Schwechat | trudymason.com

Day 40, Friday, October 4, 2019

This is the view from our apartment window. It is a fairly busy street but as long as our windows are closed the apartment is very quiet. Austria has a “vignette’ sticker for travel on their highways. It costs 24 euros, instead of charging tolls on each highway.. So, we went to put it on our car and surprise, we have a parking ticket! No one else parked on the same street has a ticket and it is where our host told us to park! We can’t figure out why we got the ticket. We contact our host and he says we are legally parked. He thinks that maybe whoever issued the tickets doesn’t ‘like’ our Slovakian rental car and gave us a ticket!

We try to go to the Council office to fight the ticket but it closed at noon, and it is already 12:30, so we decide to just pay the ticket and not worry about it. These things can happen on holidays and it isn’t worth getting upset over.

After we sorted all that out, Bob went for a walk to the Danube River and I stayed home and do a bit of my blog and just take it easy.

It is about an hour walk to the Danube river. There is a hydro-electric dam across the Danube. Bob was able to walk onto the dam see some of downtown Vienna in the distance. He also watched a ship go through the locks beside the dam. It took about 20 minutes for the water to fill the lock so the ship could pass upstream.

I have mentioned before that this blog is a great souvenir for us as well as a way to keep in touch with family and friends.

I have a favour to ask. If you enjoyed reading a post could you ‘Like’ it or perhaps post a comment? It is kind of nice to know others are enjoying our blog too. Thanks so much to the people who have taken the time to comment. I really appreciate it.

Day 38, Wednesday, October 2, 2019

We take a Flixbus to Vienna today. We were going to take the train but Bob read reviews and they all said to avoid the trains! Service is terrible, the bathrooms are filthy, the seats you reserve are often not even on the train, and so on.

We have used Flixbus before and they are affordable, clean, comfortable and efficient. We take our very first Uber ride ever to the bus station. Our driver, who was originally from Azerbaijan, had a university education and spoke five languages! Bob had thought we could walk, pulling our suitcases on the cobbled sidewalks…I am so glad we changed our minds on that. We drive by the train station we first arrived at in Prague five weeks ago.The National Museum at the top end of Wenceslas Square. I didn’t recognize it at first from this angle. I drew one of the corner domes at the Urban Sketcher’s Meetup last week.
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 planted here but it was the brightest green!

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!