Yikes. I haven’t written a blog post since last August. What have I been doing with my time?

1. Writing:

I finished my novel, Ten Days in Summer, the sequel to Deadly Fall, and am waiting for word from publishers.

While waiting for word, I’m revising a non-mystery novel that is into its fourth draft.

I polished a 12,000 word short story I wrote a few years ago and sent it to three contests. It made the finals in the Glimmer Train Fiction Open Contest. Within the next few weeks, I should hear how the story fares in the other two.

2. Travel:

In November, Will and I spent 16 days in Hawaii, on two islands we hadn’t visited before — Oahu (Waikiki-Honolulu) and Big Island. We loved them both.

Highlights included a jungle hike (pictured here), swimming with sea turtles (usually not on purpose – to my surprise they appeared beside me on busy Waikiki beach), hiking Koko Head – the steepest hike in my life, Pearl Harbour; on Big Island driving to the summit of Mauna Kea volcano for an astronomical tour and viewing stars and the moon through a powerful telescope, hiking Kilauea Iki Crater backdropped by a spewing active volcano; beaches, pools, strolling the streets after dark without a sweater and good food.

In Calgary, memories of warm Hawaii quickly faded this cold, snowy winter. In late February, Will and I escaped for a week in Cancun, Mexico. Sunshine. Thirty-degree highs every day. Mostly we relaxed on the beach and by the pool, but we included two full day outings. One was was a ferry ride to nearby Isla Mujeres (Island of Women), where we rented a golf cart, saw the whole island in three hours and finished  with a swim in shallow, calm Playa Norte.  The other excursion was a bus tour to the Mayan ruins of Chichen Itza, which we’ve wanted to see since our first trip to Mexico some years ago. It was a long drive through jungle, but the ruins were awesome. I’d love to return to spend more time there.

Despite the hat I wore constantly on the trip and covering up on the beach, I still have my tan.

3. Teaching

Since September, I’ve been teaching A Novel Approach at the Alexandra Writers Centre. The class runs every second week and ends in June. It’s been a challenge for me to keep up with the students. I hope they’ve learned as much as have and go on to finish their terrific books.

The weekend after I returned from Mexico, I taught a two day intensive workshop on Novel Revision. It was inspiring and great learning for me, too, if a tad exhausting.

4.  Writing related activities

A surprisingly fun activity was working the AWCS casino in December. Will and I took a night shift in the counting room and somehow managed to stay up until 3:00 AM. We really enjoyed hanging out with other AWCS members and getting a glimpse of casino activity.

I organized the Crime Writers of Canada and Calgary Crime Writers tables at the Calgary Public Library Writers Weekend on February 1st. I spent the day at interesting sessions on publishing and writing humour in between my shifts (wo)manning the table.

5. All the rest of life.

Family. Reading. Walks in city parks. Friends. Snoe shoe trips to Kananaskis, Banff and Lake Louise. Zumba & Fit and Fab at the gym.

Life away from the blog has been busy and good, but I promise not to wait this long before I post again.

What I love about Salzburg are the bells. The city is full of churches that chime every quarter hour. Some hours bring extra chimes. There’s also a glockenspiel (carrillon) that rings a tune on the hour a few times a day. Walking down the street, you’re regularly surrounded by the sound of bells ringing from every direction.

The glockenspiel tune changes periodically, which Will and learned when we toured the glockenspiel. It was fascinating to see the mechanism, which is a giant version of those little music whirly-gigs that play a line of song. The tour would have been even better if we’d understood our tour guide’s German. The English crib sheet he gave us offered minimal detals. That’s the hazard of visiting a country when you aren’t fluent in the language.

Our last three days in Salzburg made me realize that, for travel, weather extremes are usually better than consistent, grey skies. We had far less rain during the second half of our visit, but the almost zero sun made everything look dreary. It also got colder. I was glad I’d brought gloves as well as tights to wear under my summer pants.

To make the most of those three days, we bought a Salzburg card, which gave us admission to a number of local museums and attractions. The card easily paid for itself, even though we spent a good part of one day on non-card attractions. One of these was the glockenspiel tour. Another was a trip outside of town to the ice caves in Werfen. These were high up a hill – a gondola took us up to a path blanketed in snow. The temperature inside the caves was about the same as out. A good activity for a cold, grey day, although the views would have been spectacular in the sun.

My favourite attraction with the Salzburg card was the tour of the music festival halls, conducted bilingually in German and English. This is the largest music festival in the world. It  draws masses to Salzburg every summer. I was intrigued to learn how the concert halls, built into the mountainside, were formerly riding studios.

The guide paused for a long talk in the unique festival venue featured in The Sound of Music. He asked how many of the German speaking people on the tour had seen the movie. A few hands went up. He said that was more than usual.

Aside from the music festival, he said, The Sound of Music is the prime reason tourists from non-German speaking countries come to Salzburg.  Yet, if you ask Salzburg residents if they like the film, most will say they hate it or they haven’t seen it but  hate it. This is not because they are unfamiliar with the Von Trapp story or dislike the autobiographical book. It has been made into a German film that was reasonably popular.

The guide told us , as a communications student at the local university, he has the pleasure  — or duty — this term of taking three courses devoted to the SOM phenomenum. He’s developed four reasons why Austrians hate the film.

(1) It’s Hollywood. I assume this means they see it as sentimental schmalz.

(2) It portrays the Von Trapps as the only Austrians who resisted Hitler (by leaving), while many Austrians stayed and fought Hitler.  I don’t think the movie really does single out the Von Trapps. They just happen to represent that faction in the film. Also, Austrians, in general, did support, activily or passively, the Nazis takeover of their country. The guide added it’s natural for Austrians to not like a movie that recalls the worst part of their history.

(3) The movie is set in Saltburg, but not the real Salzburg known to its residents. Julie Andrews couldn’t run down a mountain twenty miles away and arrive at her abbey in 20 minutes. The mountain escape route walked by Von Trapps leads not to Switzerland, but to Germany.

(4) The movie is tolerable watched with German subtitles, but doesn’t make sense when dubbed. When the guide hears Julie and children singing Do, Re, Mi he wants to ask what medication they’re on and where can he get some.

But the bottom line, he said, is that Salzburg residents recognize the movie’s tremendous tourist windfall. SOM is the world’s best free advertising.

From the tour, Will and I strolled onto Salzburg’s main pedestrian shopping street. I noticed a group of Japanese girls dressed in  school uniforms. Suddenly, they stopped walking, formed into choir lines and sang Do, Re, Mi to the utter enjoyment of everyone around.

For whatever reasons, The Sound of Music  has touched people across the world.  Someone should bottle its secret and prescribe a dose to every grumbling Salzburg resident.

Calgarians love to say, “If you don’t like the weather, wait a few minutes and it will change.” I’ve also heard people in other cities make this claim. In Salzburg, Will and I lived it for three days.

We arrived to a horrible weather forecast for our one week stay: sun and cloud the first morning, with increasing cloud, cold and rain through the week.  By the end we’d be wearing mittens under zero sunshine. I felt light-deprived thinking about it.

Our first morning, we walked under sun and cloud, over pedestrian bridges and along the riverside to check out the Mirabell Palace, where we had tickets to a chamber music concert that night. On a square near the palace , we noticed a ‘Sound of Music’ tour bus preparing to head out for the day. We’d heard these tours were pretty good and figured, why not take one now and see something of the city and region before the rain hit?

We hopped on the bus, which gradually filled with fans of the musical about an aspiring nun who marries a captain with seven children. The bus rambled through Salzburg with stops at the film’s settings: the mansion used as the back of the von Trapp house, the lake Maria and children tumbled into and the gazebo that sheltered two sets of lovers from rain. Throughout, our guide dressed in drindl supplied anecdotes about the movie location filming. We learned that the scheduled six weeks expanded to eleven due to rain that spring.  The cast and crew spent hours waiting for momentary breaks in the weather to shoot scenes, often in discomfort due to miserable cold.

We bussed into the lake district south of the city. Instead of growing dreary and rainy, the day got sunnier and warmer. Views of  Lake Wolfgang and the mountains were gorgeous. We stopped in Mondsee for a fifty minute break to see the church used for Maria’s and the captain’s wedding and had the best strudel of our holiday while sitting by Lake Mondsee watching sun dance on the water.

Back in Sazburg, it continued sunny and warm. We explored Mirabell park, where Julie and the children marched around fountains and hopped up stairs while singing Do, Re, Mi.

We crossed a bridge and climbed steeper stairs to another scene from Do, Re, mi, fabulous viewpoint, near the modern art museum. From there, we hiked the Monchsberg escarpment looking down at the historic town.

By the time we reached the castle, the sky was growing dark. We hurried past the abbey – another SOM settting – and ducked into our apartment as the first drops hit. Within minutes, hail pounded our roof. We ate dinner cosily inside.

Rain poured through the evening and overnight. We woke to sunshine and a forecast of cloud and rain. After the previous day’s botched forecast, who knew what today’s forecast meant? Lake Wolgang and the mountains had looked so wonderful the previous day, we decided to take a chance and drive out there to ride the cog steam train to the summit of Shafberg Mountain, with its views of seven lakes.

The steep ride was tremendous fun and the views from the top amazing. Clouds covered sections, but drifted continuously, revealing new vistas while concealing previous ones. I saw the beauty of how clouds can frame a scene.

Will and I agreed the cog railroad ride was the highlight of our Salzberg trip.

At the bottom, we ate lunch on a sunny patio, soon covered in drizzle. We boarded the Lake Wolfgang cruise boat and huddled outside in cold and rain to the St. Gilgen, at the end of the lake. Blue skies blew over the town and followed us to the opposite end of Lake Wolfgang, where we sunbathed on the deck.

Day three looked to be as variable as our first two, with a somewhat less positive forecast. We went to the lake district again, to tour a salt mine. Salzburg was founded due to the region’s abundant salt. The fun tour included rides down slides like the ones miners used to quickly get from one level of the mine to another. The tour ended with a mine train ride out. The high school students in our tour group loved it.

We emerged from the mine into sunshine, which inspired us us to have lunch on a restaurant patio on a cliff overlooking Lake Hallstatt.  After eating, we rode the funicular down to the tiny town of Hallstatt squeezed between the lake and mountain. An hour was enough to see the picturesque village before a deluge sent us scurrying under a restaurant canopy for ice cream.

Sun, rain, cloud, warmth, cold, often within the space of minutes. Luckily, the periods of sunshine and warmth were long enough for us to enjoy most of the region’s sights and views. When Salzburg looks good, not much can top her. After our dreary, initial weather forecast, our first three days in Salzburg were a gift.