Day 52: Vienna, Austria

We started our day at the Schonbrunn Palace, a huge 1400 room palace surrounded by acres and acres of gardens and fountains. The picture with Brooke shows the palace off in the distance and some of the gardens and pool in-between.

After roaming around the grounds, including a stop to play in the hedge labyrinths (see pic) and playground, we went through rooms of the palace. Some of the rooms had some cool history attached. In one room JFK met with Soviets and in another room the 6 year old Mozart played for ruler Maria Theresa. The audioguide kept it interesting and brief, so we were through 40 rooms in about 45 minutes.

From the palace we took a U-Bahn ride to get a pretty bad lunch (fyi - Chicken Burger Pita = chicken breast + beef patty + tortilla), then hopped on a tram. The tram took an unexpected turn and crossed the Danube, well, unexpected for us, as the tram was on tracks.

We lucked out, however, because we found the "City Beach." Tiki bars with sand pits stretched a half mile along the river (imagine Rock Bottom in Milwaukee with sand under their tables). We went with the flow that fate brought us and enjoyed a beer on the "beach."

We stopped back at the hotel to plan tomorrow and decided instead of going directly to Salzburg, we'd stop in Hallstatt for the day. We also made a huge discovery. Our hotel will do our laundry (wash, dry, and fold) overnight for the same price as we did it ourselves in Barcelona. We averted another laundry crisis and took advantage of our hotel's service.

Now freed up from having to do laundry, we headed back to the Rathhaus (city hall) to get dinner and enjoy the outdoor show. Tonight was a Hanzel and Gretel opera in German, which was a pretty funny thing to watch. We were slightly confused on how they could get away with calling it Hanzel and Gretel when no bread crumbs were involved.

On the way home we saw the longest word ever, so we wrote it down to remember:

Fahrtreppenbenutzungshinweise


PS - Happy birthday Melissa (it's a day late, but it is the July 17th post). We didn't find your parent's church, but didn't have much time to look.