Saturday morning was spent with our friends Renato and Loulou and their child. Renato and I have been talking about a hike while I was here and I've always wanted to walk up Schöckl. So, Friday night at dinner with Renato brought up the subject, we decided to hike up early on Saturday and then have Sue, Louou and the three kids meet us at the top via a gondola ride.
The hike up went well. It was about a 1500-foot climb. Renato is in great shape and I managed to keep up (all my biking here is paying off). It was great to be with him and chat as we walked up in about an hour. As we made good time getting there and walking up, we had about an hour until our families arrived, so we explored the top and a few side trails. We arrived at the gondola station about 10 seconds (I'm not kidding) before we saw the kids waving to us from the gondola.
The kids played on the Spielplatz (playground) up there, we ate Apfelstrudel mit vanille sauce (apple strudel) and pommes frites (french fries), hiked around to see the views (and some, in my view, huge dairy cows with big bells grazing up top), and ride the carts on track (see last year's post -- great fun and at least the feeling that the carts could come off the tracks if you were not responsible -- this is Austria!).
Sunday was spent in Vienna. We caught the 8:30a train and were in Vienna by 11:00a (which means it was 2.5 hours of me saying, "wow, this is SO beautiful!" -- no kidding -- wow!). The plan was to spend the day at Schönbrunn, the summer palace of the Habsburg's. Sue and I had spend a day there when Grace was 15 months old and we didn't see it with the kids last year when we visited (cold and rainy). We thought we might see the children's museum, go to the mazes and playgrounds and just explore the grounds. We knew that we had friends in Vienna for the weekend, but what we didn't know was that we'd run into them at Schönbrunn! As Robert said, we actually couldn't have coordinated this any better. Our children played together (and led each other around in the mazes) for two hours. It was quite fun. In addition, we rode the "train" around the grounds and had a nice lunch. We caught the 5p train back to Graz and were back in our apartment by 8:20p. A long day, but I think I even heard the kids thank us for such a fun-filled day.
No comments:
Post a Comment