During the night, the ship moved from our port in Melk, Austria to Passau, Germany. We chose not to take the included walking tour through Passau and instead took a special tour back to Salzburg, Austria to see the city where the movie, The Sound of Music was filmed.
Interestingly, the people of Salzburg were not even interested or aware of the filming until months after the release of the movie, people started arriving looking for the places seen in the movie. Bearing in mind that Hollywood specializes in illusion, many of scenes make no sense geographically. One example the tour guide mentioned was at the end of movie, the family sneaks out of the performance in Salzburg at night and the next morning they are seen on the mountains escaping which is hundreds of miles away. Not doable by car but certainly not on foot.
For me, however, Salzburg was like a miniature Vienna with only about 500,000 people compared to Vienna’s 2.8 million but all the same charm and beauty. This is the birthplace of Mozart and art and music are very much a part of the Salzburg culture.
We started the tour walking through the Gardens of the Mirabell Palace. 
The Palace is now the home of Government offices but garden is where the children sing Do Re Mi in the movie. When you watch the movie, which we did aboard the ship, its fun to see these places but you realize there was a great deal of editing done to make the locations gel.
We saw the home where the Mozart’s lived with his family after his musical genius was discovered and actually found the home where Christian Doppler, physicist and mathematician, the Doppler Radar is named for was born in 1803.
There is a saying about Salzburg, “If its Baroque don’t fix it”, which is the basis for Old Town, (Alstadt), with narrow streets and VERY old buildings filled with upscale shops of all kinds.
On the way to Prince Bishops Palace we passed through the Old Market Square with lots of wonderful things to eat. Obviously, they don’t have the regulations on this type of food vendor that we do.
Streets of Salzburg
In the center of the courtyard of the Palace, we saw the Residenzbrunner fountain with the water coming out of the horses mouths. 
It was built in 1661 of Italian marble and is the largest fountain in Austria. I remember seeing it in the scene after Maria leaves the convent to become a Nanny. Again, no logical reason why Maria was walking past that fountain in the movie other than it was a famous and beautiful masterpiece.
Town Hall in the distance
Part of our tour included an Austrian lunch in the St Peter’s Restaurant that has been in consistent operation since 802 A.D. accompanied by a group of four performers singing songs from Sound of Music.
Performers in St. Peter’s Restaurant
Windows and art work in St. Peter’s Restaurant
No Sound of Music Tour of Salzburg would be complete without a visit to the cemetery where the family hid from the soldiers. Again the differences from the movie were striking. We were told that the Bishop would not allow filming to take place in the cemetery (for obvious reasons), but he allowed them to take pictures and re-create whatever they wanted back in Hollywood. And so they did. Do you see any resemblance to the movie?
Back to the ship because we leave for Deggendorf. River water level is still very low and things are not looking good. PLEASE DON’T MAKE ME PACK!
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