To Vienna, Austria
I have fallen a bit behind in my blogging since arriving in Vienna on Saturday. In my Friday blog, I only wrote about the Mauthausen Concentration Camp since I believed that it deserved its own blog post. However, that meant that I did not blog about my ride from Linz to Melk. Above is a photograph of the Melk Abbey. Founded in 1089, it has been continuously occupied by the Benedictine monks. Besides being a gorgeous building, it houses over 100,000 books including over 2000 medieval manuscripts.
Our cycling from Linz to Melk to Vienna has been along the Danube Cycle Path, also known as Donauradweg, Austria R1, and EuroVelo 6. While I have navigation on my Garmin cycling computer, in most cases, I have been able to simply follow these signs as we progress down the Danube. In German speaking countries, the Danube is known as the Donau.
Most of both Friday’s ride to Melk and Saturday’s ride to Vienna were right along the Danube.
There were brief periods where we drifted away from the river through forest. Typically this occurred when there was a small feeder river and we needed to get to a road bridge to cross over. Over the past couple of days, the temperatures have risen back into the 80s, so these periods of shade were welcome.
More commonly, when we shifted from riding along the river, it was to cycle through small towns.
Of course, this led us to cycle by many beautiful churches such as these three above.
Of course, there were frequently churches visible on the hills or across the river even when we were not cycling through a town.
When leaving towns, we often biked through agriculture areas before rejoining the river. Here we were passing through some vineyards.
Typically we would cross the river a couple times a day as we followed the Danube Cycle Path.
The primary difference between Saturday’s ride and the rides on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday was that we had a headwind on Saturday compared with a tailwind the other three days. As you can see from this photo from Saturday’s ride, there is often no protection from the wind along the river. My speed on Saturday was about 2.5 mph slower than the previous couple of days.
The river cruise ships look like they are moving along fairly quickly when watching them from the shore, but I caught and passed this ship traveling down the river even with Saturday’s headwind. I would guess it was actually traveling along at about 12 mph.
When I saw my first Austrian skyscrapers, I knew I was close to Vienna.
We had to cycle about 2 miles away from the river to get to our hotel. I am really not much of a city person, so I have spent my rest days actually resting and hanging out with fellow riders over multi-hour breakfasts and dinners. Tomorrow we enter Slovakia for 2 days before crossing into Hungary and arriving in Budapest after day 3. Budapest is approximately the halfway point of our trip. It also is the point where we shift from following the Danube river. The second half of the trip will have much more climbing as we move through Romania in particular.