Praha-Wien

A non-eventful 4h 4’ train journey south-east across Czechia to Brno and then southwards into Austria saw us delivered into the Austrian capital city at mid-afternoon on Friday. Vienna’s U-Bahn is fairly intuitive, and made getting to our Hotel on Grieshofgasse in the 12th District (Meidling) fairly straight forward.

The presence of a local INTERSPAR made our selection of supper even easier. I bought a bottle of Thomy’s Krauter Dressing for my salad, observing they had frozen parmi filed under ‘Pommes’… I would think that should be filed under ‘Aussie’. When the INTERSPAR reopens on Monday (it’s shut all day on Sunday) I’m hoping to pick up a tube of piquant knoblauchpaste.

On Saturday, we commuted by U-Bahn – U4 to Schwedenplatz and U1 to Alte Donau – to run Vienna’s park run, which turned out to be three laps of a section of Donnaupark. Around 100 people turned up, around half park run tourists and many from the UK.

A 4 km walk back across many variants of the Danube got us to Velopold Vienna where were able to hire a couple of town bikes for 48 hours. So far so good. The bike infrastructure here is quite extraordinary (compared to Australia anyway), and while it takes a bit of getting accustomed to various switches while navigating a city for the first time, it is well-connected and ultimately highly functional. So getting from Velopold Vienna to Orangerie Hotle was taxing and fraught with error. But we followed that up with a 30+ km round trip through the city and onto the excellent Eurovelo 6 to Klosterneuburg.

Day was rounded off quite excellently with a delicious bowl of chilli con carne ‘mit brot’ and some suitable libation at the Café Rondo. Home and out like a light.