When you're embarking on 580 km to your destination in a bus, I guess you'd think the weather wouldn't matter much. However, this part of our journey involved some of the most beautiful scenery of any of our days of travel on this tour, so it was a shame that we had rain for most of the day. Passing from Budapest to well into Austria, it was pretty much flat farmland and reading a book helped to while away the first few hours. We then entered Austria's Wachau Valley, picture-postcard villages and vineyards along a lovely stretch of the Danube, edged along one side by mountains. Even in the rain, in this area you could see why the Danube is referred to as "blue". At lunchtime, we stopped at Melk Abbey, a Benedictine abbey listed as
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