What did you think of Austria?
T – good, fat (that’s a new way of saying good apparently).
What did you like best?
O – the boats on the lake, the train & the tram.
That’s all I can get out of them. Tom has promised to take over the blog from Croatia onwards – we’ll see!
We decided to try our skills at navigating a train into Vienna instead of packing the van up & finding parking etc.
There was a little train station a few minutes walk from the site, so off we trot. Not a great start with Ollie moaning about how far he’s had to walk after about 1 minute but the idea of a train ride kept him going.
Google maps really have been massively helpful, I can’t imagine getting where we’ve got to using fold out maps and travel guides! So according to our trusty google the train would come at 33 minutes past the hour, we’d change after 4 stops with 10 mins in between to figure out the platform we needed & then 30 mins into Vienna central.
After a slight hiccup of getting on the wrong train (but it says 10:33 and it’s only 10:25 so I don’t think this is the right train 🙄) we managed to jump off the wrong train and onto the right one after one stop without too much yelling.
‘Yes Ollie that’s the station we were at a few minutes ago’.
Very impressive how well kept the old train was, commuters in Austria are clearly better behaved than in the UK.
We changed trains and much to everyone’s delight jumped on to a DOUBLE DECKER TRAIN.
Into Vienna, even Tom was moaning about walking now. I had assumed we’d be spoilt for choice with pavement cafes galore but nothing to be found. After about 40 minutes walking to the centre (turns out central station isn’t very central) we ended up at the old faithful, not really what I had in mind but did the job.
We then worked out that the trams were hop on, hop off & the ticket we’d got for the train covered us for tram travel so managed to cover a few streets in comfort without any moaning.
Hopped off at Mozart’s monument where Tom announced he felt sick (at least explained all the whinging!)
Managed to persuade him to sit in the garden whilst I pretended to be a tourist for about 4 minutes, quickly taking photos of random buildings that looked impressive before finally admitting defeat and doing the journey in reverse.
Back to base for early afternoon, turns out he had a temp of about 102 and slept until the next day. Sorry Tom, he’s fine now!
Our travels, mostly in the van 