Leading Spouse Says - Who are Wayne and Julia from Tallahassee?

And why wouldn’t it? I am a huge fan of The Sound of Music. For readers of this blog, you may recall a recent story of how the Trailing Spouse surprised me with front-row seats to the play here in London. And a post from last summer recounted how he humored me on a four-hour bus tour throughout Salzburg, Austria to a number of the movie’s settings. In pre-blog days I drug him to the Trapp Family Lodge in Stowe, Vermont. It seems like if there is anything related to this wonderful movie, I’ll bite.
You may be wondering what the gist of the Observer story is. It turns out that the former Von Trapp family home has been turned into a hotel and the reporter was the first British journalist to set foot in it. For a mere $400 to $1200 one can spend the night where Maria sung her way into the heart of Baron Von Trapp and his seven children. The 150 year-old house was abandoned by the Von Trapps in 1938 as the Nazis expanded their influence into Austria and was later sold to a Catholic foundation and inhabited by monks. The monks have fallen on hard times and the hoteliers are renting it and helping them transform into a hotel.
The writer predicts it will become the most popular hotel in Europe due to film zealots like herself. Those she met on the bus tour were described for several paragraphs. “We re-enact the film’s more energetic scenes, as one 76 year-old broke her hip doing in the gazebo where Liesl and Rolf sing “Sixteen going on Seventeen.” We travel 31 hours from Australia to Austria, like Don and Mary seated behind us on the bus, miss our connecting flight in Japan, and fork out $3400 just to be here. We sometimes fall in love en route, like Wayne and Julia from Tallahassee, donning matching Florida State University sweaters, and fly back on our anniversary to do it all over again.”
So, does anyone know Wayne and Julia? If so, I would love to meet them! Maybe they’ll bring me along on a trip to stay in the hotel. Because the first words out of my Trailing Spouse’s mouth after I made him read the story was, “I’m not going here!”