We got an early start Friday morning. The driving time was 6 hours, but I knew with a gas station stop and a stop for lunch, we'd be looking at closer to 7 hours, and we had to be in Vienna no later then 4:15pm because the reception desk at the hotel was not 24 hours, and closed at 4:30pm. I left early to drop the dogs off at the kennel, came back, loaded the car up, and we were on the road by 8:15. After a quick stop on base to top off the tank, we hit the road at 8:45. The drive was long, but uneventful. We filled up right at the German/Austrian border, the continued on and pulled into Vienna right around 3:45pm. The hotel was an interesting one...it was small, and consisted of 10-15 rooms made up in the traditional Ikea decor. But it was quaint, and the price was unbeatable compared to the other hotels in the Inner Stadt area. The hotel didn't have parking, but I had looked up parking garages prior to us leaving, and saw several around the hotel, so I wasn't worried. What I didn't know until we got there was how ridiculously expensive the parking was. We've typically found over night parking in garages for between 15-20 Euros a night. In Vienna, the cheapest I could find was 40 Euros a night, but I found a few that were as high as 60 Euros. After unpacking & checking in, we hit the city. It had been a long day, starting at 5am, so we weren't really up for a late night, but we did want to walk around. We walked to the main area of St. Stephen's Square and found a company that offered bus tours of the city with an audio guide. When doing city tours, a personal guide is the best way to do it, but we knew the weather was supposed to be awful the next day, so being in a bus was the way to go. We bought our tickets and walked around shops. Our friend Jenny and her friend Heather (two of the people I went to Rome with) had been to Vienna a few days prior, and told us about, in their words, one of the best Mexican restaurants they'd ever been too. I know we were in Vienna, but with how hard good Mexican is to come by, we wanted to check this place out. So we saw on the map it was maybe a 10-15 minute walk, so instead of taking the metro we decided to walk and see some of the town. By the time we got to the place, we were excited about Mexican. Unfortunately this was some of the worst Mexican we'd ever had. There's a place here in Stuttgart that is MUCH better. Even the Mojito Shanna ordered wasn't that great. I did like the Zipfer beer they had though.
After dinner, it started pouring rain, so we metroed back to the hotel and called it an early night.
The next day it was cold, raining and just nasty in general. According to the weather report, though, it was the only day of our vacation that it was supposed to be like that. We checked out of the hotel and drove over to the main square where the bus pick up was. Thankfully on the weekends there is free street parking in the city, so we were able to park near the pick up and leave the car there all day for no cost.
The bus tour was three hours, and was a "hop on / hop off" kind of deal, meaning we could get off the bus at any stopping point, tour where ever we were, then get back on the bus when it came back around again and continue the audio guide tour. For the first two hours we just stayed on the bus. We saw the old town area and the newer parts of town. The third hour we got off at Schloß Schönbrunn. It's the imperial palace in Vienna. It was a pretty impressive sight.
We walked around but decided we'd come back at some point before we left when the weather was nicer. In the back they were setting up for a large concert...it would have been neat if we could have stayed for it, but the concert wasn't happening until Thursday. When we walked off the palace grounds, we checked the schedule and saw that we'd just missed the bus, so we decided to just take the metro to the next stop we wanted to see, the Military Museum.
When we got there, we saw that it had been built in what had formerly been the city arsenal.
It was interesting to see their pricing...almost all museums have strict rules about not allowing photography. This museum said you could, but only if you paid an extra 1.50 Euro. I paid the extra cost and we went in. When you first walk in, it's impressive, they have columns all over the place with sculptures. The audio guide said it contained life size sculptures of all the past famous military leaders of Austria. Next we walked into the WWI section. This is what I had wanted to come here to see...they had the car that Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated in which led to the outbreak of World War I. You could even see the bullet hole in the side of the car from the bullet that killed his wife. Next to the car was a glass case containing the uniform he was wearing when he was killed, and you could see the bullet hole in the collar of his uniform.
The rest of the museum was interesting, it had all kinds of artifacts from WWI and WWII, including part of a sunken U-Boat that was discovered at the bottom of the ocean floor in the '70's.
After the museum we hopped on the bus, finished the remainder of the tour, and were dropped off back at the main square. By now it was almost 5pm, so we went to one last souvenir shop so I could get my Austrian Stein with the birthday money I got from Shanna's parents.
I liked this particular Stein because it had the flags of all the states, including Salzburg where we went last time, but hadn't gotten a Stein. After that we got in the car and headed to Bratislava.
That's it for Part 1. Click here or any of the above pictures to see all the pictures of the trip. I'm breaking the posting up into 3 parts, but not the pictures. The first part of the pictures are from Vienna (Friday/Saturday/Monday) and the second half are from Bratislava (Saturday/Sunday/Tuesday).
Click here for Part 2!
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