Today we had two stops in Austria. That’s Austria the country near Germany of course. There were tee shirts and hats all over Vienna yesterday that said, NO KANGAROOS in AUSTRIA. They had an outline of a kangaroo with a big slash (for no) across it. Apparently, people get confused.
Anyway, we saw two of the prettiest little towns today along the Danube. One of the things that has struck us, and others on board, is the lack of development along this river. Occasionally we’ll see a house or a small village but that’s it.
Durnstein was our first stop. It’s a lovely medieval town untouched for the most part for centuries. Only 800 people live in the greater Durnstein area. There are a lot of wineries in this valley and our tour today included a wine tasting that everyone seemed to enjoy.
They are also famous for their apricots. There was apricot everything you could think of being sold all over town today. Apricots with alcohol from the German somehow translates to drunken apricot. It was everywhere.
It was just a beautiful place to walk around and enjoy the scenery. At the church they had set up a large 'selfie' mirror so you could take pictures with the building in the background.
We walked along the Danube path for a while. We’ve seen bikers and walkers on these paths for miles and miles. I don’t know for how much of the Danube these walkways exist, but it’s a lot!
Some on board rode bikes from Durnstein to our next stop, Melk. It was about 18 miles along the Danube. We would have loved to have done it but we haven’t ridden bikes in a long long time and we really don’t want to deal with that kind of pain on this trip.
We arrived in Melk a little after 4PM and took a bus up to the Melk Abby. It’s quite a complex that serves only 22 monks nowadays and most of them don’t even live there full time. They have converted some of the Abby to a school for boys and girls.
It was a nice tour with a true religious scholar. It was hard to know if he was kidding or not when he talked about the relics in the church. Like the sliver of wood that was supposedly from the one true cross. It exists at the Abby, but was he a true believer or was he skeptical, I couldn’t tell. In any case he was very informative and it was a beautiful place.
After the tour we walked back to the ship, about a mile or so. We decided to have dinner in town for a change of pace and chose this restaurant that was, we think, part of an old stable. Great food and the waiter was from Bratislava and recognized Fred’s last name as Slovak and had an idea where that family name exists in Slovakia today. That was fun.
On the way back we took a path that looked like it was headed to the river (it was) through the woods. It was very pretty and well used. It took us the Danube bike path and we headed back to the ship.
Tomorrow, we were supposed to do a full day tour to Salzburg but it was going to be a very long day and the city will be packed since this is a long weekend here. Besides, we’ve been there before. Instead, we’ll sleep in and take a tour in Passau Germany in the afternoon.
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