Nomadic Spirit is a weekly newsletter for travelers who care as much about the why as the where.
In this issue
This week, we say yes to a trip we would never have picked: a week in Austria built entirely around The Sound of Music. The Dispatch opens onstage at Symphony Center in a nun’s habit and ends in a van in the Salzburg hills, somewhere between a wife who has waited forty years and a fourth grader named Izzy. In A Chosen Place, we make the case for Salzburg well beyond the film that made it famous, from the yellow house where Mozart was born to a monastery that has served dinner since 803. In The Journey, the reader, Jeanine B., drives onto Manitoulin Island knowing nothing about it, writes the day off as a loss, and then walks around a bend in a stream. And in Further Afield, the new Sound of Music museum opening this autumn, the festival that fills Salzburg every summer, and the research on why we are such poor judges of what will make us happy.
Dispatch
Where Travel and Life Intersect
Say Yes to the Trip You Were Going to Pass On
It might be the one you never saw coming.
Schloss Leopoldskron, the lakeside house that stood in for the von Trapp villa.
A few years ago, I stood onstage at Symphony Center in Chicago in a nun’s habit, holding a plastic guitar, leading more than two thousand strangers through “My Favorite Things” while the Chicago Symphony played behind us. It was the orchestra’s Sound of Music Sing-Along, and a news crew filmed it.
My wife, Diane, had promised the whole audience would come in costume. I went as Mother Superior, one friend as a nun, the other in lederhosen. We found two other costumed people in the hall, and the staff marched us onstage to lead the room.
Diane was in heaven. The three of us wanted the floor to open up.
A milestone birthday
That is the kind of Sound of Music fan I married. This summer, for a milestone birthday, I planned the trip she had wanted her whole life: a week in Salzburg and Vienna centered on the movie.
I love Austria. I was lukewarm on seven days of Rodgers and Hammerstein. Our son, in his twenties, signed on late and came along.
The film day
We gave a full day to the movie sites, in Salzburg and out into the lake country. Diane took the Do-Re-Mi steps in the Mirabell Gardens one at a time, forty years after she first wanted to.
Our tour van carried another family, two kids named Izzy and Mikey, fourth and second grade, word-perfect on every song. They ran the singing before we left the lot and tumbled out first at every stop, Diane right behind them.
The day ended in Mondsee, at the basilica where Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer filmed the wedding. Diane walked up the aisle, stood at the altar where they had stood, and could not speak. It was the spot she had pictured for most of her life.
Somewhere in that day, I stopped minding that the movie was not my kind of thing. What I was watching was better than anything we came to see.
Vienna
After three days in Salzburg, we went on to Vienna, where Diane and our son took over the map. They kept pulling me into places I would never have chosen.
One was Sisi’s apartments in the Hofburg, the private rooms of Empress Elisabeth, the beautiful and restless wife of Franz Joseph. Her dressing room still holds the gymnastic rings and bars she trained on every day, to the court's horror.
They also found two of the national library’s small museums, tucked together in an old palace. One is the Esperanto Museum. In the 1880s, a Warsaw eye doctor invented Esperanto as a neutral second language, owned by no country, so strangers with no common words could understand each other. The idea is close to utopian, and people still speak it.
The other is the only museum in the world given to globes. Hundreds of them fill the museum, including one from 1536. Together they show how confidently each generation believed it understood the world, and how often it didn’t.
Their enthusiasm was impossible to sit out. I spent an hour bent over the oldest globe, a thing I’d have walked past the day before.
Going along
I kept thinking about our recent issue on solo travel, and why so many people, women especially, now go alone. The reason we heard most often was that a partner had no interest in the trip, so they went without them. I understood it.
The Sound of Music would never have been my pick. Say yes anyway. The parts I will remember are the ones I never would have chosen, and going along was the only way to reach them.
This issue begins with a simple idea: say yes to someone else’s trip once in a while. You may come home remembering entirely different things than the ones you expected.
A Chosen Place
Destinations worth traveling for — and understanding once you arrive
Salzburg's old town, packed beneath one of the largest surviving fortresses in Europe.
The movie is the smallest reason to come.
Salzburg, Austria
For many Americans, Salzburg is first a movie. This autumn it gets a museum of its own: the Sound of Music Salzburg opens at Hellbrunn, beside the gazebo, run by the Salzburg Museum. Fans have come for sixty years. There is now a building for them.
But the film is a small part of Salzburg.
Mozart’s city
This is Mozart’s town, and he is hard to avoid. He was born in 1756 in the yellow house on Getreidegasse, the old town’s main shopping lane, where his family lived for twenty-six years. His face is on the chocolate, and his name is on the squares. Every summer the Salzburg Festival, the largest of its kind in the world, fills the town for six weeks. Spend a few days here and you will not get away from him.
Built on salt
The name means salt fortress. Salt from these mountains made the prince-archbishops who ruled Salzburg very rich, and their money built the city that stands now. The old town sits below the Hohensalzburg fortress, one of the largest surviving in Europe, with the Salzach river running through it and the Alps behind. There is a large baroque cathedral, a set of open squares, and domes and spires across the skyline. It is one of the most beautiful small cities in Europe, and it was beautiful long before the film.
The oldest restaurant in Europe
St. Peter’s, a working Benedictine monastery in the old town, has served meals since the year 803. That makes it Europe's oldest restaurant, and Mozart’s family ate there. Its Baroque Hall is one of the last concert halls in Salzburg that still allows real candlelight. Singers and musicians in period dress perform his music between the courses of a set dinner. It is built for tourists, and it is still worth visiting in the evening.
The lake country
Salzburg is also the way into the Salzkammergut, the lake district an hour east: deep lakes and steep green mountains, from the Mondsee to the Wolfgangsee. At the center is Hallstatt, a village of fewer than a thousand people below a cliff on its lake. Its salt mine is one of the oldest in the world, having been worked for thousands of years. Hallstatt is beautiful enough that a Chinese company spent nearly a billion dollars building a full-size replica of it in Guangdong. The original is a UNESCO World Heritage site.
Stay more than a day or two, and Salzburg shifts from movie set to living city. That’s when most visitors realize they should have planned another night.
We want to hear from you
Two ways to be in Nomadic Spirit
Jeanine’s piece this week (below) is a reader submission. The Journey is open to readers who want to write about a trip that mattered. Personal, specific, in your own voice. Length is flexible. We edit lightly and leave your voice intact.
Fork First: One dish, one place, one reason to go. 200 to 300 words. The test: would you go back for this dish? Would you tell everyone heading to that city to find it? If yes, write it up.
Please let us know if interested in sharing your story to our 8,000+ readers, at [email protected] and we’ll send along submission guidelines.
We read everything that comes in.
The Journey — Voices of the Nomadic Spirit
Stories from travelers who have been changed by where they went. If you have one to share, please reach out to [email protected]
Cairns, stacks of balanced stones traditionally built to mark a trail or a summit, stand in a stream on Manitoulin Island.
Seasickness changed my route.
A stream changed my trip.
My daughter went to college in Minnesota; since we lived in Maryland, driving there gave us the chance for numerous road trips, with Minneapolis as a starting point. One route I chose was to head north into Canada, drive along the Lake Superior border, then through Ontario back into the States and home. Along my trip, I planned to explore a place I knew absolutely nothing about aside from a name that intrigued me: Manitoulin Island. There was only one bridge crossing onto the island, which only allowed traffic in that direction at certain hours; my plan was to spend the night and then take a ferry off the island heading toward the states.
A grey day on the island
The day was grey and rainy, and while my rental in an upstairs apartment overlooked Lake Huron, there was little else to do on the island. Despite it being mid-afternoon, I was still too late to find food, and the sole grocery store I was aware of had already closed, so lunch and dinner consisted of whatever I could scrounge from my car. I drove for hours exploring the cliffs that towered over the winding roads, and admiring the inuksuit and other rock formations that visitors had built and left behind. I located a handful of landmarks on my mental checklist, but could not find one in particular, Bridal Veil Falls. As the weather deteriorated, I finally admitted defeat.
One last attempt
In the morning, the water was very rough, and I knew my tendency toward seasickness would never allow me to survive a long ferry ride, so I was left with no choice but to drive back over the bridge I came in on and alter my route. Back on a part of the island I would not have otherwise revisited, I decided to make one last attempt at locating the falls; this time I chanced upon a small sign pointing me down a hidden road, and was rewarded with a beautiful view of a waterfall powered and energized by the recent rain. I sat on a rock and admired it; I walked behind it; I waded through it. It was just another beautiful waterfall, but I couldn’t bring myself to leave. I’d worked so hard to find it! The water formed a stream that meandered around a curve, and I decided I’d walk the trail alongside the stream before leaving the island.
What was past the falls
As I walked around the bend, I froze in my tracks; there in the middle of the stream, now about thirty feet across, were dozens of glistening cairns scattered throughout the water. Dozens. Some were delicately balanced and stood up to three feet tall above the water’s surface; other shorter rock formations surrounded these and filled the empty spaces. That they seemed to simply grow out of the water, that they stood without falling and defied gravity, that they were clearly manmade but felt as natural as the environment around them...was breathtaking. Rays of sunlight filtered through the tall trees and reflected off of the cairns while the sound of running water played in the background. There were no other visitors but me. I felt as if I had stumbled upon some magical world and was given the gift of a vision nobody else would ever see. It felt sacrilegious to even move.
But, as I had limited opportunities to cross back over that bridge and leave the island, eventually I did. That accidental discovery stays with me years later as one of the most spiritual and moving experiences of all my road trips. It wasn’t a tourist landmark or even on my radar at all, and I had considered my stay on Manitoulin Island disappointing until then. But when I recall that image, it still takes my breath away and brings me joy every time!
Jeanine B. is a Nomadic Spirit reader and lives in Silver Spring, Maryland.
Further Afield
Reading worth your time.
The Salzburg Festival
SalzburgerLand
The world’s largest classical festival takes over the city for six weeks each summer, this year from July 17 to August 30, and has run since 1920. It packs more than two hundred performances of opera, drama, and concerts into one small city at the foot of the Alps. If you are going in season, the good seats go early.
Sound of Music Salzburg
Hellbrunn, Salzburg
A new museum opens this autumn on the Hellbrunn Palace grounds, beside the film’s gazebo, run by the Salzburg Museum. It covers both the Hollywood phenomenon and the real story of the von Trapp family. It is the first museum the city has given the film in sixty years.
The set-jetting boom
Luxury Travel Magazine
Traveling to the places you have seen on screen has become one of the biggest forces in travel, ahead of social media as a source of trip ideas. The Sound of Music tour is the original version, sixty years early. This piece traces the pull and the risk, from the White Lotus effect to the beach that fame closed.
The von Trapp Family Lodge
Stowe, Vermont
The real family fled Austria in 1938, settled in Vermont, and opened their farmhouse as a ski lodge in 1950. Their descendants still run it, now on twenty-six hundred acres with cross-country trails and a brewery. It is where they ended up.
Stumbling on Happiness
Daniel Gilbert, Knopf
The Harvard psychologist’s case that people are strikingly bad at predicting what will make them happy. The trip you would never have chosen is exactly the kind your imagination misjudges. It is the science under this issue’s argument for saying yes.
“The only true voyage of discovery would be not to visit strange lands, but to possess other eyes.”
Marcel Proust, The Prisoner
