First, since today is actually Oct. 19 and I am trying to get the vacation blogs done, I wanted to post a quick update on Brendan's appointment from yesterday. They did an x-ray and we were told the bone had only "slipped" a little bit and that they really preferred not to re-cast it and that it will be fine and heal properly. We are supposed to go back in 4 weeks at which time they will hopefully take the cast off and he will be healed. Apparently the minor slipping of the bone is not a concern in children as they have years of growing still to do, but would be a concern in an adult. I was skeptical, so asked my brother-in-law, the ER doc and he concurred, so I feel a little better about it. :)
Okay, on to Day 3...
Our first outing on Sunday was the Mozart City Tour which was about an hour and a half ride around the city featuring various important sights mostly related to Mozart along with a few other locations. We learned about several more interesting sights and saw the birthplace of Mozart, where he lived, and places he wrote and performed his music. It was a good way to learn more about the city!
One of the places our tour guide, Wolfgang, pointed out was the Haus Der Natur that featured a large display and information about Christian Doppler, who was also from Salzburg. He highly recommended the museum especially for kids. Doppler is famous physicist and of course, that was hard to pass up considering Spencer is also a big fan of physics! So, after the tour, we headed over there to check it out.
I don't think I mentioned it on the previous blog, but Barbara, our travel agent, arranged for us to have these cards called the 48 Hour Salzburg Card and it was great! It gets you into all kinds of places and includes rides on the public buses...so anyway, I mention this because we go over to the Haus Der Natur and get in with our Salzburg cards and spend a couple hours in the museum. It is really, really great and was definitely worth the visit! It had everything from dinosaurs to an aquarium to human body displays, to geo sciences to space to insect collections to displays on various "ages" (i.e. Ice Age) to physics to fables and legends and more! It was probably one of the best and most interesting museums I have been to and we all enjoyed it!
After that we grabbed a bite of lunch at the festival in the square and went off in search of the bus that would take us over to Untersbergbahn, the cable car up to the top of the mountain. We stopped off at the tourist information office to get a little more information and caught the next bus out to the mountain. We were blessed with wonderful weather in Salzburg, so we knew the views would be amazing and we weren't disappointed! This cable car ride was much longer than the one we had done in Bergen! When you arrive at the top, there are hiking trails and a couple restaurants and even cabins and camping and a B&B type place. We took advantage of the photo opportunity and hiked up a little bit (not too far with Brendan's arm though!) There are many legends associated with the Untersberg mountain with one of the most famous being that Emperor Charlesmagne never really died and is instead sleeping in the mountain along with his knights and will awaken then the empire needs him most to aid his people.
We took the bus back into town and headed back to the hotel for a short rest before dinner - big plans tonight - The Sound of Salzburg Dinner Show! We had originally not put this into our itinerary, but were persuaded by one of our tour people to go - he said we would love it and the kids would have a great time! We are so glad we took his advice! Dinner was a traditional Austrian meal and it was followed by a show that included songs from The Sound of Music, Trapp family folk songs they used to perform, operettas, and several Mozart pieces. Audience participation was part of the show and we all had our chance to be on stage - yes, totally true - and the kids got a huge kick out of seeing us up there and then getting to go up on stage also!
At the dinner show, we ran into some people that were also staying at the Radisson Blu hotel and they had two little girls. We ended up visiting with them for a bit and all walked back to the hotel together. He is in the military and stationed in Germany. Very nice family. It is so funny how we happen to run into people and end up chatting and such everywhere we go -
Anyway, it was a little bit later of an evening and we have an early Monday morning...one more scheduled tour in Salzburg and then Spencer's special request...stay tuned!
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