In search of do re me – la

The Sound of Music and Four weddings and a funeral are the only movies I can watch again. And again. The pinnacle of TSOM-viewings came the sing-along Friday night screening at London’s Prince Charles Cinema in Soho with gallons of awful white wine and MC-d by a drag queen dressed as claws-out Baroness Schraeder.  But I like it not just for its sticky sweet kitsch but because, shrouded in Hollywood inconsistencies though it no doubt is, it’s basically about doing the right thing. And how it makes me yearn for those mountains, like it was my homeland. Forever.  

Those hills

We have made it as far as Germany. En route from Munich to Trieste and with just a 2-hour stoppage possible to recreate the feeling of that alpine epic of cinema, minus the dark overshadowing of impending Third Reich doom… how to spend it? Obviously it must involve food. The plan has to be assembled en route, internetless. I have been to Austria before in winter with my Dad, and it was beautiful, and I always imagined a return during the summer months.

Stunning Bavarian countryside is heightening the mood and upping the stakes. Summer wildflowers in the pastures, villages peaked by white painted steeples nestled under steep hills darkly forested and merrily pastured, chalet farmhouses with geraniums abloom in window boxes, high wooden barns and piles of perfectly stacked firewood, caramel calves with actual bells chomping pasture (sorry I don’t get to use that word very often).

I am loosely imagining frying cheese on a mountainside looking over a valley with a village nestled at bottom and a mountain chalet at top… maybe that’s a little more Heidi (different country, different story). Apparently Santz Gelgin is where they filmed the mountain scenes and this is 30 km east of Salzburg and also where Hermut Kohl ex German Chancellor has a summerhouse. It’s too far for us, we head for Salzburg for our TSOM moments.

Under the hills

Despite TSOM having little interest within Austria or Germany (there is a German language version of the real Von Trapp family story) the tourism office in Salzburg provides good advice on location-spotting. Some of there advice is available online here.  Somehow an hour passed between arriving in Salzburg and locating an information office: a combination of traffic, not wanting to pay for parking, a dawdling toddler, a left-behind parking building ticket and walking the wrong way.

So we were recommended Schloss Hellbrun for our TSOM fantasy. 6km out of town it is the former summer palace of the Archbishop of Salzburg, and it is here that the summerhouse that features several times in the movie is located. There are acres of splendid parkland, formal gardens and a children’s play area – free and open to the public (you pay to go in to the palace) all in the shadow of those hills that put a lump in my throat.

You can drive there and park in the grounds or go a little further along the road and park for free.

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Best food moment: We found a picnic table and fried bratwurst on our camping stove and stuffed these in white rolls with shiny dark brown exterior, like they’ve been spray-tanned. Slightly awkward about public displays of fire since having had a portable barbeque extinguished on Primrose Hill, but no rangers presented themselves. And the bratwurst went down well Milly – the first food apart from mandarins and breadsticks eaten for days.