Our Days in Vienna Palaces

We continued to have lots of fun together during our last two days in Vienna. On wednesday we made it down to the breakfast buffet at our hotel and then we were off on the trolley to see Schonbrunn-the summer palace of the Habsburg family- who ruled Austria and Hungary and several other territories at different times through the last 600 years- until work war I.  Riding the trolleys was a great way to see the town- above ground-as we journeyed about 5 miles in the suburbs of modern Vienna. It was half raining and half sunny so we needed our umbrellas.  The palace was one of the buildings where they didn't allow photographs, but the rooms were quite spectacular- similar to Versailles- and we did buy a collection of photos on a disk. We enjoyed lunch at one of several cafes on the palace grounds, with some traditional Vienna food including apple struddle. After lunch it was still wet and dreary so we rode the tram around the gardens- which include a zoo and woods and a hedge-maze.

We had an idea that we wanted to buy more gifts for the grandkids; specifically wooden toys (traditional European look) from a toystore that was across from our Hotel.  But our suitcases were full and near the weight limits.  Judy had the good idea of buying an inexpensive carryon bag and using it to hold my backpack along with several toys and our other gifts.  On the trolley line in the morning I had spotted a discount store with some sports bags in the window.  So on the ride back we got off the trolley near where I remembered the store and were able to find a sports bag- just like we imagined.  We arrived back at our hotel at about 4 pm with an hour to shop in the toystore.  What a fun hour we had selecting tops and pull toys (a horse, a sheep, a double-snail, and an alligator), a small music box and koo-koo whistle, a wooden Noah's Ark mobile for Brooke, and a rubber-band powered wooden race car.  By five we were ready to make our purchases and walk across the street with our new treasures.

For dinner we had reservations at a music show in the basement of the town hall- Rathaus.  The string ensemble and piano played Austrian folk music and some singers sang a few light opera pieces, that were probably humorous if you understood German, but were enjoyable for us anyway.  The architecture of the building circa 1890? was very decorative and the basement 'banquet halls" were each decorated differently with painted walls and wine barrel designs.

Thursday morning was our last day for touring Vienna.  We were a little late and missed our Hotel breakfast, so we went acros the street to a French Cafe next the toy store and had a delicious breakfast; fresh squeezed orange juice, omelets, and chocolate croissants. My coffee came in what looked like a soup bowl! We found out from the waitress that the dough is from Paris (frozen) and baked each morning.  So this was our Paris connection in Vienna.

We knew there was a museum of folk art just down the street so we went by and looked in the windows and saw old wooden chests and a reconstructed kitchen from an early Austrian house.  So we went in for a closer look and were again surprised to be surrounded by wooden carved and painted furniture and tools and other artifacts from the rural life of Austria.  The signs were only in German, but we enjoyed looking at the artifacts- quite a collections of chests and cupboards.  Just the sort of things that we like!

    

     

Also in the neighborhood was a catholic church- still functioning with a congregation and school.  And one more stop at an old bakery building that was turned into a restaurant, with the baking ovens and breadmaking utensils decorating the dining rooms.  It looked like a good place for lunch, but we had places to go and things to do... maybe on our next visit.

We took the trolley to the Hofburg Palace to tour the rooms-imperial apartments- and see the kitchen utensils and silver and porcelain plates, bowls, and decorative wares.  This was another chance to see the furniture and beautiful rooms of Maria Teresa and her husband circa 1750 and Emperor Franz Joseph and Elizabeth circa 1850.  They apparently enjoyed new buildings (palaces) and redecorating rooms in existing palaces.  No pictures were allowed of the rooms,but we took a hundred of all the dining room plates and settings.

As we walked through one of the passageways at the Hofburg palace, we saw costumed men selling tickets for a Bach and Mozart and Strauss concert in the evening in one of the palace ballrooms; so we decided that a third night at a concert would be a perfect way to end our days in Vienna.  After the tour of the palace rooms we walked through the downtown shopping pedestrian streets looking for St Stephen's Cathedral, but on the way we saw the Central Cafe- where many of the Vienna authors and artists congregated (maybe they still do).  It still looks like it must have 100 years ago- very decorative- and our table was next to the piano- so we enjoyed beautiful music while we had dinner and very fancy and mouth watering pastry deserts.

This was turning out to be a delightful day, but I had lost track of the river.  We had time before the concert, so we bought tickets for the hop-on-hop-off double deck bus tour around the City and the Ringstrasse.  And sure enough, this narrated (head phone) tour goes along the old river channel- which now looks like a canal and is about 30 feet below the street level- so not quite as acccessible as the Seine in Paris, but I was reassured that Vienna is a river city!

Time to stroll back through the downtown pedestrian street to the concert hall in the Hofburg buildings and up the grand staircase to the ballroom.  It was very decorative with large chandeliers and colorful walls and ceilings.  This was a full orchestra and several opera singers inn beautiful dresses and tuxedos-so it was a very nice setting for our last night in Vienna.  

We rode the trolley one last time past the city lights along Ringstrasse and to our hotel.  We enjoyed our hotel because it was like visiting as the city was 100 years ago-in a time machine.  Here are the stairs around the elevator.

We packed most of our clothes and were ready for an early rise and taxi ride to the Airport, where we had a breakfast before our first flight back to Amsterdam.  This was a little funny, because the flight was an hour and twenty minutes, but we had just spent 12 days cruising from Amsterdam to Vienna.  It was a wonderful and enchanting cruise together and we are very gald we had this chance to see all of the places and the river views along the way.  If you have the time, always choose the river cruise!

                                                                                                            

Our last days on the River Princess and first days in Vienna

Our ship docked at Krebs, about an hour by bus upstream of Vienna, because a lock was still being repaired after the flooding in early June.  It was raining all day, so our cruising along the Wachau Valley of the Danube, which is filled with scenic towns and castles (palaces), was a little dreary.  I tried to take some pictures using the 55mm-200mm telephoto zoom lens I had purchased for the trip.  

After lunch our bus left for the walking tour of Vienna- which was dreary and wet.  One stop at a church near the Habsburg Palace complex was fun because they had an organist give a recital on the large church organ- very impressive full resonating pipes.  So that was our second church organ music experience along the Danube.  Our tour group walked along some of the pedestrian shopping streets with designer jewelry and clothing stores and other high-end businesses, but it was hard to really enjoy the rainy  day, even if we were in Vienna.  

We also visited a house where Mozart and his wife had lived for a few years while he was doing well.  They had most of the museum displays in english-so we could learn a little about their life in Vienna in about 1800.  We then walked from the center of town, near St. Michaels' cathedral, to the Ringstratt to the building where our diner and concert would begin at 6:30.  I was low on sugar so we stopped in at a day cafe (closing at 6 pm) and had a coffee and pastry- desert first.  The dinner was very nice at large round tables of 12, and we met a few new people (on our last night together) and also had some new friends from previous dinners on the ship.  The concert was really fun- an orchestra with wind and string instruments, including a really funny drummer.  The music was Mozart and Beethoven and Strauss.  Some was operetta music, so there were four opera singers; singing in German or Italian so we can only imagine what sweet words of love and affection they might have been exchanging.  Some must have been funny, judging by their expressions and laughter from the international audience.  It was a great introduction to the City of Music- Vienna

So we made it back to our ship at about 11:30 and opened our cabin door to sleep our last night on the river cruise ship... and we were surprised by a candlelight flickering on our bed and ribbons of gause decorating our bed with a bottle of champagne waiting with glasses to celebrate our 39th anniversary.

 What mixed us up for a moment was the date- it was a couple of weeks early.  Judy remembered our travel agent asking if we had any special dates during the cruise; Judy told her the closest was our anniversary on July 13, and our agent must have reported our anniversay to be June 24 our last night. So we enjoyed a double royal treatment on our last night, because they treated us like royal guests every day on Uniworld, both the River Queen the first week and the River Princess the second week.  What fun we had each day on the river cruise part of our travels together.

The next morning we enjoyed our last breakfast buffet and packed our suitcases to load on the shuttle bus back to Vienna.  They dropped us off at a central square where we each found a taxi to take us to our hotels- our's was the Baroness, just a few blocks NW of the Town Hall building on the Ringstratt.  We settled in and planned our afternoon- we wanted to visit a furniture museum of all the Habsburg palace furniture that used to be moved around between the winter and summer and hunting palaces ahead of the family.  There was a whole department of the goverment in charge of storing and movind and repairing the furniture- or ordering new furniture when the palaces were redecorated. The museuam was really interesting- looking like an antique store in some rooms (storage) and some rooms were set up to display what rooms in the palaces had looked like with furniture.

Very beautiful and unusual items filled the rooms; it was one surprise after another.  Some of the chairs lined teh hallway-with a sign to try them out- so we did.

We stopped halfway through to have a Chinese lunch at the museum cafe.  Then we went back upstairs to another floor filled with more furniture displays.  We decided this was the best museum in town-although we had only been to one so far.  We took the bus back to our hotel and took a nap.  Then we were ready for a second museum- of applied arts- that was open late on Tuesday to 9 pm and displayed ceramics, fabric, wooden carvings and more furniture in a 1890s building with beatuful brickwork and tile decorations.  

We took the trolley around the Ringstratt to the NE side of town, and found a coffee house- famous for the locals reading papers and eating and drinking exotic thick coffee drinks and talking or composing music or poetry.  

Because we had less than two hours to see the large musuem we tried our famous "spin tour" where we went through each room and scanned all of the exhibits, stopping to look more closely at items that caught our eye.  We were able to make it through each room, and took many pictures of beautiful things- a room filled with 1900s wallpaper designs was one of the last surprises.  

We rode the trolley back around the Ringstratt at night with all the historical builings with lights and lots of activity-like people leaving the two opera houses, or returning to the fancy hotels.  The coffee houses and cafes looked as busy near midnight as they had been at dinner time. But I doubt that any of the people had seen as much of the treasures of Vienna as we had that day!

Towns Along the Danube River

When we woke up we had passed through the big locks on the Main-Danube Canal- the original schedule had us passing the locks in the afternoon, but our revised schedule passed the big locks after dinner.  I was able to watch the ship pass one of the largest locks with a lift of 100 ft- a ten story building!  It was like being in a big box when they closed the back lock and began filling the lock chamber- up we went and then emerged into the next section of canal through the rolling hills and farmlands of Bavaria.  The big locks take about 30-45 minutes to enter,fill and pass through.  The many locks and dams on the rivers with normal lifts of 30-40 feet take 20-30 minutes, unless there are other ships waiting; often two or more barges and ships can share the lock if it is long enough.  The water in this high canal has to be pumped up from the Danube, and to reduce the lost water for each lock cycle, about half of the water is diverted into storage ponds beside the canal.

We woke in Regensburg on the Danube.  It was Saturday and they were having a music and dance festival with many stages set up throughout the town.  We had a morning walking tour as usual and then had the afternoon free to explore the town.  Judy wanted to take a nap-so I went back to town after lunch to explore and listen to some of the music- interesting harp and accordion duo, a string instrument band and music from a brass band.  I went onto an old steam powered paddle ship that was built in 1922, sank in 1945 from a mine dropped from a RAF plane, and finally was salvaged and restored in the 1980s.  They had some good books on the Danube navigation-but none in english- I'll have to look harder for a Danube River history book when I get home- the river locks are quite large and navigation has been a major enterprise for many years.

This stone bridge in Regensburg is over 1000 years old-nice engineering, similar to the cathedrals.

The brightest inside of a cathedral that we saw anywhere.

This is back a day at Nuremberg. A clock tower on the cathedral-we had lunch near here.

The next morning we woke in a small town about 20 km south of Passau because the docks at Passau had been flooded two weeks earlier. We took a bus shuttle into town for our Sunday morning walk around tour.  The Saint Stephens Cathedral has a great organ- they all seem to be great far as we can tell, with thousands of pipes- and we stayed for Mass at 11 am and heard the 17,734 pipes organ and the choir sang three songs-with one song a cappella.  It was very beautiful and I hope they were praising God in their hearts.  Judy told me that since we didn't speak German we could go.  We did and walked around more of the town.  

Our guide had shown us the high water mark which was about two feet above the last high water-and the highest water since 1504- quite a long recorded flood history. But if you hadn't known that there had been a flood you wouldn't know that it had flooded.  It was all cleaned up and repainted with shops open.  We went down one narrow alley where there were a lot of doors and windows open.  Some had fans blowing in them and others had wafts of wet basement blowing out.  Judy told me it smelled like our basement after it flooded in Knoxville.

   

We found a nice restaurant and sat out on the balcony and had lunch.  The reason we stopped was because it was a Confidorai (? bakery) where we saw marvels of yummies.  So we had a chocolate cake/chocolate mousse/vanilla mousse/cherry glaze confection that tasted pretty good.

Another sunny day in Passau on the Danube (looking across the river)

When we finished we realized there wasn't much time to see anything else so we just walked across a bridge and viewed the town from the other side and took some more pictures.  Then we walked back and looked for our bus.  We were to have a white bus with a Uniworld sign in the front window.  We walked up and down and up and down for 25 minutes and we  could see no bus or any of our other passengers or our cruise manager.  Judy started getting a little panicky.  We could go back at 12:30 or 2.  We decided for the later bus to see more of the town built on a peninsula between two rivers .  But there was no bus.  Judy asked a bus driver if he spoke English and if he was going to the place we needed to go.  Another man who looked like a tour guide spoke to us.  We pulled out our itinerary which showed where we were docked but it had no phone number on it.  Judy was feeling rather lost and scared, but I pulled out our boarding card which we use to check out and check in and it had a phone number for our cruise manager and the boat.  The man tried both numbers and they rang but no one answered.  He hadn't used all of the numbers so he tried them all and we got a hold of our cruise manager, Wouter.  Apparently, he had counted wrong on the way back at 12:30 so he didn't send another bus.  AHHHH!  He told us to get a taxi and they would pick up the tab.  So the nice man went up to a day cruise office and got them to call a taxi which arrived immediately.  He explained our situation to the lady who didn't speak English and of course we don't speak German-or we would've stayed for the church service, right?  So when she understood where we were going there was a bit of groaning going on.  Then she was talking over the phone to her commander who I assume was giving her a lot of directions-accompanied by more groaning.  Meanwhile, Judy was in the back ready to burst into tears even though we had been rescued and were on our way back to the ship and they said they wouldn't leave without us.  We finally made it back to our ship and all was well.  But now the feeling that Judy always had that we might be left behind had been justified, unfortunately for me, because now Judy may feel compelled to say, "Remember Passau?"  So that was our adventure-an exciting day as American tourists in Germany.  I hope your days have been smoother sailing than ours.

A pretty blue colored church along the Passau- approaching Krem.

We docked in Krem today before we go to Vienna.  It's the same idea as Passau only in this case the lock is not operational that goes from the Vienna City Canal to the Danube.  They thought it would be open when we started out in Amsterdam, but it was not able to be repaired yet.  This is inconvenient for many cruise ships which would normally dock at the City- now we all have to take busses back and forth.   It's the first day of pouring rain.  Boo, hoo for pouring in Vienna.  Oh well.   The rain made it harder to enjoy the Wachau valley- a very scenic section of the Danube.  Not as many pictures on the  Danube River because we sailed at night and because of the rain. We are going on a walking city tour, dinner in town and then a concert this evening.  They'll bus us back at midnight.

Towns along the Main-Danube Canal

Warzburg on the Main River has a beautiful residence for the Bishop- built in the same era as Versailles-with many artistic decorations in the rooms- used for grand receptions as well as daily meetings and conferences and living for the prince-bishops family.  It looked all fancy and ginormous and frescoed, and gilded and such, but was one of the few places where pictures are not allowed; no idea why they don't allow them- but I can't show you any.  

We then drove through the beautiful farmland countryside to the town of Rothenberg- a walled medieval city with many decorated buildings with those great metal signs hanging out with symbols and figurines representing the shop or craft.  We will have to get our iron (and gold) working equipment so that we can make cool signs that distinguish our houses.  Noah-you can start with your sign- Brown Abbey- because we all like to gather there.  Once you've got the hang of it you can make our house sign.  The prince-bishops call their large houses "residences"- they often have an old and a new one, so maybe our sign can say Brown Residence-with flags representing the five families. It will be a side business.  You're going to love it!

Some very interesting rooflines.

And great gated archways- the gates are no longer needed to keep the ad guys out-all are now welcome to stay and eat and buy things.  Every street or alley is enchanting.

Then we drove two hours to Bamberg to get on the new ship because that's where it was waiting for us.  Some of the ships still couldn't get up from Vienna but we are supposed to be able to get down.  In the morning we saw Bamberg on a walking tour.  That was pretty good although it was "stinking hot" as somebody we know would say.  So Judy stayed on the ship after lunch and heard a lecture from someone from town and I went back and got all hot and sweaty again to walk along the streets and river, and saw a ceramics museum located in the old town hall that was built on an island to unite the two sides of the town long ago.

 They seem to have trails and parks along the rivers and canals.  I walked just upstream from town and entered a park that goes for a mile- with concessions and fenced off areas for picnicking and swimming.  The American River parkway is a good start- but we should continue to creat more parks for access to our waterways. They have had locks for a long time- here is one along the river (for bypassing rapids) along one of the parkways in Bamberg.

The next morning we awoke on the canal in Nuremberg and had a bit of a drive around tour as well as a walking tour which we enjoyed together- the walls were quite large with a very big moat around the entire town-maybe a half mile across.  The town was an important trade town with some artists and another prince-bishop.  The Nazis selected it as their demonstration town for huge rallies. We saw the Nazi parade ground and got out and looked at it for a few minutes.  We drove by the Nuremberg courthouse where the first war criminals were tried.  We had started the morning with someone coming on board and giving us a lecture on WWII through now.  It had to be cut short because we were leaving for our tour-we need longer days to experience all of these towns and river wonders.  After the tour we walked around town on our own, ate lunch at the Market Plaza, saw towers, walked over quaint bridges, took lots of pictures of half-timbered houses, went to Albrecht Durer's house, and lastly had Starbucks before we took the last bus back to the boat.  We heard another lecture from our Cruise Manager, who we like a lot, about locks and such on the Main-Danube canal.  All of the rivers in Europe have locks and dams- with many river barges moving cargo and lots of river cruise ships these days.  The canal really is an engineering marvel- three of the locks have 100 feet lifts.  

This canal was completed in 1992, but many of the river locks and dams were completed in the 1930s and then in the 1950s through 1970s as part of the after WWII reconstruction.  Do you want to see more of my lock and dam pictures?

Main River Days

One of the fun things about a river cruise is that you wake up in a different place each morning.  So far on the ship, we woke on the first morning in Amsterdam, we woke on the second morning cruising up the Rhine River towards Cologne, where we stopped just after lunch.  On the third morning we woke  at Boppard, in the Rhine gorge and on our walking tour after breakfast, church bells were ringing at a couple of churches, because it was Sunday.  On the fourth morning we woke in Frankfurt and on the fifth morning we woke in Mittenburg, a delightful town with great decorations on the stone and half timbered houses (with shops below). On the sixth morning we woke in Wuzburg, and on the seventh morning we woke in Bamberg (here) on our second ship, the River Princess.  Our week on the river cruise has been busy but enjoyable; eating in the restaurant looking out full length windows into the forsets and fields and town along the Maine River is quite enchanting.  Sailing to Wazburg we had an outdoor concert on the deck; really fun with songs from many European countries.    

Because of the flooding two weeks ago, many cruise ships were stuck for various reasons and our ships, River Duchess could not make it over the locks connecting the Danube with the Main.  While we visited Rathensburg yesterday, our luggage was transferred from the River Queen in Wazburg to the River Princess in Bamberg.  The people coming west had to drive about 6 hours on a bus to get from where they had made it to on the Danube to the River Queen.  We are all thankful that Uniworld was able to rearrange ships and allow our cruise to continue on schedule, with just this one transfer.  Beginning next week all ships are supposed to be back on their schedules and physically back on track. 

Frankfurt was on the Main River, and we sailed upstream through a series of locks that were built in the  1930's when many other river development projects were also beginning (like TVA).  The river is controlled during floods and kept high during the summer with locks and dams.  Each has a hydropower plant (on left) that produced electricity for the electric trains.  Here is the captain of our first ship River Queen, controlling the ship through a lock (out of view on the right) from the side deck.  

 Mittenburg is a very beautiful bavarian looking town, which has been preserved to the present time.  It is still a very popular place to live, with bakery, butcher, shoes, clothes shops along town; our guide says people shop each day, and go to the farmers market for fruits and vegetables, and once a month go to the large grocery store for staples and canned or frozen The shop signs are very creative- hanging way out into the street, with symbols representing their craft (baker, cobbler).  

Many pastel colored buildings and carved or painted half-timbered designs.

Around every corner are new beautiful sights- just like around the bends in the rivers.

Gorgeous Gorge of the Rhine

The Rhine River flows through a gorge (narrow valley) cut through a range of mountains (hills) upstream of Cologne; the valley walls are 250-500 feet high.  The river is faster and more constrained, and there are towns along both banks, alternating from side to side, spaced sometimes just 1-2 miles apart.  A few larger cities with churches town halls and hotels are located where various tributary rivers join the Rhine.  This is the castle corridor of the Rhine.  Most of them are high on the hills or on large rock outcroppings; many are just stone ruins, but several have been maintained or restored, with museums or hotels. Here are a few of the beautiful views.  

There is a lot of traffic moving through the gorge.  There are railroads on both sides, roads on both sides, and a steady stream of barges and boats. For the boat traffic there are several radars located on the points, and the captains are able to view the radar remotely- it works well and we saw no collisions.  

We stopped at two towns along the gorge during the day- and watched from the top deck during the rest of the day.  

The second town was Rudesheim- and we had dinner onshore at a restaurant from 1729- with a music band and a clock that had 16 bells on the outside wall and little people that came out on a carousel movement- we listened to the bells three times, 7 pm to 9 pm, and then sailed overnight to Frankfurt.

We slept past the walking tour time, and went into town and rode a hop on hop off double deck bus- a good way to view the city without walking as much.  It was very warm, over 40 C (104 F).  The city is built on both sides of the River Main with 20 museums along one side, pedestrian bridges crossing, and a parkway along the other side.  The old town has several great buildings, but the city also has the most modern buildings of any other European city.  

The Main River is smaller than the Rhine River, and the water level is controlled- except in the highest floods- by the upstream locks; there are 100 locks on the Main.  We are traveling most of the way up the Main to Bamberg- but that is around another bend.