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.