We went back to Austria, specifically to Vienna. A cousin of my mother’s lives there with his wife, so we met up with them.
Chris and Marianne have lived in Vienna on and off for many years, so over a lovely meal in a traditional Austrian hostelry, they recommended the must see sights of the city. The highlight of the meal for me was the delicious lemon & lavender soda water – you can just see the carafe at the bottom of the picture.
Unfortunately the weather turned against us and it rained cats and dogs all day. So we took shelter in the tourist bus and dried off in the Natural History Museum, where I realised a long term dream to see the Venus of Willendorf, a 25,000 year old fertility symbol. Steve then had ‘the best chocolate cake ever’ (Viennese Sacher torte) and I had a lovely tisane of sage, rosemary, honey and ginger.
Day Trip to Vienna (Monday 9th September)
Vienna is an awe-inspiring city. Architecture is fantastic, clearly the city is wealthy, and has been for many years. But this was the beginning of what turned out to be “Storm Boris” – and so it rained continuously and heavily all day. The highlight of the trip was actually the (warm, dry) and beautiful natural history museum. These dinosaur fossils and models are, of course, very photogenic.
The actual museum building was also fantastic:
St Stephen’s cathedral (in the pouring rain):
The not -so- blue, but still beautiful, Danube
Getting pitches was harder than we expected, and we suspect that this may be because of the trend for flotilla camping, where an organized group travels around together, having all their pitches reserved by the organizers. We have come across this twice now. Anyway, the upshot of this is that we only managed 2 nights in Vienna before having to find another site farther away.
As we were heading towards Prague, we found a nice site a little farther up the Danube, in St Polten. The weather was not improving, but we did have a much bigger pitch for the van. We even managed to BBQ, as you can see from the picture!
This gave us the opportunity to visit Durnstein, a small village on the Danube, famous for incarcerating the English King, Richard the Lionheart.
More photos from Durnstein:
This is one of the “explainers” near the castle at the top of the hill. You can see images of Robin Hood, Richard the Lionheart, and William Shakespeare here!
Janet and Steve's TRavel Blog 