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While in a rush to shar our last week with you all, we failed to remember that Slice. com attaches music to the slideshow. Hence the annoying sounds of Green Day or some other band we can’t stand. We apologize. Please turn off your speakers!! We do not have time to correct it, today, please enjoy the flurry of posts
With rest and better maps, Vienna is extraordinarily beautiful. We danced with our bicycles around fountains and palaces. We breezed through the streets with grace and smiles.
We like Austria, we do. People are very friendly. In stark contrast to the Czech Republic, we are receiving lots of greetings, smiles and waves. When we set out to plan our trip and our highlighter came across Austria, we were never really interested in spending too much time there, but the highlighter traced a line that lasted for two weeks, in theory, but at our established limit of 70 km a day with or without climbs, the journey through Austira and its large mountains would last something like three weeks. Sorry, Herr Austria, but we are heading for Frau Slovenia, sooner than we had told you.
Amazing bike routes everywhere you turn. People on bicycles everywhere you turn. Incredible sights, sounds, and textures everywhere you turn; and for some fifteen kilometers, turn is pretty much all we could do for we have never felt as lost as we have in Vienna. Riding in the city on a loaded touring bike is one thing, and not so bad. Riding on a loaded touring bike in a city with a street system laid out like a broken bicycle wheel is another. At the beginning of our planning we had said to each other “let’s avoid big cities’ and for Vienna we decided to make an exception, But Vienna is very overwhelming for us at this point. We couldn’t make it to our arranged accommodations in a town just south of this massive city, so we hunted for a hostel. We will try to find Herr Franz’s home in Weiner-Nuedorf and lay low for a day or two to regroup and remix our route a bit.
When Confronted with a friendly kitten in the woods, we had yet another language to decipher. Was this kitten trying to tell us that she wanted to join us on our journey? To ride on top of our panniers in search of new land and fresh milk from goats? To cuddle with us in our tent at night and awake in the morning to breakfast at sunrise? Or was this kitten playing our heart strings like the a panhandler, just in search of or money or at least some food? We still can’t decide and we fought back the tears as we left the kitten near the white washed folly in the forest.
When faced with what sounds like gauntlet of gunfire or maybe the musket gun civil war, you have two options; duck and take cover or pedal faster. We choose the later. The gun fire came from all sides near and far. Someone had told us that the hunting season starts soon, but this couldn’t be from hunters. The hunting season conjured images of thousands of deer or maybe pheasants running about in a field with ten drunk men firing single shots at random intervals, ultimately seemed false. But it was these images that began to help us devise an explanation and comfort our minds; indeed we were not entering a war zone. However, still unconfirmed, we are quite certain that this is the celebratory tradition of announcing the ripening of the grapes and to keep the pesky critters out of the vineyards.
