Day 80, Thursday, November 16, 2023
Today we drove to Pairs, in the rain! This will be our last stop before we fly home. It is a two and a half hour drive and we both just want to get to our next airbnb and get settled. Sightseeing in the rain isn’t much fun.
There is no way I would want to be navigating using a paper map. The roads can be very complex…like this interchange below.
We pass through several tunnels with lots of traffic. Bob does an excellent job following my navigational instructions, but I think we will both be quite happy to return our car tomorrow and use the metro to get around Paris. 
These two buildings, or maybe it is just one, looked so wonky. Not sure why anyone wants a build a high rise that looks like it is falling over? It is still pouring rain. but we are almost to our destination.
On our way to our bnb we passed a church with four angels high on its steeple.
I wasn’t able to find out the name of the church, but really liked the angels.
This lovely house with its beautiful fall colours was just down the street from our bnb. 
We parked on the street close to our apartment to unload but needed to move the car for the night. As Bob pulled into the parking spot the car made a strange noise. Upon investigation we realized that a rough curb had caught the side of the tire, tearing it and scraping the hubcap. We return the car tomorrow morning…we almost made it the whole three months without any car issues….this little incident problem ended up costing us $500!
Our twelfth and last Airbnb on this trip. It was difficult finding a place when we were booking last Spring. Our apartment is very small, probably the smallest that we have had on this trip. In the photos it actually looks a bit bigger than it is in person! Not ideal for the end of our trip but it will do.
I wanted a photo of this pretty bush covered with orange berries, and Bob hams it up by giving himself an orange moustache.
I loved this carved lizard, which is the symbol of Montrésor.
I notice that the leaves are staring to turn colour…winter is coming!
with not a lot of room…
but we are soon on some wider roads…
and crossing the Danube as we start a four hour drive to Verazdin, Croatia. 
The Hungarian countryside is much like back home in Alberta.
At the border they checkout our passports and the car registration, then let us pass.
We arrive at 
Here is another view across the street from our apartment . There is a small grocery store on the corner, but not much else close by.
I liked this one of the young man with the bandaged nose.
Our drive to Vienna was long and uneventful. We stayed on the freeway and it still took us about 5 1/2 hours. We had to wait about an hour for our Airbnb host to meet us, but we found a parking space just outside the apartment and our car was warm, so it wasn’t too bad. It took forever to figure out how to pay for street parking but we finally sorted it out. We take our rental car back tomorrow so we just need parking for one night.
On the way to say goodbye to my friends the sheep I snapped a few more photos of the farm buildings. There were certainly lots of interesting things to see here.
Only the young fellow destined for the table came up to see me today. The other two were playing shy.
This shows how long the front of the house is. The attic full of stuff ran almost the whole length of it. On the far end was the smaller attic above the two bedrooms in the auntie’s house.
Part of the route to St. Florian Monastery, which is our next stop, is a very narrow road through some woods.
The monastery is very large. The stretch of red roof from the church to the front corner is 200 metres long. It covers a corridor that runs its length.
This is the fountain in the middle of the large courtyard.
I am so excited…we actually get to go into a library. This library has 150,000 books, 35,000 of which are in this one room. They are mainly books on Religion and History.
You can see the bookcase door that opens to another room. The spiral staircase to the second floor is in that room. There are many more rooms full of books but we only get to visit this one. We are told that this library is available for the public to use. Wish I lived closer!
I love the library ‘ladders’ used ot reach books on high shelves. Heck, I pretty much love everything about this library!
Later on during the tour we see this photo of Adolph Hiltler standing in the same place we had just stood. It is a strange thought…that we were someplace that he was.
Of course this library also has a magnificent ceiling.
This is why I end up with a sore neck after sightseeing!
Our guide pointed out some of the many fossils that are in the marble on the floors and walls. I never thought of marble as being a stone the came from ancient oceans. The big ammonite was on the fireplace hearth, notice the toe of a shoe in the corner for scale.
One of the many very ornate carved wooden doors in the monastery.
The Monastery church is grand. Lots of carved white stone and dark carved woodwork.
The altar is decorated with bouquets of sunflowers.
We have never seen drapery carved in stone in a church before. Everything in this church looks so very well preserved, there are no broken or dirty bits. In fact everywhere in this monastery is very well taken care of. We wonder where the money to maintain a place this large comes from. 
The church organ was built in 1774 and it is one of the largest working organs in Austria. It is known as the Bruckner Organ as it was played by composer and organist Anton Bruckner. He had been a choir boy at the monastery, and he was the church organist, between 1848 and 1855.
I do not know much about classical music so did not know anything about Anton Bruckner. He was a famous Austrian composer, organist, and music theorist best known for his symphonies and masses. On the floor directly below the organ is a memorial plaque and …
in the crypt directly below this plaque is his sarcophagus. His wish was to be buried here at St. Florian Monastery even though he lived and died in Vienna.
Yes, those are bones behind the sarcophagus, the bones of over 6,000 people, dating back to the 4th century. It is thought that the bones of St. Florian could possibly be in here. 
A few more pictures of the 700 year old crypt which is still used today as a burial place for the monastery monks. The windows open to outside, there is no glass. I wonder if this was so decomposing bodies were ventilated?
We visit twelve guest rooms in the monastery. These rooms have not been used since the mid 18th century and have been preserved as a museum. These elaborately decorated rooms were reserved for royalty who might visit the monastery. These doorways connect all the rooms.
The red bedroom was reserved for Pope Pius VI, although he only spent one night here.
The walls and chairs in this room are covered in matching tapestries. There is a big masonry stove in each of these rooms.
Each room is lavishly decorated. 
The last two rooms are a shrine to Anton Bruckner. The photo shows him in his bed in his Vienna apartment. He died in this bed, which is now on display here along with his other furniture.
Remember those big masonry stoves in the royal apartments? These metal doors in the hallway open to the inside of the stoves. This is how the fires in the stoves were cared for by servants without bothering the apartment occupants.
There are thirty monks at this monastery. Only thirteen live here full time, the rest live in neighbouring parishes. Over the last 950 years the monastery had 108 monks at its peak and only three at its lowest. I am told that thirty monks is quite good ‘these days’. There is one young monk, several in their fifties and sixties and the rest are older. We see this monk as we are leaving and assume he is the one young one.
The cemetery beside the church is the prettiest, most well cared for one we have ever visited.
As we drive towards Salzburg we pass several huge piles of sugar beets in the fields. Austria grows more than 3 million tonnes of sugar beets every year.
Finally we find a safe place to pull off the road so I can get a photo of one of the fields of pumpkins we have seen along the way.
We make a quick stop at Kremsmunster Monastery but it can only be visited by guided tours and we don’t have time. The church is open and it is the only one we have seen that has tapestries wrapped around its pillars.
Back on the road, from a distance, I thought this was another field of pumpkins or maybe squash, but they are sunflowers.
Good thing the sun wasn’t shining or I would have wanted to stay much longer and take many more photos. What a beautiful sight it was to see so many gorgeous sunflowers.
Not sure if I have a photo of the trams we used here in Prague so I snapped this one from the bus window. They run every few minutes and are a fantastic way to get around the city.
Soon we are in the countryside. It always surprises me how quickly cities transition into rural areas in Europe. You are in the city and then suddenly you are not.
The views here are quite similar to the countryside around home in Canada. There are those big round hay bales, and…
then something we do not see at home. We see several huge haystacks of loose hay piled high. They must have a machine that throws the hay up onto this haystack?
No idea what was 
This big double decker bus drives through small villages on narrow roads. I like being up high as I can see over fences into the yards of the houses we pass and sometimes into windows. I am always curious and love these little glimpses into people’s lives.
I also do some sketching today, standing outside waiting for our bus and then later on the bus.
I forgot to post this page from yesterday so here it is today. Most of the museums charge a fee to take photos. That is what the big yellow sticker is about.
We pass several fields of pumpkins, all lined up ready for harvest. Halloween is coming!
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