Sunday, July 8 Klosterneuberg and Vienna

We left Krems yesterday morning with a goal of the riverside town of Tulln, halfway to Vienna. On our way out of town we came to a puzzling sign which seemed to say the bike path was closed because of a  running race. Fortunately four other riders came along who had either better local knowledge or better German. We followed them on a circuitous route which led eventually back to the Donauradweg, Danube cycle path. We were on the north side of the Danube even though the route in our guidebook called for the south side, but the path was fine so we continued that way. At one point we stopped and gave our treasure bag of apricots (which we inadvertently froze last night) to two men who are paddling down the river in kayaks as part of an international paddling excursion from Ingolstadt, back in Germany, all the way to the Black Sea delta of the Danube, well over a thousand miles. We saw many of them on the river.
At the same spot, an information board informed us that we could not go all the way to Tulln on our side of the river; luckily we only had to go back 2 km to a bridge.

For all that, we reached Tulln by lunchtime, much to early to stop. So we continued and looked for accomodations downriver. But we did not find anything until Klosterneuberg, only 10 km from Vienna. There we found a good a hotel and the welcome news that we could reach Vienna by rapid transit. So we signed up for two nights so we could visit the city without moving further.

Today we took a series of buses, subways and trams into the city. We visited the Kunsthistorisches art museum, a world-class collection of old masters. We'd been there before, but it was good to see many great pictures we'd remembered, and at least one we hadn't: a large Vermeer of an artist doing a painting- a picture within a picture. It's considered his masterpiece, and he never sold it. We took a sightseeing bus tour of the highlights of the city, and then made our way to the Belvedere Palace with its eye-popping Gustav Klimt collection. Sandy had bought a souvenir t-shirt there years ago, long worn out and discarded, and we bought her a new on at the same shop. We made it back to Klosterneuberg without incident, if you don't count asking directions a time or two.

A very good day, and we were proud not to screw up the navigation of the transit system.