Vienna, Austria

Just left Vienna this morning. We had two beautiful weather days in this grand city. Our hotel was in a perfect location - right across from St. Stephens Cathedral on the pedestrian streets.

We did lots of walking around, past the Opera House, the Parliament building, the Burg Theater, the City Hall,,, through the park with the famous Mozart statue. The center of town is surrounded by a road that is called the Ringstrasse -  there are trams that run along this route, and there are bike paths and walking paths... we had to be careful (as in all Europe) not to walk on the bike path!

We walked by the palace, and got to see some of the Lippizaner stallions in their stalls..such pretty white horses. Maybe next time we will be here on a day when they have a performance and we can see them dance! We saw the jewels and crowns in the Royal Treasury.

One day we took the tram out of town to the Belvedere Palace, which is now an art museum with several Gustav Klimt paintings, including the famous "The Kiss"... just beautiful. There were also pretty gardens and a lovely view of Vienna from the ballroom.

One church we stopped in had an Impressive mosaic of The Last Supper. We also went into the Romanesque and Gothic St. Stephan's Cathedral - a massive church.

And what would Vienna. Be without the cafés? It was warm enough to eat either indoors or out. We had eiskaffe and sundaes outdoors at Mozart Café and Anna Torte, Vanilla crème and strudel at the famous Demel. The cafés here have very large newspapers on wooden poles so that customers can read the newspaper without buying their own,

For dinner, we went to a traditional Viennese wine garden type restaurant called a heuriger. We all had goulash.