The hills are alive....with Storm singing!! LOL

Austria!! The land of apple strudels, schnitzel, and the Sound of Music!! Yay!

The train ride from Venice to Salzburg was beautiful! We rode through mountains (snow capped!) and greenery as far as we could see and little German-style houses with flowers on their window sills. They do flowers on their window sills much much better than the French do! It was all so beautiful.

And we´ve loved Salzburg because, well it has beer for Matt and the Sound of Music tour for me - what more do we want! LOL.

Our hotel was a bit of a walk from the train station but it had such lovely views of a mountain side that we forgot about the walk as soon as we opened our curtains.

We spent 2 nights here and managed to wander round the old town and do the Sound of Music tour, which of course was an absolute must on my travel agenda (Matt needed beer to get through it!). It was four hours of Sound of Music bliss, I seriously loved it! Along with lots of songs from the movie and interesting trivia from our nutty tour operator, the scenery was breath-taking. We took lots of photos and those who know the movie may recognise some of the pictures. And I realised that there are many other people out there who are crazier about the movie than I am - but then they´re just weirdos! :)

Unfortunately for us, when we woke up this morning it was overcast and the rain had set in, so our plans of going up a vernicular to the top of a fort that they have here had to be cancelled. We did spend a lot of time walking through the city so we feel that we´ve explored a lot but not seen too many of the tourist attractions, such as Mozart´s home and a river cruise. And Mozart is everywhere here - there´s cafes named after him and they also have chocolate as well; they definitely love him here!

We´ve also noticed that not so many people ride scooters here like they did in Italy - it seems all about the bicycle here, much to Matt´s delight! We almost hired some bikes to do a bit of a tour around the town, but unfortunately the weather wasn´t too good. Maybe in Vienna...

Today we travel to Vienna but we have really liked Salzburg and Matt keeps saying that Vienna better be worth it cause he would have liked to have stayed here a bit longer. If only it weren´t for this rain! Hopefully it hasn´t set it cause we don´t want to get wet drinking beer in Munich!!

Trying to get lost in Venice

Our last stop in Italy was Venice and even though it was very expensive (three times more than everywhere else we´ve been) we definitely thought it was worth it. And I´ve decided that if we win the lotto and become rich we´re going to buy a villa there and visit for 2 weeks of the year and watch people go up and down the Grand Canal in gondolas! :)



We actually only ended up spending 17 hours in Venice due to train times so we made the most of it by walking through the city as soon as we got there. There are no cars in Venice so we caught a waterbus called a vaporetto along the Grand Canal to the Piazza San Marco where apparently the number of pigeons tends to outnumber the tourists (not the day we were there though!) . Lots of cafes with linen tablecloths (our sign that it may be a little out of our price range!) lined each side of the piazza and there was a live jazz band playing, it was all very cool and funky.



We followed a walking guide in our Lonely Planet book that suggested the best way of discovering Venice is to get lost in its litte cobble stone streets and we liked the idea of that. The only problem was that there were so many people around it was too difficult to get lost! But the walk was worth it. We cross the Grand Canal a couple of times and at each bridge there were lots of cafes and street markets, so it made for a great way to pass the time. The streets are beautiful and everytime we turned a different corner we weren´t prepared for what we saw, there´s always something new!





We fell in love with the biscotti shops and managed to find some time to indulge in some gelato as well!