Somewhere on the Danube October 18

Started the day in Weissenkirchen. We didn’t visit the town at all, it was just where we were parked for the night.

We had signed up for another bicycle trip this morning, 28 km to Melk alongside the Danube. It was fantastic. We started out all wrapped up with the wintery gear we’d bought yesterday but it became clear early on that the predicted high of 15 was going to be exceeded, and there wasn’t the chilly wind there’d been in Vienna yesterday.

The cycle paths are excellent, and we only had to go on the roads a few times, when passing through picturesque villages where there wasn’t any traffic anyway. We were riding on muscle bikes, not ebikes, so I was pleased we had a following wind, and it was mostly flat.

We were cycling through wine country for most of the morning.


We stopped at a cute little town that had a church that dated back to at least 800 AD although it was rebuilt “only” 500 years ago. It’s a very Catholic county here, there are wayside shrines quite frequently along the roadsides.
The church was very well maintained, as were the graves in the churchyard.

Our guide told us matter of factly that the graves are marked only with a family name, when someone is buried they remove the bones of the grandparents and put them in a bone house, located in a small separate building on the same site. We couldn’t get inside but I took this photo through the window.

There was a tower we could climb up right next door, and by coincidence we saw our cruise ship sail past on its way upstream to meet us.

They speak a version of German in Austria, I was enjoying saying the street signs to myself as we cycled along, and wishing people a “Guten Morgen!” when we passed them. A pleasant change from Hungarian and Slovakian.

At the next small town we stopped for a toilet break. In the women’s, you have to pay 50 euro cents, whereas in the men’s you can pee for free, although if you need to sit down, you also have to pay. This is the same country where you can go to university for 40 euros tuition a year, including books. That is very impressive but I think they can do something about the toilet situation.

They also still have compulsory military service here, one of the things young people can do during that six months is help repair flood damage.


They have a lot of money in Austria, so their flood protection strategies are the best available. They have removable metal barricades that can be put up when floods are threatening, and it saved a lot of the riverside communities in the big rains last month. The problem is of course, the water has to go somewhere, and it ends up going downstream and becoming someone else’s problem, usually the poorer countries who can’t afford such high tech solutions. Sorry Hungary!

Simon is standing next to a flood marker here that marks flood levels from deluges in previous years.

We finished the tour in the town of Melk, where there is a famous Abbey, the library of which was apparently the inspiration for the Umberto Eco book The Name of the Rose.
From there we took a short bus ride to join the ship in Ybbs.

After lunch we had a lecture on nutritional requirements throughout the ages. I had thought this was going to be a historical lecture but actually it was about food needs during our lives, from infancy through to old age. Oops.  Very interesting nonetheless. It seems everyone in the audience as well as the lecturers are taking supplements, especially vitamin D. They recommended this app:

Apparently you put in the food you eat each day and it tells you what nutrients you are and aren’t getting. I don’t think a cruise is a good time to try it out.

I was well overdue for a nap by then so even though everyone else left the ship for a guided tour of a castle in Grein, I had a little sleep and then we just had a wander around the town by ourselves. We’ve really seen so many castles recently we didn’t feel like we were going to miss out on much.

I’m writing this whilst listening to a string three piece group playing instrumental versions of old pop hits. Simon has gone to bed but I’m enjoying it. Currently it’s a medley of Dolly Parton songs.

 

 

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