Not sixteen, nor going on seventeen

I'm not really much of a sound of music fan, so it might seem strange to folk that I've partaken in a fair amount activity that you would normally only do if you were a SOM fan - for example, I've been to see a sing along version, I've been to Frohnburg Castle - the building they used for the exterior shots of the Trapp family mansion, and on this trip - I've been to see the gazebo at Hellbrunn Palace - where the love scenes from the film were shot.

The day started off well, we packed and headed off about 10 - it was a two hour drive to Salzburg and Milly slept most of it.

It was a lovely day when we arrived at Salzburg, so we parked the car up and headed into the central city - with the intention of going to the information center and asking about where we could go out of the city that had nice grounds where we could have a picnic and Milly could have a run around.

When asking the attendant, Claire also expressed an interest in Sound Of Music sight seeing tours, so the person recommended the aforementioned Hellbrunn Palace - a 30 minute drive in the right direction - we needed no further encouragement, off we went.

The grounds of the Palace were indeed lovely, we had some bratworst that we'd brought at the grocery store - so we fried that up and Milly and Claire had that whilst I was relegated to cheese and bread, the sacrifices a veggie makes, ay?

The gazebo was in the grounds, and does look like the one from the movie - we needed to join an orderly queue of American tourists to wait our turn to get our picture taken - luckily one of them offered to take a picture of us, this is what you see above.

In the grounds there was also a childrens playground area, so Milly had a chance to run around and let off some steam there for a while.

At about 4pm we decided we needed to head off, the GPS was telling us it was a 4 hour drive to Trieste, our next destination, and the hotel check in closed at 10pm - time to get our skates on.

Milly drifted off to sleep almost as soon as we hit the road, and off we went - an amazing drive on a motorway that cut it's way through the Alps - with long bridges and tunnels ensuring that there were no slow windy roads required.

About an hour into the journey, we hit some major traffic - which ground to a halt and sat stationary for about 30 minutes, no idea what was happening but everyone around us all got out of their cars and walked around, stretched, chatted to other motorists etc - making us think it was some sort of regular/expected experience? After a while we got going again with no visible signs as to why we stopped?

Milly woke up during this stop - and was really not interested in being in the car from that point, which was a problem as we had about 3 hours driving left to do.

She's been so good this trip, we have a little portable tablet computer and it's loaded with movies for her to watch, so she's spent a lot of time in the back watching Mickey Mouse or Handy Manny - but even they weren't managing to console here this time.

We drove for a while with a miserable kid in the back seat, eventually stopping at a motorway services in Slovenia to stretch our legs and cook up the rest of the bratworst and some 2min noodle style pasta for us to have for dinner.

Milly loved being out of the car for this brief period, but then hated going back into it when we had to set off again, at this point it was getting quite late and we still had 90 minutes of driving ahead of us.

We pushed on, poor Milly grizzled in the back, and finally we arrived in Italy.

It was funny going through the border controls - both Austria/Slovenia and then Slovienia/Italy - these big imposing structures that you needed to drive through that were now essentially unmanned shells - you'd imagine that at one point before Slovenia being in the EU it would have been a different story.

Trieste is just over the border from Slovenia, so once we were in Italy it was a quick drive to the hotel - we arrived at about 9:30 and were greeted by a pleasant man who spoke very little English - what he did speak he was reading off of a card - but he seemed to know who we were and gave us a room key, so result!

Once in the room we had showers and let Milly play with her toys for a while before putting her to bed, poor little button - we were all so exhausted we all went straight to sleep and then didn't wake again until 7am - which is about as close to a sleep in as we get these days!

Today, we didn't need to drive anywhere as we're here for two nights - hooray!

We went into Trieste on the tram (or hotel is in Banne, on the outskirts of Trieste) and checked out the city - which is very lovely.

We spent the day wandering around the pedestrianised streets letting Milly run and play as much as possible - she seems to love the big Roman style fountains in the middle of the Piazzas - going up and down the steps and running around them - she must have done this for hours.

We had lunch in one of these Piazzas, I had Pizza and claire the Pasta - and Milly shared both of our dishes.

In the afternoon Milly fell asleep in her pushchair, so Claire and I took the opportunity to have a glass of Prosecco each in one of the waterside bars - friends of ours got married today in the UK - so we felt that something bubbly was in order, and Prosecco, the town that the wine comes from, is just up the road - so it seemed like the right thing to do.

Tomorrow, we've got another 4 hour drive ahead of us, to Fiesole near Florence. This time we're going to try not stopping and heading straight there - hopefully making the most of Milly's nap times - we'll let you know how it goes.

Trip in numbers:

Number of miles since N15: 1100.2

Length of beard: 1.5mm

Number of countries travelled through on 10/6/2011: 4 (Germany, Austria, Slovenia, Italy)