Day 39, Thursday, October 3, 2019

Our new bnb is in Schwechet, which is a suburb of Vienna. Today we are going to Bratislava, which is in Slovakia, to pick up our car rental.  Doing this saves us over 400 euros, renting the exact same car from the same company.  This is certainly worth a few hours of our time. The train we take to the Vienna airport from Schwechet isn’t very busy. We pass refineries that stretch for more than a kilometre. We find our Flixbus at the airport easily and it is just on hour ride to the airport. After stopping in the town centre of Bratislava we are the only ones left on the bus. We asked the driver to make sure we were on the right bus…it seemed strange that no one else was going to the airport. Our first view of the Danube River. When we get to the airport there were maybe a dozen other people there! The place feels almost abandoned, but we do find an English Time magazine with Justin Trudeau on the cover, so we can catch up on the news. We discover why there are so few people here.  There is only one flight every hour or so departing from here. We pick up our car rental, a nice blue Škoda Octavia, and we take a side road back to Austria.  We see several hilltop castles but no time to stop and explore today. This route takes us through many small towns.  We were hoping to see the Danube as we are driving right along side it, but there just isn’t any place we can find to get down to the riverside. Guess that will have to wait for another day. The road narrows to one lane to go through this town gate.  We stop for groceries on the way home and  find a place to park our car on a side street near our apartment.