Day 7 – Linz to Vienna

We woke up to find overcast skies with a light drizzle on and off. At breakfast (and, oh, what a breakfast!) we watched the radar websites show a few more storms to the west and heading our way. It looked like we might be able to wait them out, so we went back to the room. After an hour or so Brad came by; he had decided to chuck it in and take the train to Vienna. We kept watching the radar, and every time the cells seemed to be passing a new one would pop up. After another hour of the same, we reluctantly decided to join Brad.We biked to the main station, where Brad went to talk with an agent while John and I just bought our tickets from a machine. Turns out we should not have been so bold: I bought the wrong kind of bicycle ticket, but the train agent took pity on us and just charged us the difference instead of preventing us from getting on entirely. While we were sad to be missing the Wachau, which is supposed to be the most beautiful part of the Danube, if we had biked, we would have missed it anyway with the weather expected there for the next few days.

The first order of business upon arriving at the Westbahnhof was to get a SIM card. I found a post office/bank/everything store, and got one in short order, but even though it looked like it had connected, I could not get any data. Giving up for the moment, we biked up Maraihilferstraße towards the city center. Somewhere along the way Brad got separated from us. We waited for five minutes once we got to the Ring, but he never showed up. Hope everything turned out OK, Brad! We never got your email (or even his last name!), so, if you’re reading this, leave a note to let us know what happened!

John and I rode our bikes through the Burgtor and through the Heldenplatz, then dismounted and walked through Michaelerplatz, up Kohlmarkt and into the Graben. The emotions of being here without my folks hit me hard. I introduced John to the Viennese Wurstlstand and then got some nuts from the seller on Kärtnerstraße, all the while still futzing trying to get my SIM card to work. Giving up, we went to the T-Mobile store, and got their card working in 2 minutes. Before heading out to the hotel by Wien Messe, we stopped at the Hotel Imperial, my parents’ home away from home, to tell the staff about them.

After cleaning up, we took a cab back into town for dinner at Kuckuck (Cuckoo), a hole-in-the-wall that Anne and I went to with my folks on our honeymoon trip in 2007 that serves old-school Austrian recipes: Creme Brûlée of goose liver(!), Wiener Schnitzel with Spargel (white asparagus), and Guglhupf (a kind of cake). We then wandered around the Innere Stadt, smoking my birthday cigars. We ended up back over at Stephansplatz, where a bunch of stalls where set up for Steffl Kirtag, the first big summer festival. We had a glass of Himbeersturm (kind of a raspberry wine), then wandered around the open booths before heading up to Zanoni & Zanoni for gelato…and John’s new home. We bought a couple of 24-hour passes at Schwedenplatz U-Bahn station, then headed back to the hotel.