Austria is a wrap.

The Austrian portion of our adventure is over. We are on the train to Ljubljana (which in case you’ve forgotten from my blog twelve years ago, is pronounced “pu-TAY-tō”). We are pretty excited to meet up with the Allens in one of our favorites spots in Europe. They have three days to recover from jet lag before we grab the rental car and begin our journey. They landed about an hour ago, while we have already been coping with zombie-brain for five days. What better spot to recover, then Ljubljana, Slovenia? Really, all spots are the same when you are fast asleep in your AirBnB bed at 2:00 in the afternoon, because your body thinks it will never get to sleep again. But this is the place where we were able to find a large enough car to transport all six of us, and one in which the country of origin would actually allow us to go all the way to Albania and back. So this is where the big loop begins. We are still crossing our fingers about the rental car. It turns out that Mark and family were immediately picked up by their shuttle driver upon entering the airport terminal and so had no time to visit the rental car desk to inquire about our reservation. Everybody please call in your karma points for us on this one. No car, no bueno.

 

Don't think this car will fit us all. This guy was inside one of our Graz lunch restaurants. For perspective, the roof was no higher than my belly button.

 

First sighting of old town Graz

 

 

“So how was Austria?”, you ask. Absolutely fantastic! (Shout-out to my Iceland buddies. If you don’t know, don’t worry about it.) We began in Graz, and were surprised by our old friend Katharina at the airport. We thought we were going to meet her in town, but were greeted by her smiling face the second we stepped off the tarmac. For those who don’t know, Katharina is an Austrian superstar of a human being whom I met in Iceland and then gave a whirlwind two-week-tour of the Bay Area about a month later, back in 2022. We have stayed fast friends via Zoom and WhatsApp ever since.  She has now returned the tour-guiding favor, showing us Austria like only an insider could do. We’d never been to Graz. In fact, Katharina had only been there once. But she was still an excellent tour guide/navigator for all things typically found in Styria (the province wherein lies Graz.) It was all pretty cool. No drama at any point to report. Sorry. I know that drama is the stuff which makes reading the blog worth the time. But I’m not going to make up stories just to have something to tell. So this post is really just going to be a photo-dump and a description of the highlights. I am certain the drama will hit us right between the eyes soon enough. It always does.

 

War Memorial in Graz

 

Almost three years since I last saw my favorite Austrian

Proof that yes, Carol is here too.

We climbed the Schlossberg mountain in the middle of town to see the iconic clocktower shown below, that is visible from much of the outlying town. The views from up there were superb, as were the history lessons on all of the signs that greeted us as we hiked up the hill. I’ve included one pic about the tunnels that I found fascinating. We could have taken a funicular to the top, but we thought we’d get some exercise after sitting on a plane for over twelve hours. The way back down however, was never in question (at least for me). They have a slide that drops you the 64 meters through the middle of the mountain by winding you at breakneck speeds around 170 meters of winding tunnel. Super fun way to get back to the bottom of the hill. It is pitch dark in places, and lit up in others, and is the largest underground slide in the world, at least according to them.

Heading up to the top

Near the top

Crazy history

Good shot of the clock tower. Not so much of us.

Graz is located on the river Mur, a beatiful tributary of the Danube. On at least one website I read that it calls itself the culinary capital of Austria, but it also teemed with museums, parks and wonderful, medium-sized-town baroque and renaissance style architecture. Come to think of it, though, we did seem to spend almost all of our time in Graz eating. So I guess maybe they are on to something there. I could live in Graz. It’s not a big metropolis like Vienna, but it’s not a tiny town either. Around 300,000 Austrians. And probably another 50,000 tourists. Big enough to contain plenty of culture, but small enough to avoid the impersonal feel of big-city-life. Nobody would ever call Vienna cute. Graz is cute. At least the few square kilometers of the old town around Schlossberg is, especially the Hauptplatz (the medieval old town’s square). 

 

Typical Graz architecture

 

Funky iconic art museum that looks like an alien's internal organ on top, with heart valves and such. Can't see those from this shot, but I promise they are up there.

 

The cobblestone streets immediately put me in vacation mode; lacking in cars, but bustling with bicycles and the ever-present trams that, for me, set pretty much all of Europe squarely ahead of the U.S., in terms of getting from here to there without ruining here or there. We saw Eggenberg Castle, a few kilometers outside of the main town. The gardens were magnificent. We saw the town cathedrals. We climbed a double spiral staircase in a random local medieval building, just because we could. We enjoyed many a town park and many more town cafés. Carol checked out the armory which apparently is the largest historical armory in the world. Once you’ve seen ten thousand swords, I figure you’ve seen them all. But the horse armor was apparently pretty impressive. 

Fancy!

 

 

 

They don't make 'em like this in the U.S.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Beats having hundreds of cars any day.

Eggenberg Castle

 

Part of the Eggenberg gardens

 

I did have a breakfast buffet snafu that was funny. There was an egg-boiling station, where they expected you to soft-boil your own egg to your liking. I just saw a basket of eggs and figured I was getting one already cooked, as it was a buffet. I cracked it open and quickly discovered otherwise. Needless to say, I went back and got a different egg when I figured out the dealio. Nothing much else to report in Graz. Beautiful scenery. Beautiful town. Beautiful people. Beautiful train-ride to Vienna.

 

Here's the buffet.

 

Here's the egg station. The color coded boiling station in the back should have tipped me off.

 

 

Vienna was a different vibe. Grandiose architecture in every direction reminding you that this is a place to be taken seriously. The home of emperors for hundreds and hundreds of years, Vienna makes you feel like you have arrived and you’d best respect the history around you, because it is alive and well in the present. Katharina started our tour at the University of Vienna, where she got her multiple degrees and where marble busts of Nobel Prize winners and 500 year-old world-changers stared at you from every corner. An apt start to a three day tour of every side street and back street in the city. Each statue and monolith and church and government building vied for the most awe-inspiring man-made thing you’d ever seen, but the real inspiration was in the incredible detail work on each building. I took so many pictures that I may need to purge my phone before we make it to Croatia.

 

Kaiser's Palace

Each river gets its own statue

I think this was the Parliament building

Some rich lady's home.

So many grandiose buildings. Can't remember which is which.

St. Stephen's Cathedral

Mozart was everywhere. If whatever it was you were interacting with at the moment wasn’t named after a dead Kaiser or Kaiserina, you could be sure that it was named Mozart@$&#. We didn’t go in the opera-house this time around for lack of time, but we sure as hell got accosted by Mozart-dressed actors trying to sell us tickets to 83 different classical concerts/operas/musicals/plays that were going on each night in any of the 83 marbled concert halls in the six square kilometers of downtown. I actually don’t know if I am exaggerating here or not. But I did just make up that number off the top of my head. If you’ve met me, you were probably on top of that fact before I fessed up, but just in case…

National Opera House where Amadeus did his thing.

And here he is in all his glory.

 

Sadly, on this trip, Carol has to work on weekday evenings. She sightsees with me in the mornings and up until 4:00ish, but then she logs into work, and I am on my own for the rest of the waking hours. Thankfully, I had Katharina to keep me company in Vienna, and I will have the Allens the rest of the way. So I’m good. I just feel bad for Carol, because she has to miss some stuff. For example, Katharina and I took a train to a cute little town on the Danube, about an hour north of Vienna, called Krems, to visit with our friend Simone, who also was on the Iceland trip with us. We had a blast catching up as even Katharina hadn’t seen Simone in about a year, and for me, it had been three. 

Krems

Other highlights included the Albertina art museum, with a Monet and Picasso exhibition, a ride to the top of St. Stephen’s Cathedral for epic views of the city, a walk along an arm of the Danube, a stroll through many of the gorgeous city parks including Katharina’s favorite, the Liechtenstein Gardens. We saw and partook of farmer’s markets and dozens of fancy bakeries and chocolatiers and we ate Wienerschnitzel and wursts, and cheese and gooseberries. We came, we saw, we ate. We left. Three days is not enough for a city the size of Vienna, even when you have a handy-dandy local to show you every shortcut. Thankfully, we had been here before, and had seen much of the touristy stuff already, like Schonnbrunn Palace, and so could skip a good deal of it. But still, more time would have been great, if not to go to a concert or an opera, at least to spend more time with our beloved friend. But seven other countries and a family full of Allens await. So our Austria trip is now a done deal. We are on the train in Maribor, Slovenia as I type this. We’ll be back here in our rental car in a few days. Seems like we are traveling in figure eights rather than straight lines. But you got to do what you got to do when you want to see it all.

Liechtenstein Gardens

Walking along the river

Incidentally, if you’ve read this far, congratulations, you’ve got staying power. But please know that I don’t expect anyone to actually read all of my drivel. It is for me to look back on in posterity, as much as it for others to travel along with us. So good for you, but please don’t feel compelled to read every word of every post. There will not be a test at the end. It is okay to simply peruse the pictures. I will keep it PG, nonetheless, just in case…

Nothing says Austria, for me, more than the Mannerwaffle store

Until I next post (probably once we are done with Slovenia)…