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!
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