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I'm going to make this write up a little meta. Some of you know, but others may not. Emily and David put in about 5 years of research into this trip. Many weekends of downtime choosing the next country alphabetically and then finding some way to partition the country (region, state, major cities, etc.), then looking for,

* Things to do in ____
* Best museums in ____
* Best day trips from ____
* Underrated attractions in ____
* etc.

Every item we recorded was then ranked: high, medium, low, and that process organically painted the route of our trip.

One late arrival to our research radar was realizing the unesco.org website can be filtered by country. Then we began the arduous process of going through each of those. During that particular process, one item completely sucked Dave in for a few days:

Prehistoric Pile Dwellings around the Alps
https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1363/

To be quite frank, this is not an "A lister" kind of item. It was just kind of nebulous. The fact that these sites are littered around Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Slovenia, and Switzerland made this tough to categorize. There are "937 known archaeological pile-dwelling sites." To call it uninteresting would be a disservice, but to choose a single worthy destination was a monumental task and FOMO set in.

Today we decided to do a day trip to Mondsee, Austria (which eluded our earlier research) from Salzburg. It was chosen because it was in the lakes district, and because it was the closest city on the lake and it was only a single bus trip away. After the destination was already set, and we were trying to come up with sights to see, I came across a small town museum attached to a church, that an exhibit on, and had artifacts from Pile Dwellings archeological sites from this very lake.

I have to say, someone put some love in this museum. It was probably the best museum we've been in that didn't have a sentence of English. Even ignoring that it was still a very good museum.

A good portion of this museum was dedicated to the church itself. Now remember, this was a mostly impromptu day trip. The church itself was famous for two things. The first we didn't even know until we read an English sign inside the church. This was the filming location for the beautiful wedding scene in the "Sound of Music."

https://youtu.be/DIc6U0wbLJs

That isn't the most astounding thing about this church. That back altar is famous for having, on clear display, the mummified remains of a local saint, Saint Konrade II. I must have missed that in the Sound of Music. See the accompanying post on "Lakes Region, Austria" for pictures.

Actually, I didn't notice this in person, but when looking at my picture I noticed there are actually 5 mummies in the altar. Two of them can be seen in the original Sound of Music.

Back to the Pile Dwellings
The Pile Dwellings are pretty amazing. Some of them date back to 6000BC. To try and make it short (too late), the dwellings were all built near lakes and on Stilts or Piles. This was to protect these ancient structures from occasional flooding. The houses themselves were usually built on marshland, which in sure also served as predator protection. The marshes also served as a means to preserve the Piles, and other artifacts from the settlements. Thus we actually have a lot of evidence to tell us how these ancient humans lived in this part of the world.Läs mer