The Sound of Music

Salzburg is home to many interesting things that we're well-familiar with in the US. Mozart, The Sound of Music to name a few. Did we check out any of those areas? Heck no.

The first thing we did was take a tram up to the Festung Holzensalzburg castle, which is perched on the mountainside overlooking Salzburg. Not only does it house some historical information about the palace itself, but holds a few museums on assorted subjects. The stand out (for me) was the marionette museum. It could only be described as creepy - smelling of mildew and the various Sound of Music Characters and lines of can-can girls eerily smiled and stared off into space. The stuff that nightmares are made of, at least for me. It also contained the most colorful graveyard we'd ever seen, and catacombs that were carved directly into the side of the mountain.

Hands down, the nicest thing we saw were the Wierfen Ice Caves. It's about 40 minutes of hiking and a tram ride up to a sizable height of the Austrian Alps. The guide hands a select group of participants a small kerosene lantern, which promptly blows out as they open the door and you are blasted by an arctic gale of wind going anywhere from 60 - 100 km/hour and is -1C (~30F). As they relight all the lamps and your eyes adjust, you begin to see the sides and soaring ceiling of the cave and the ice that coats most of the walls. In all, you hike over 1000 steps through ice formations that look like polar bears, elephants, and one room that looked like it was straight out of Superman and the Fortress of Solitude. AC diligently tried to take pictures (even though it was strictly forbidden), but none of them really turned out.

After about an hour of hiking in the freezing cold, we were more than ready to get the heck out of there. My toes thawed out on our hike back down the mountain, as we reflected on one of the coolest things we'd ever seen - no pun intended!