Unfortunately when we boarded the train, we noted that all of the seats had reservation signs next to them. Huh? So where are we supposed to sit? We walked up and down the aisle until finding two rows without reservation signs. They were likely supposed to be reserved, but without an actual sign on the row, we were quick to sit down.
At the next stop, hordes of young students boarded the train with their abundant and huge suitcases. They were off on an adventure and were rather rambunctious about the opportunity. Their teachers were good herders but were not thrilled with the fact that we were sitting in “their” seats. At the next few stops, they moved their suitcases to another section.
Chris wanted to ride bikes from Melk to Krems. He downloaded the app and then tried to get a code from a bike rental company. The code needed to access the app was never sent to Chris’ phone so in order to rent the bikes, we started first at the tourism office to try to get help. Since there was an English-speaking tour starting at the abbey in 7 minutes, we told the tourism office we would come back later to finish up registering to use the bike app. And then we took off on an uphill hike that might have taken 30 minutes for the average family. At Kline-speed we reached the abbey in about 7 minutes. The tour with Florian had already begun, but we were able to join.
We toured the royal wing of the abbey, the great hall where lavish dinners were held, the library which housed over 100,000 books, the chapel, and then the gardens. It was all lovely.
We ate lunch at a small place called Salt and Pepper. Despite the English name, the staff were not very fluent. We ended up ordering extra salads that we thought were included with our meal.
Heading back to the tourism office, Chris finally got things squared away for an afternoon of bike riding along the south side of the Danube.
Let’s just say I fell off my bike within ten minutes of riding. I was following my family and got held up when Kristen slowed down going through a small entry way. I didn’t have anywhere to go at the last minute but in to a column and down I went. Got my elbow and knee pretty good, but we kept going to work out the kinks. The blurb we read about this ride suggested that it was a nice, leisurely downhill coast. It was not, IN NOT WAY, leisurely or a downhill coast.
After a couple of hours and about 25 km, we finally stopped in a small town called Spitz. Our bike riding muscles were worn out. Though Chris was ready to ride a couple more hours until we reached Krems, his girls were not willing to go further by bike.
We did catch a bus to Krems, but by the time we had arrived, the town was pretty much shut down for the day. Boo. The description of the town had been interesting.
After walking around for a short time, Chris found a bus leaving from the station within a couple of minutes. We were all willing to run a little to catch a train back to Vienna. Sadly, we picked the slower train and it was two hours later when we finally rolled in to the station. Chris and I had eaten power bars on the train as our pseudo dinner. The girls weren’t having any of that. Luckily we reached the station and a small food court.
Gotta love McDonald's sign.
We still had a subway train to catch and then a bus. We were all so exhausted and saddle sore from our day of riding. You can imagine our dismay as we raced to catch the bus to our hotel and found that the escalator out of the subway was broken. Not just a regular escalator mind you, it was about three or four escalators in height. Ugghh.