We had a really friendly taxi driver taking us to Lesce-Bled station (I was overruled on making the boys walk 7km with their bags at the start of the day!)
She is a scuba diver too, and was telling us about the problems with invasive species from peoples brought-in boats, which are now banned from the lake. She also recommended a schnitzel place!
It was a fairly easy travel day, with the potential to become really hard. If we’d missed the first train, there was only one other to get, a couple of hours later. In either case, we had a six-minute change to make, and if we missed that for the first train it would have been a two-hour wait, or for the second, it would have meant figuring out loads of extra trains.
We got an email in the morning telling us that the arrival platform for our incoming train at Villach, had changed to platform 8 (all this is obviously a bit mind blowing compared to UK trains… you mean you know the platform more than 5 minutes before the train leaves?!)
That sounded like a good thing because our connection was going from platform 7, so we’d just have to walk across, right? Worst case, crossing one track.
Nope. Not on the other side of the same platform, so down to the subway we go (with a bunch of other slightly panicked interraillers.)
There’s no platform number on the next set of stairs, or the one after that… we looked up them and couldn’t really figure out where they led.
Eventually we did find it, the third stair away from our platform, and the train pulling away from it wasn’t ours, so all was well 😅
We had a good four and a half hours on the comfortable, scenic Austrian regional train taking us out of the Alps. I’m glad we started our Alpine trains with the Bernina Express though, you do start to get a bit used to the surroundings and less appreciative! The train was a bit wobbly in places too, so we were wary of sickness, but the boys were fine.
Vienna HBF is amazing. It’s a very new station which totally modernised train travel through Vienna. I’ll get some pictures tomorrow when we leave, but it was really spacious, well designed, and good to navigate.
We did the usual, and found ourselves a picnic from Aldi Hofer, and ate it in the park. Angus wisely chose a giant salad, the rest of us had cheesy ham pastry rolls and salami!
By now it was pretty much check in time, so we opted for a 48h pass for the public transport (nicely integrated, €14.10 each for adults and children free because it’s Vienna school holidays) and hopped on a u-bahn to our hostel out in the west of town.
When I was looking up directions, I noticed that the Tripadvisor reviews were all… horrendous… so started to get a bit worried, but our private room is actually really nice. Just off a courtyard, two rooms and a bathroom, cool and airy. At €62 a night it’s easily our cheapest accommodation of the trip and we’ve had no problems so far. Obviously the kitchen’s a bit of a mess, but hey, it’s a city-centre hostel…
Haus der Muzik
We came without any kind of agenda… Vienna is a convenient place to stop, and feels unknown and interesting. This meant we had no idea what to do on our first night.
Half an hour of idly browsing the Maps app came up with a few things, but when we saw that Haus Der Muzik is open until 22:00, we though we could make the €33 family ticket worthwhile in that time, so went for it. It was a lot more fun than you’d expect a Viennese music museum about the Philharmonic to be, especially for kids!
Giant instruments (the stair piano and drum were a hit.) Physics of sound waves demonstrated in a tube, and lots of headphones to put on, it was very hands-on.
But even writing “Angus smells” and having it translated to Mozart’s music (using the rules of a musical game he made up, apparently) was beaten by the CLONGs!
You could make your own using a VR interface, which was pretty fun, and we made loads!
The final excitement was conducting (and being creatively berated by) the Vienna Philharmonic.
We definitely needed some food after that. Only one thing for it: Schnitzel, and me humming/quoting obscure Tenacious D bits under my breath all the way there. At least until I got too hangry because the place we went to was closed for renovations…
We’d gone a bit out of town to save money because the recommendation of the taxi driver did look great, but would have easily ended up over €100 for all of us, and a month long trip doesn’t allow for many of those!
We did eventually find a great spot though: Anna’s Schnitzel Stube
Eating outside was nice: it’s a bit cooler here, and there’s life in the streets but it’s chilled and calm, not at all like Paris and less stressful than Rome too (which wasn’t bad at all.)
We’ve got two full days here now, and will play it all fairly by ear I think. We’ll start today off with a self-guided walking tour that Jennie’s found…
I’m sure there won’t be any whinging about that…. (Jennie just told the boys, and Angus’ reaction came through loud and clear: “Not doing it!”)
Yeah you are, little buddy!
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