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Published: October 20th 2008
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Sat 11th October
Werfen - Vienna
It was a 4-5 hours drive into Vienna and therefore we arrived in the afternoon and had intentions of visiting a huge market that was on everyday but extra special on Saturdays!! So after a bit of driving around to find a suitable and safe car par for the motorhome, we parked it and headed into the town. (We did see some parking but it cost $10 an hour and we intended to stay and see Vienna by night! There was no max fee and therefore we weren’t going to pay for approx 8-9 hours of parking.)
So we parked slightly further out and decided to walk. What was a bit of walking? We’d only walked heaps the day before and god knows we were eager for more!!
When we approached people for help with the directions, they shook their heads and said catch the metro it’s too far! Did we believe them? Noooooooo!! On the map, it only looked like a nice walk, but some of us didn’t pay attention to the scale!! It was bloody miles away!
But the market was worth it! It was like a big
Victoria Market mixed up with a Trash and Treasure and a load of trendy cafes and restaurants thrown in.
We very quickly separated into groups but with a firm meeting spot at a designated time. I was terrified of Kurt losing Joshua b/c Kurt’s so calm and complacent about walking with Joshua. As long as Joshua is in the near vicinity…Kurt’s happy!! But I was frantically having vision of us running around looking for Joshua because some suspicious looking man had kidnapped him while Kurt happily shopped 2 metres away!!!
Katelyn, my Mum and I all fell in love with different scarves and bought them, happy to wear them straight away.
We walked through the market and as far as a fresh produce area but weren’t interesting in looking at fruit/vegi or cheese/small goods.
The guys took us past the small goods/fruit area and showed us another area about
30 metres wide by 60 metres long of cafes and restaurants. It was full of food!!! Delicious, mouth watering smells came to us and suddenly we remembered we hadn’t eaten lunch!!
So we ate a fat, juicy souvlaki for dinner with some Turkish bread and dip
and headed to the city centre of Vienna. If there’s every a city to see by night, then Vienna is it!! It was the first city we’d actually seen at night and after Vienna we made huge efforts to see all major cities in the evening! The buildings were so beautiful and even more so when lit up and there were so many tourists walking around.
The only disappointing thing about Vienna was the slight fog that hung around in the evening and the stench of the horse in the city square.
We decided to catch a train home and Kurt did sterling job working out that we had to changes 2 trains to get home. We were parked on a small quiet street that separated the Botanical Gardens and a University and it was an enormous block. So Kurt figured out the best train stop, to minimise the amount of walking back to the car. Did I say minimise?? I meant maximise!! We entered up walking around this gargantuan block and it took forever!!! I swear to God it felt like an episode of the Twilight Zone where we knew the motor home had to be around
the corner, but we couldn’t find the bloody corner! When Kurt was plotting our way home that corner of the block was outside of the map, so he assumed the block was rectangular and one side met up with the other. Big Mistake!!!We still couldn’t figure it out later but it felt like we’d walked for days. I didn’t complain b/c I was so damn grateful I hadn’t wore my boots!!! The thought had been there and I decided against it!! Thank god!
Kurt has wore a pedometer and we have averaged at least 10,000 steps every day. Some days we average about 14,000 steps but on this particular day we walked 33,000 steps!!!!! God knows how much the poor kids walked!!
Eventually we made it home and since it was so late, we decided to spend the night where we were. The road was quite and we didn’t think anyone would have a problem.
We had the worst night sleep of our entire trip on that road. Although it was small, in the night it felt like every semi trailer in Austria raced past us. Every single time a truck or car sped past the whole
motor home shook, so we spent most of the night being violently shaken to near death!!! At one point in the night, my Dad jack-knifed out of bed thinking our side mirror had been hit. We woke up very grumpy!!!
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