May 3, 2023 – Movie Madness in Salzburg

I have to start my Salzburg post by sending a massive THANK YOU to my lovely boyfriend. I doubt he will even read this, but without him, I wouldn’t have come to Salzburg at all!

I originally intended to spend three nights in Innsbruck. However, a week before my trip, we started watching one of my favorite shows of all time, which I honestly just consider to be a very long movie. It’s called The Tenth Kingdom, and it’s an NBC mini-series from 2000 that lasts around seven hours. My cousins showed it to me when I was little, and I’ve been in love ever since. It’s a right of passage into true friendship to sit through these glorious seven hours with me. Only one person has ever watched it with me start to finish within 24 hours. (Hey, Morgan!)

The series takes place in a world among many of the fairy tale princesses we all know. Several of the beginning scenes take place at this huge castle in the mountains, called The Snow White Memorial Prison. (Lol!) As we watched, I pondered aloud where this castle might exist in real life. Sean did some searching, and when he found out it was in Austria, he determined I’d be silly not to go. (“Why would you NOT go?!”)

I tried explaining I was not actually going anywhere near the castle, that the nearest big city was Salzburg, and even then it was over an hour of additional travel to reach the fortress. But again, he thought I was crazy for even considering not making this detour.

Whelp, I still think I’m a bit crazy, but I tossed my nonrefundable third night in Innsbruck in the trash and hopped on a train to Salzburg! (The reason I thank Sean is that I really quite enjoyed the detour, and I really did all I wanted to do while I was in Innsbruck. Win-win!)

I had planned to wake up at 8am, but on my early clock, I woke up at seven and decided to catch an earlier train, chocolate croissant in-hand! The early clock kind of rocks.

Due to work on the train tracks, I had to de-board my train after only half an hour and switch to a crowded bus. Boooo. The ride was still pretty, but I definitely picked the wrong side, so I didn’t get many good photos.

Once I arrived in Salzburg and got my bearings, I headed to St. Sebastian Church and its gorgeous adjacent cemetery. Some of Mozart’s family is buried here, as he was born and raised in Salzburg!

The only real thing I wanted to do on this day was to visit the Snow White Memorial Prison, tehehe. I was shooting for the two o’clock train so that I wouldn’t waste all of my daylight running back and forth. Luckily, when I picked up a city map from my hostel, it had been scribbled upon, and this little “city mountain” was circled with the path from the hostel outlined.

Salzburg is surrounded by these hills that are charmingly referred to as “city mountains.” They were great defenses in the old days, but now they make for great viewpoints!

I spent a couple hours just wandering up and around this mountain, getting a nice view of the city and the Salzburg Fortress. It was quite exhausting! I got so sweaty, haha.

I had a little time to spare after my mini hike, so I explored a couple churches in the Old Town, as well as the Mirabell Gardens and the neighboring Marble Hall in Mirabell Castle.

Pretty! But it was finally time for my big adventure. To the Fourth Kingdom! (If you know, you know.)

I caught some great shots of the castle just from the train, but getting off and hiking up to it was very worth the extra effort.

It was over thirty minutes of walking and hiking to reach the castle by foot, and I was momentarily distracted by an empty playground, equipped with swings and a zipline.

I continued my ascent toward the imposing fortress, still a bit in awe to be traveling to a land I’d seen so many times on the little screen.

As I’m sure you can imagine by the “Prison” title, this is not a super happy place in the TV show. There was this one especially-evil-looking mountain behind the fortress, but I couldn’t get a good picture before it became occluded by the clouds for the rest of the day. The other strangely evil thing was that these huge birds kept circling the fortress, just like in the show! It was all very surreal!

When I finally made my way to the entrance, I learned the fortress is home to a historical falconry, and as I was climbing the hill, they were in the middle of their daily presentation of these huge birds. I rounded the corner, and a giant culture flew directly at me, coming within feet of me! Ha!

I only caught the last few minutes of the show, but that’s probably fine since it was conducted entirely in German.

Then I was free to wander the castle grounds a bit.

There was a falconry museum and a temporary exhibit on witchcraft. Very evil!!

I joined a guided tour through the interior of the castle, but this, too, was conducted in German. I had to hold a boring audio guide up to my ear in English. A bummer, too, because the guide seemed so fun and animated! If only I could have understood her!

We got to see the courtyard from the upper floors of the castle.

And THIS was a window originally used to shoot intruders or pour molten pitch onto them, but it was later turned into a… Toilet. Who needs plumbing when you can just go down the side of your castle, right?!

Of course, my favorite part of the tour was the view from the bell tower.

Fun, fun, fun!

My phone battery was almost completely dead by this point (which will continue to be a headache for the rest of the trip, I think!), and it was spitting and cold. I made my way down into the town by hopping a free ride down the funicular. Thank goodness I didn’t have to hike that again! The path up was already slippery without the added rain!

My phone did turn off on me once I made it into town, so I spent a fair bit of energy looking for outlets, and even charged my phone in a bathroom at one point, in case I needed it to find my way back to my hostel in Salzburg.

I was also ravenous by this point, and mercifully found a grocery store. I picked up some snack sausages, two pretzels, and some mixed berries for dinner.

What I didn’t realize until my mama told me was that much of the Sound of Music was filmed in and around Salzburg!

Turns out the Snow White Memorial Prison was also used as a backdrop to film the opening picnic scenes of Do-Re-Mi! I had considered hiking up to the very hill where they filmed the scene, but with the blistering cold, the hunger, and the lack of phone battery, I decided it best to head home. A very fun day trip, indeed!

The hostel I was staying in actually plays The Sound of Music every single night, so of course I had to watch some. My mom watched it in the hospital while she was in labor with me, so you could say I was born loving it!

I meant to only watch a few scenes, since I was dreadfully tired, but I got sucked in and ended up watching the whole thing. Oops!

Then in the bathroom that night, I ran into one of the Australian girls from my Innsbruck hostel! Also, she was English! Hahaha. She said she’d even met an English boy from her very town who also thought she was Australian, so there must be something funny about her accent!

This was my latest night to bed so far, with a shut-eye time of around midnight. I felt it the next morning, especially because there was one girl coughing all night! Ugh. Did not like that.

In the morning, I wandered back toward Mirabell Gardens so that I could recreate some scenes from Sound of Music’s Do-Rei-Mi. So fun!

I was scheduled for a free walking tour, but I couldn’t find any breakfast on my way, so I was hungry the whole time! Always looking for a quick place to grab some food!

I signed up for the walking tour so I could get a speed round of the Salzburg highlights! One of the best ways to see a city on a time crunch. Our guide was named Sonja, and she was a delight!

We visited Mozart’s birthplace and childhood home, the University Church, and some modern art pickles.

I don’t usually like pickles, but I liked these ones! Hehehe.

This is the very theater where the Von Trapp family had their final performance and big escape in the movie!

Then we visited a monastery and the Salzburg Cathedral. I was taking mental notes of all the places I wanted to rush back to after the tour was over so I could actually go inside!

The first place I ran back to was the Salzburg Cathedral, just in time to catch the second half of the daily organ concert. It was very dramatic. There were multiple organs in the church, so the organist ran between them, allowing us to hear each one. The big finale was the giant organ at the back of the hall, and it was quite loud!

I also really enjoyed the Franciscan Church. The columns and the ceiling arches were so pretty.

A lovely highlight was the monastery church and the cemetery in its courtyard, which inspired the final hiding places of the Von Trapp family in the Sound of Music, where Ralph finds them!