The tour was pretty interesting. For example, I had no idea that Marie Antoinette was Austrian and born in this palace, where she was later married off to Louis XVI, and of course, everyone knows what eventually happened to her. They had all sorts of paintings of her as a child with her brothers and sisters inside the palace. One part of the palace was off limits while they were restoring it...the thing I thought was interesting was among other things, they were replacing the electrical wiring that had been there since Edison installed it.
After the tour we walked out back to the garden areas. Now that it was a sunny day, it was much prettier here. They had a beautiful fountain in the back and we were able to get someone to take our picture there.
Adjacent to the palace was the Royal Zoo. When the first giraffe was sent there as a gift from Egypt in 1828, it caused a sensation amongst the locals who had never seen a live one before in person. So much so that it inspired local fashion at the time, dubbed "à la Giraffe". They also had a Giant Panda in the zoo. The picture below is when he was having lunch.
The zoo had a Biergarten in the center of it, but the food menu was expensive and didn't have much on it, so we ended up just hitting a hot dog stand nearby.
The combo ticket we purchased not only got us into the zoo, but also on the famous Vienna Ferris Wheel. The original was built in 1897, but burned to the ground in 1944. In 1945 it was rebuilt and that one still stands there today. It's slow moving, taking approximately 10 minutes for a full rotation, so when you're at the top you get a great view of the city.
The Ferris Wheel isn't all by itself, it's located in an amusement park where there are all kinds of rides, both roller coasters and water rides. We had to laugh at the bumper cars...it was called "Chauffeur School".
After the Ferris Wheel we got on the metro and headed to the Belvedere. It was formerly a residential palace, but today is an art museum. It was a fairly impressive sight when you first got there.
Again, inside the museum, no pictures were allowed, unless we were taking pictures of outside through the windows. Some of the more notable paintings were The Kiss, by Gustav Klimt, and Napoleon Bonaparte, by Jacques-Louis David. I'd never heard of The Kiss before, but apparently it's pretty famous. While I'd never heard of Jacques-Louis David before, I did recognize the painting as soon as I saw it. We couldn't take pictures, but below is what the painting looked like.
After the museum it was fairly late in the afternoon, so we headed back to our car and drove back to Bratislava. That evening we decided to try an Italian restaurant near our hotel since our feet were throbbing from four days of walking and it was near our hotel. It was delicious, and like everything else here, cheap. A glass of house red wine was 90 cents and the white wine was 80 cents.
The next morning at 8am Shanna went downstairs for the Massage she had scheduled. The masseuse hadn't arrived yet, so she came back up to the hotel room to wait. Unfortunately by 8:45, it was at the point where it was too late. We had to pack, check out, and had a guided walking tour set up, and there was no longer time for a 60 minute massage. After check out we walked around the shopping district since we had an hour to kill.
Shanna found some great deals on shoes & a hat, and I got a Stein for Slovakia.
We then headed back to the hotel. Right at 11am on the dot our tour guide walked in. She was really nice, and she took us all over the city showing us things. She pointed out the street next to our hotel where, during the Baltic Revolution in 1989, 300,000 people (including herself) lined the streets, demanding the Soviet Union leave their country. It's personal touches like that that make the walking guided tour so much more interesting then a generic audio guide or book.
The tour lasted about an hour, and it was finally time for us to head home. Normally the adventures stop there, but not this time. Before we left we decided to take a bathroom break in the McDonalds near by. After we left, it was a 10-15 minute walk back to our car. Because of pickpockets I've gotten in the habit of occasionally checking my pockets to make sure my wallet, phone, etc... are all still there. Right before we got to the car I did one of those checks and noticed my passport was missing. We checked the suitecase in the car and couldn't find it. Shanna went to check with the hotel to see if I'd left in there while I went back to the McDonalds to see if I'd dropped it in the bathroom. As soon as I walk into the McDonalds a cleaning guy sees me and asks if I was "Bryan Adams". I said "Bryan Norton, yes" and he said "Passport". Thankfully he'd not only found it while cleaning, he'd looked at the picture and recognized me when I came back in and they had it for me in the back office.
I wish I could say the adventure stopped there, but it didn't. We left Bratislava, and were back in Austria, approximately 10 minutes outside of Vienna, when I noticed something didn't feel right in the car. It was nothing overt, just a subtle way the vibration of the car felt that didn't feel right. Shortly after I noticed it, the low tire pressure warning light came on. I looked up the nearest gas station on the GPS, and it was only 3km away, right off the next exit. When we got to the gas station, I didn't notice anything strange. I don't have a good eye for tire pressure, though, so I decided to fill up the tires anyway and check the gauge. The hose for the air was short and not retractable, so I was going to have to fill up one tire, pull up, fill the rear tire, turn the car around and repeat. After I filled up one tire, I asked Shanna to watch to make sure I was pulling the car forward enough and lining up with the pump. That's when she said we couldn't drive any further because the tire had a giant bubble in it. I don't know how I missed it. We moved the car to the parking lot area and while I changed the tire to our partial spare, she went inside to ask if they knew a tire place nearby. The only one the attendant knew of was a small auto shop located right behind the gas station.
We took the wheel inside and the guy said immediately the tire was no good, it was not repairable. This wasn't a tire shop, so he didn't have any way of replacing it. Thankfully he did know of a tire shop in the town over. He gave us the name, and it happened to come up in the "Points of Interest" section of the GPS. Luckily it was only 6km away. We drove over there, and this place ended up being a practical Tire Expo. They had logos of all the major brands up on their wall, and they happened to have our tire size in stock. It was a quiet day, and there was no other customers, so all 5 technicians on duty went to work on swapping our tire out. It took them about 10 minutes. Once they were done, we were back on the road, the tire pressure light turned off, and we were good to go for the rest of the trip. A valuable lesson learned, though, was always make sure you have the local number of your insurance company when you leave the country. I had USAA's number for Germany, but either you can't dial a toll free number in one country from another, or I don't know how to do it. And the number is different in Austria then in Germany. If the tire had blown out on the Autobahn, it could have been a disaster, especially if I couldn't get a hold of my insurance company.
So that was it for our trip. Aside from the scare on the ride home, the rest of the trip was a lot of fun. So much so that we wanted to stay for a few more days. That's twice we've been to Austria now, and twice we've not wanted to come home when the trip was over. Bratislava is also a beautiful city, so if you ever get the chance to visit, jump on it.
To see the pictures, click here or any pictures above to see the pictures from our trip.
Things coming up in the next month that I'll be posting about will be my 30th bday (technically tomorrow, but will be celebrated Saturday with friends) and our trip to London for July 4th weekend.
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