Saturday, June 27, 2009

Welcome to Austria


Mittersil, Austria....that is. It is beautiful! At the tail end of our "worldwide wedding tour", we came here to attend an Arts Summit.


Overlooking the valley, we stayed here at Schloss Mittersill...which is an old castle. We ended up sleeping in the room that the Queen of Netherlands stayed in 100 years ago when she came here for her honeymoon! There is another room full of memorabilia, old pictures and historical information of the castle. A random tidbit: back in the day, Clark Gable was here. I wonder which room he stayed in....






This castle even had a couple dungeons. They were cold, damp and creepy....just like you'd imagine them to be. What made it even creepier were some of the stories we heard of prisoners that were thought to be witches and whatnot. They don't call it the Dark Ages for nothing...yeesh!






This is a place where you can really enjoy the quiet.









The castle gardens are quite beautiful.










The view from the patio of our room.










There is a glass house on one corner of the castle that you can just go into to relax and write. It's a fantastic space to soak up the quiet, gather your thoughts, reflect and enjoy the view.





We had a fantastic time at the summit and met a lot of great people and had some really intellectually stimulating conversations. I ended up doing a couple of spontaneous concerts here and they invited me back to play here for an arts conference.

Fastforward a little over a month, and now I'm back here again. It's hard to believe! I came a couple days early and it's nice to enjoy the quiet. It was just a little over an 8 hour train ride to this place. I know that may seem like a really long journey, but the european countryside is just gorgeous and time flew by so fast!