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???

Day 17 Krems an der Donau, Austria.

Joan's View

Henriette's backyard

Our morning started a little different today. First, Tony went to the market down the street and bought bananas for me, and a roll for himself. We put our paniers and any other bags in the "cellar" of our Airbnb, and left there about 8:45. I wore my tennis shoes and left my bike shoes with the bags. Our bike had a rare night of being outside, but our Airbnb host, Henriette, assured us that it was safe in her backyard. We rode about 2.5 miles, uphill again, to the Melk Abbey. It was easier traveling and securing our bike without paniers since we knew we would be there a little while. 

The dedicated ceiling cleaners

The Abbey was impressive. It is a Benedictine Abbey founded in 1089 when Leopold II, Margrave of Austria gave one of his castles to Benedictine monks from Lambach Abbey. It's still a monastery, most notably is its size, the details in the church and the ancient library. Many of the cruise ships visit there as well, so we saw lots of tour groups. We did our own tour though since most exhibits were explained in English, and it would have been really late for us to wait for a guided tour. I got a kick out of these two cleaning ladies who were cleaning the ceilings on our way in and then still on our way out. It takes some strength to steady that long poll for so long. Going outside of the Abbey is a huge courtyard, and the gardens on the other side of that are even bigger. Tony read it would take an hour to tour all of the gardens so we did a quick walk through.















Once again, we beat the big crowds. You can see from the picture below just how many other crazy cyclists climbed the hill to the Melk Abbey. There were only 2 bikes in the racks when we got there. We saw bus tours pouring in when we left, as well.

We left the Abbey and went up hill again to Emmersdorf to pick up our bags. Yes, Dane, believe it or not, it was up hill! 😣 I know Tony likes hills. but this was a ridiculous workout for the beginning of the day. 

The bike racks were full & covered too.

A small part of the gardens at the Abbey

 Tony monkeying around at the Abbey

                                                                                                     

Tony rowing on the Donau - a special exhibit at the Abbey

We got back on the trail and followed the bike trail signs the whole way to Krems. It took us through lots of small towns with narrow streets. We passed large groups of bike tours that included some Americans by the comments about our bike. We stopped in Spitz for lunch at another biergarten, and this time our table was part of a big vine though I doubt these were grapes. 

There were lots of turns and bumpy cobblestone in these old, small towns so we went slower than usual. Besides that we were riding into a fairly strong wind at times. We had to walk the bike through one of the towns because it was a busy shopping street. Some of the cruise ships dock in Krems, and as a result there were lots of souvenir shops. 






Toward the last half of the ride today we rode through heavy wine country, and I mean pure wine country. There seemed to be grape vines growing wherever there was space, like in the middle of a parking lot.  

Small shed dotted the rows of grapes

 Grapes were growing on both sides of us. The hillside had rows of grapes with small sheds here and there. Some larger buildings even had grapes growing alongside of them.


Arriving in Krems an der Donau, we found our place for the night. This room is kind of like a cave just because of the age of the building, but the room has everything we need. 





I wanted to go to Schmid's tonight for dinner based on some prior research. We walked about a mile to find it through the university area and then to another old section of town. Can you guess what Tony had?

On the walk back we took a slightly different path and came upon this cool truck. I think it's actually a travel company. How appropriate is that right now?

Tony's Extras

We got very few pictures inside the Church of the Abbey mainly because they prohibited pictures. Again, they didn't realize these pictures were for you. The ceilings were beautiful as you can get a glimpse from the right. I got two other pictures before they yelled at me. It was all your fault I got yelled at. 


We had a little shorter ride today, which was nice since we had so much sightseeing to do. All the small towns we went through were on the side of the mountain which had an uphill to get there. Yes, Dane there was a downhill to get back down. I only complain about the uphill. Downhill is not so bad. We rode through about as many vineyards in the valleys of Austria as the hops fields of Germany. Hops fields were much more impressive. 😀  This area reminds me of Italy when we went on vacation with Wade to Rome and Asissi. There were grape vines all over the place and the wine was excellent. When we got to Krems today, I walked to the local store and bought some wine. It was cheap like the wine in Italy and tasted excellent. Speaking of Wade, his fiance, Linda, got notice today that she passed her Bar Exam. GO LInda 👍👍👍. Yes, attorney jokes aren't as funny anymore. 

Even though we were in wine country when we were at the restaurant tonight, I got a beer. They had IPA's and I had my first IPA in Europe. It was very tasty. Not many places over here have a variety of beer. Jeff Puthoff would love it here. Anything but pilner beer is for yuppies. 
I sent a picture to my beer connoisseur, Lisa Wolters at Yellow Springs. She said it is not even a Large one, 😂. One last thing, when I was in Austria's version of Aldi's today, I had one item and it was the bottle of wine I bought. There was a huge line, but I got in the back of line and the lady in front of me pointed and said in German to go to the front of line. Confused, I went in front of her and everybody in line moved over and let me through. I went to the front of the line since I had only one item. How cool is that? Good thing Joan told me about that the other day, otherwise I would have been in confusion land. Looking forward to our ride to Vienna tomorrow.