Day 18 Vienna, Austria - Peaceful Ride to the Big City

Tony's View 

 We are on our way to Vienna, the big City, population 1,900,000. 
The picture to the right shows how they do sidewalks and intersections over here. They have a bicycle cross and a crosswalk. Even the sidewalks are separated by a small granite curb between bicycle path and sidewalk. The bigger curb is between the street and bikeway. Just a suggestion, that isn't a curb to cross or you will drop your wife onto the curb and crash. I know, been there done that. It is cool how they have a place for bicycles here. We were heading out of town this morning, and my directions were working great. Then we ran into a path closed sign and a detour. There was a gentleman and lady there that were vey friendly. They helped us out and we followed them, even though I questioned them a couple of times. Without them, I would have struggled getting around the detour. We ended up in an industrial park again. There was one place as the picture shows below with miles of containers. Joan said it reminded her of iRobot. For me, with Lisa and Nate's dream, it reminded me of condominiums. 😀

The bike paths were once again awesome. We have been traveling on bike paths or small country roads with very little traffic. It might be hard to get Joan to travel on the busy roads of the United States again. Once again, I need to say how lucky I am. Our bathrooms are sometimes cornfields and woods. Not many wives would accept that. I bet our kids are saying that is enough good stuff about Mom. They are probably right, but I am sure they will bring her down to real life when she gets back. 

Check this out. The pictures above show what the bike path looked like when going around a pier. You can see the concrete beams. We went around until we crossed underneath on of the cantilever sections. Wow, that was an ingenious way to get a bike path across a bridge. 

 These two pictures show how high the flood waters get with dates. Their dates start with the day, then month, then year. August 14, 2002 it was pretty high. The path would have been under water by 3 feet or so. That would be a major flood. We are glad the water isn't too high. I do believe it is a little high though.

We went into this little town to the grocery store to get some food for a picnic along the Danube. We stopped by this nice little church along the way. Even the small ones are beautiful. 
After getting our supplies at the grocery store, Joan bought some chicken from this guy right outside of the market. It was really good stuff. We packed the chicken up along with the other stuff and looked for a good place to have a picnic. We found a bench along the river and bike path and had our picnic. It was so nice watching ships and bicycles go by while eating our picnic.

 One more cool bridge. This one looked very difficult to construct. Looking at how it was connected on the top and how they had to build it from the inside out makes it difficult. It is amazing to me how all the bridges are different. They must not realize you can make more money just copying your last design and redoing it. That is what the American engineers do it. You Architects do the same thing, too. 

Here is another church we got into. We stop at many of the churches and some we don't get in. We had better luck getting in churches in Germany. Austria we have found a majority to be locked. The picture to the left is the sacristy. That was beautiful, almost too nice for some Priest. There are a couple of priests following the blog so I had to throw that in there. The wood working on the cabinets in the sacristy was well done. 

We were in this one town that seemed to be very modern called Tulln. They had a boat as a stage with the stands up the dike and hill, So the band was playing on a boat. I guess the groupies couldn't get to them that way. When we were in Tulln, we got a message from Andrea in Budapest that says she needed a Declaration Letter from us to get our luggage from Hungarian customs. We stopped right away and wrote back. She said after they receive it, customs could take up to 10 -14 working days to process it. Andrea said she would try to get them to expedite it. This could be a real problem getting back to the USA without luggage. Hopefully, this works out. We will take prayers. By the way, the WiFi in Vienna Airbnb is not very good and has cause much frustration for me.

Joan's Extras

 Two cool signs today. The top one is for Theresa, who is kindly covering for me at the women's center while I am gone. She needed some attention anyway since Bud got his fishing pictures. 
The bottom one is for my Godson, John, or any of the other millions of John's that we know.

A couple of other noteworthy points today - we saw way too many nude, old bodies sunbathing today along the water and the bike trail. Yikes.

We also got passed by a guy who said something in German to us that was beyond my understanding. When I said, "English?", he said your bike is nice to slip shade, and he drove off. I think he meant that it's nice to draft behind???