Lowell is the best husband ever!

How many men would accompany their wife and 10-year old daughter on a four-hour bus tour visiting sites made famous by the movie, The Sound of Music? Lowell did! What a good sport! I’m sure he would have rather been in the hotel room working ob the electrical equipment designs for the big new Oracle building in West Jordan, Utah.

It was a typical bus tour with a guide that is also thinks of himself as a comedian—telling jokes about the Hill family and Dracula (ask Hannah, she’ll tell you the joke), turning the lights on and off on the bus when we get to the line “fate will turn the light on” from “Sixteen going on Seventeen”. Lowell does say the tour guide made the tour pleasant.

We learned that Hollywood took great creative license in changing the story and actual locations for their version of the movie. In fact, the Germans first released a very successful, closer to reality version of the story called “The von Trapp Family Singers”. My friend Annette Klassen was familiar with this version, but not the musical. Is that even a possibility? I’ll have to send her the movie so that she can see the musical. Maria von Trapp was not happy about what Hollywood was doing with the family’s story and expressed her dismay. I guess she was appeased by the $900,000 she received.

We saw so many locations featured in the movie: Nonnberg Abbey, the von Trapp Hollywood home which is now a musical school, the gazebo where love was declared between Rolf and Liesl and Georg and Maria and St. Michael’s Basilica in Mondsee (yes, they were actually married at Nonnberg Abbey, but St. Michael’s was so much more “Hollywood”. It is beautiful!

Our tour guide told us that there has been a Sound of Music tour in Salzburg every day since the movie opened. So which comes first, Salzburg was good for The Sound of Music or is The Sound of Music good for Salzburg?