One of my favourite movies is “Where Eagles Dare”. My father used to love old war movies, and we watched loads of them together when I was young. Some of these are still among my favourites, but “Where Eagles Dare” is definitely in my all-time top ten!
It starts Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood, and is a taughtly scripted thriller with several intriguing plot twists and turns. Most of the story takes place in the aptly named “Schloss Adler – The Castle of the Eagles” high in the Alps, which is an amazing-looking place.
During the ALife4Sale period I watched the movie again on DVD, and was interested by the “making-of” documentary on the disc too. When I started thinking about the 100 goals I would like to achieve, going to see the spectacular location that the movie was shot was added as a potential to the list.
I already had 95 goals selected, and opened up the selection of the last five to anyone reading my website. Twenty possibles were chosen, and voted on for a period of a week. Visiting Hohenwerfen – the real Castle of the Eagles, in Werfen in Austria – was one of the final twenty, but did not make it to the final five.
However, as I was in Munich, and found out that Werfen is only a couple of hundred kilometres away, I thought it would be good to go and visit the castle anyway.
Peter had contacted me through the website about coming to meet me in Munich for a beer or two at Oktoberfest, and when he found out I was interested in going to Salzberg in Austria, and on to Werfen, he very kindly suggested he could take me, as he was driving down to Munich anyway, and would have his car there.
So Peter arrived at the hotel this morning, by which time I had managed to eat breakfast, but was still feeling a bit queasy from last night. I quickly packed my bags and checked out, and we set off for Austria. By the time we got there I was feeling a bit better.
The castle is quite magnificent, and we headed up and had a quick look around before the guided tour started. I spent most of the tour trying to spot “Where Eagles Dare” locations.
Later in the afternoon there was a falconry idsplay in the castle grounds, and afterwards Peter asked them if I could have one of the falcons on my hand. I comes pretty close to achieving my goal of having a hawk land on my hand and eat something, but not quite!
Another excellent day. Thanks again to Peter for offering to make this trip a possibility.