Danube Bike Trip — Day 6 — to Vienna

Traismaur to Vienna

Today, the last of my Danube tour, was a bit anticlimactic after yesterday's high. The weather continued fine but the closer to Vienna I got the more crowded became the Donauradweg. Austrians love bicycling and it was a lovely, warm weekend so riders were out in large numbers. But the first part of the day was mellow and uncrowded. The valley of the Danube widens just beyond Tulln and the forested hills I've been meandering through and enjoying are no longer in evidence, having given way to the wide flat plain on which Vienna is situated.

Looking upriver to the Altenworth Power Project (N48.369754, E15.871360)

Trailside shrine

A rest hut alongside the path, not yet open in April

I came to the charming town of Tulln an der Donau and decided to stop for a coffee break. Tulln is a typical Austrian town of neatly painted houses, well appointed shops, with sidewalk cafes sprinkled here and there. I spotted a small Italian restaurant advertising espresso, plunked myself down at a sunny table on the wide sidewalk and ordered a dopio. Delicious! I ordered another. For the picnic lunch I planned to eat later, I bought a basket of strawberries from a fruit vendor just across the way. I was worried they'd be like the woody, bland berries I buy from the supermarket in Alaska but they were very good, sweet and red all the way through.

An hour or so after this stop I could begin to see the outskirts of Vienna and the end of my bike trip. The Park Inn was my final destination on the Eurobike planned portion of the trip.

I crossed to the north side of the river on this bicycles-only bridge
The Nordbrucke (North Bridge) for vehicular traffic is at left
(N48.253762, E16.378283)

My room at the Park Inn, Vienna

I briefly mentioned Helga, my Viennese Couchsurfing host, earlier. I had planned to spend a few days in Vienna seeing the sights. I also figured I would just wing it on hotels and was prepared to stay a few extra nights at the Park Inn or some other hotel. I had not been keeping up with my favorite Couchsurfing group once my travels became centered in Thailand, where hotels are cheap and where I have a lovely Thai companion, Nut, who speaks the language and travels with me. But a couple of months ago Jana, a Couchsurfing hostess I stayed with in Berlin in 2009 and with whom I am now in frequent contact because we became friends during my stay, knew about my plans to visit Vienna. She contacted her good Vienna friend Helga and suggested she offer to host me. Helga promptly did that and extended, via Couchsurfing.org, an invitation to stay at her place. Helga was to be my hostess and proved to be an expert guide to Vienna's historical and touristic places.

So it goes when traveling. Things happen that just cannot be planned for and sometimes those things turn out to be special in some way. My visit to Berlin was made special by Jana's expert advice, fabulous cooking, and warm friendship. My visit to Vienna was to be a similar experience, enriched almost by accident through Jana's referral to Helga. 



Stats: Arrived Park Inn Hotel at 3:05 pm after pedaling 68.8 km (42.7 miles), in 4 hours, 2 minutes, total time 5:48 door to door.

Total distance pedaled for the entire ride: 349 km (235 miles)

Elevation loss: 360 meter elevation at Passau, 157 meters at Vienna equals a 204 meter (670 feet) drop.

GPX files for the trip

Click on the file link and select Download from beneath the cleverly hidden "More" menu (those three blue dots), at the top right of the resulting page, browse to a folder or your desktop where you want to place the file and click on the Save button. You can open them with Google Earth or any other application that can display GPX files.

GPX File of Eurobike hotels on this 6-day trip
Note: In Grein there is a shuttle bus to take bikers to hotels that are not in the town. The bus stop is in town and near the river. This waypoint is also included.

GPX traces for the entire trip
These are unedited for the most part and thus contain side trips of visits to restaurants, shortcuts, etc., as described in the blog posts.

Factoids: Vienna is properly spelled Wien and pronounced veen by inhabitants. Foods cooked in the Vienna style employ the word Wiener to describe it, sort of like we use the word Tuscan or even Italian when describing the food of those regions. When we were growing up our mom used to grill "wieners" at picnics and serve them to us on buns. This is the food most of us know as hot dogs or frankfurters. My mother comes from German speaking stock but I never knew her favorite term for hot dog had been derived from the name of this large Austrian city.

The popular dish made from thin-sliced veal, which is called schnitzel, prepared Vienna-style by breading and sauteing becomes the well known Wiener Schnitzel. 

---

Audio equipment: iPhone 5, PanApp music player, Mighty-H Bluetooth headphones
Today's Playlist:
George Harrison: All things must pass
Liz Phair: Whitechocolatespaceegg
The National: High Violet
Phish: Billy breathes
Beethoven: Klaviersonaten Op.2 No. 1,2,3, Alfred Brendel
wind noise
birdsong

Navigation Equipment: Garmin Montana 600 GPS, OpenStreetMap of Austria, bicycling version 

---

<< Danube Bike Trip (previous)

Danube Bike Trip (next) >>

---

Danube Bike Trip — Day 5

Melk to Traismaur


Today started with another fantastic breakfast served at the Hotel zur Post in Melk. Seen from the street the hotel is not all that impressive — most of its considerable charm is hidden out of sight at the rear.

My single room was small but well appointed with comfortable bed and desk and a very fast Internet connection. Dinner was excellent and the brekkie was top notch: espresso with steamed milk, homemade plum and apricot compotes, eggs, bacon and plenty of pastries, flawless service.

Breakfast — round 1 Breakfast — round 2

After playing some mean tricks over the past few days the weather this morning was very fine with blue skies and no clouds in sight. This day was to be the best of the trip although I didn't know it then. The air was warm enough by 10 o'clock that I could take off my polar fleece shirt I had worn under my yellow windbreaker for the entire trip. I finally ditched the light gloves I'd been wearing as well.

A very sweet ride

The Schloss Schönbühel guards the bank of the river

Lettering Schloss Schönbühel, the fortress in the first shot above crowds the riverbank and forces  the Donauradweg to go around behind it and up a hill, the longest uphill I encountered on the entire trip. At the top was a wooden bench and picnic table and next to them a very old 5 km. milestone. I consider a milestone a find worthy of inclusion on the OSM map so I spent some time photographing the very faint lettering on it in an effort to capture what I assumed was a town name beneath the carved 5 km distance inscription. That evening in the hotel I looked for a town named Kyselak on OSM and Google Maps but drew a blank. I gave up the search until later in Vienna when I happened to ask Helga, my knowledgeable Couchsurfing hostess, if she knew of a town named Kyselak. She did not but had a hunch about the name that a short Google search quickly resolved. Josef Kyselak is considered by many to be the world's first graffiti artist. (Wikipedia: Josef Kyselak (1799 — 1831) was an Austrian mountaineer and travel writer. He became famous for his habit to "tag" his name onto prominent places during his hikes across the Austrian Empire.) I had unwittingly blundered onto one of Kyselak's tagged objects. Enhanced

The Donauradweg wanders through some very photogenic vineyard country between Melk and Traismaur. The day was so beautiful I stopped every few kilometers to sit by the roadside enjoying the birds and flowers. It was awesome day and the high point of the bike tour in terms of both the scenery and the weather.

View of Spitz, Austria

I jumped on a ferry to cross to the north side of the Donau and the little town of Spitz where I had some delicious espresso brewed with a brand new Cimbali machine that the owner told me "cost as much as a small car". Aside from the excellent brewed coffee I'd had at the hotels where I stayed the coffee situation is not that good in the Austrian hinterlands. Many food shops and bakeries serve lattes but they're generally weak and bland, more milk than coffee — they reminded me of the "flat white" lattes I drank in rural New Zealand a few years ago — so this place was a welcome stop. I inhaled two dopios and moved on after complimenting the owners profusely.

Just before reaching Spitz I passed through a small conservation area where these little signs appeared to alert passersby to the possibility of seeing biber (beaver), birds and other wild creatures. After passing this one I went on high alert and kept my eyes open for snakes!!

New Cimbali espresso machine — Donauprinzess Cafe — Spitz

Danube River flood heights, Spitz on the Danube, Austria

I assumed the Danube would have all sorts of controls in place to prevent floods but that's not the case. The river does flood occasionally and causes a great deal of damage when it does. Passau had a similar display which showed the flood of June 2013 as the second highest in history. That one doesn't appear on this sign — maybe this far down the river and behind the several big power projects I had passed earlier, Spitz experiences slightly different flood surges. (Note: Helga later informed me that after the 2002 flooding the towns of Wachau installed flood controls which were completed in 2010. Apparently they worked. See her note in the comments for more. The link she includes is in German but Google Translate can handle the translation.)

Wehrkirche St. Michael — Spitz, Austria

A stop along the L7093 —  a very rural highway — Danube in background

View of a winery from the L7093

Wachau, Austria

Riding in sunshine and lilacs

I took some lunch beside this old wall

It had been a fantastic ride and the sort of day I didn't want to end. My butt, unaccustomed as it was to a bicycle seat, was sore and I was anxious to get off the bike but still, I felt a slight let down as I pulled into the little town of Traismaur for my last night on the Donauradweg. I arrived at 4:00 pm, having pedaled 55 km in 3 hours and 50 minutes, (6 hours 20 minutes total door to door).

---

Factoids:
Thailand has its squat toilets and Austria has what I'll call "turd shelf" toilets. Neither is much to my liking. These Austrian toilets don't have a pool of water to catch your droppings. Instead there is a small reservoir of water in front of the bowl and a dry shelf, I don't know what else to call it, poopdeck maybe?, immediately under your butt. You do your business and there it all sits until you flush, at which point it all, hopefully, disappears. Why a toilet would be built this way is a mystery to me. This is not stuff you'll see in the travel magazines. You saw it here first.

---

Audio equipment: iPhone 5, PanApp music player Mighty-H Bluetooth headphones
Today's Playlist:
Mozart Piano Trio K. 542
Mozart Piano Trio K. 502
Mozart Piano Trio K. 564
Mozart Piano Trio K. 548
Mozart Piano Trio K. 254
Mozart Piano Trio K. 496  — Beaux Arts Trio (all)
Golden Palominos: This is how it feels
Jackson Browne: Late for the sky
Moby: 18
birdsong
bee sounds

---

<< Danube Bike Trip (previous)

Danube Bike Trip (next) >>

---

Danube Bike Trip — Day 4

Grein to Melk

It rained during the night. I noticed that as soon as I got up. I opened the window to check the temperature and it felt cold, very cold. In fact, a few drops of rain were still falling. Breakfast at the Hotel Aumühle was okay, nothing like the huge feast in Linz. I had stopped at a Hofer supermarket just before entering Grein yesterday and bought some food that I ate in my room last night: herring in sour cream, cheese filled chilis in olive oil, yogurt and bread. After the 30 € Wiener Schnitzel extravagance the other night at the Arcotel it was time to save a bit of money on dinner. The store stuff was surprisingly tasty and now that I've had the hotel's breakfast I reckon I made a good decision. I also bought a Yesss SIM card (5 €) so I can be in contact with Helga, my Couchsurfing host in Vienna.

A chilly damp morning

Pretty rocks alongside the Donauradweg

St. Nikola

I started the ride today wearing a polypro pullover cap instead of the baseball hat I got from Eurobike. The weather this morning was so chilly I figured the extra warmth would be welcome, and it was; most of the day was cold and overcast. Once again, the dark clouds had a silver lining because of the nice tailwind accompanying them. Some photos of the journey along the Donauradweg follow:

A section of the bike path travels this highway

Bicycle access ramp to a bridge

Just after this photo was taken I got caught by the rain at last. I jacketed up and had to wait only a short while until the sun came out. (Willy Nelson was singing Blue Skies at the time, no kidding!). But then as I was pulling in to Melk, some hail started. I was only minutes away from the Hotel zur Post so I hustled right on over there and parked the bike for the night.

Sun!

Blue skies — for a while

Is that the last of the rain? Not quite.

When I parked the bike in the Hotel zur Post garage I had logged 56.2 km (35 miles) in 3 hr 16 min of pedaling,  4 hr 15 min total. Maximum speed I reached was 57 km/hr (35 mph) going down the hill to town from the Hotel Aumühle. I might have gone faster but I got stuck behind a big truck and couldn't get around it. There was a fairly steady tail wind for much of the afternoon. It's always good to travel this cycleway from west to east.

---

The Bike:
Eurobike supplied this bicycle for the trip. It was very well made and maintained, a bit heavier and sturdier than most touring bikes seen in the U.S., and perfect for the sort of riding I'm undertaking. The waterproof handlebar bag and single pannier reminded me of the high quality Ortleib panniers I own. Both are easily clipped onto and off the bike so they can be taken along when leaving the bike unattended.

It had Shimano SIS indexed shifters for both front and rear derailleurs, and Shimano cantilever brakes. It also had a headlight and tail light powered by a generator that I never had occasion to use. Everything worked well — the bike rode quietly and was quite solid and comfortable. I give Eurobike good marks on their choice of equipment. Electric assist bikes are available for slightly more money.

---

Audio gear: iPhone 5, PanApp player, Mighty H Bluetooth Headphones
Today's Playlist:
St. Vincent: St. Vincent
U2: Joshua Tree
Wilco: Sky Blue Sky
Wilco: Wilco [The Album]
Willy Nelson: Stardust

---

Factoids:

• Want to use a shopping cart at Hofer? It will cost you 1 € to rent one.
• Want to smoke in a restaurant? Some Austrian cafes and restaurants still allow this. There are many smokers in Austria.

<< Danube Bike Trip (previous)

Danube Bike Trip (next) >>