Brown Danube

On our last full day in Austria, we took a boat trip down the Danube to a town called Melk, known for its impressive monastery. The cruise goes through an area of Austria known as the Wachau. (The picture here is of a town called Durnstein. Durnstein's claim to fame is that Richard the Lionhearted was imprisoned here, in the castle at the top of the hill.)

We had a short time in a town called Krems before the boat departed. Mike and Walt went into a coffee shop to see if they could get a cup of coffee to go. "To go" is verboten: the shop owner informed them that, "This is Austria. We drink our coffee in the shop, not in the street."

The leisurely trip down the river on the Prinz Eugene took about three hours. (Just like Gilligan's Island -- it's a three hour tour!) Most of the scenery was green hills or vineyards, with a few ancient towns and ruins along the way. Among their claims to fame: one town was the site where a 20,000 year old fertility figure was found, and another had the ruins of a castle where a clan of robbers would give their victims the choice of starving or leaping from a cliff to their death in the rose garden below.

The weather was great -- a bit cold when the wind blew, but sunny and gorgeous. (Thanks, global warming! According to the news, the temperatures were at record highs for this time of year throughout Europe. I suppose that compensates a bit for the fact that the dollar was at a record low against the Euro while we were there.)

Melk was a beautiful little town, dominated by the Abbey atop the hill. We could have spent the whole afternoon there, wandering around the shops or drinking beer or having ice cream at the little cafes. Georgia and I did the tour of the Abbey. Only a few rooms were open to the public. The early rooms were a bizarrely postmodern exhibit about monastery life (for example, showing a stylized ladder in a glass box to illustrate the attempt of man to reach heaven) mixed with some of the church artifacts. The artifacts come from a period in Catholic history when having a bit of a dead saint was very important, so they have a chalice containing (supposedly) a shard of bone from John the Baptist, and the jawbone of some other saint, and so on. It's a bit macabre.

The final rooms on the tour were incredibly ornate. There was a marble room, an enormous library, and an unbelievably gigantic and elaborate church (and I say this after a week of seeing one after another large and ornate church).

We had to catch the train back a bit earlier than we would have liked: we had tickets for a Strauss and Mozart concert back in Vienna, a lovely way to finish off the trip.