Our adventures in Austria began with a short stop in Vienna and a picturesque drive through some quaint little towns along the Danube. They ended with the sound of screaming children running up and down the halls of our hotel in Innsbruck 2 hours before we WANTED to get up a day later. We won’t dwell on that part…
A short 2-hour drive from Budapest, Vienna is situated in eastern Austria well before you get into the Alps. It’s a beautiful, old city, and it’s easy still to envision what it might have looked like 2 or even 3 hundred years ago. Horse-drawn carriages still wrangle for position on the streets with today’s cars, and whole sections of the historic downtown are reserved for pedestrian traffic only. We made our way to St. Stephen’s Basilica in the heart of it all, and then back towards Café Central for some soup and sandwiches. A very nice parking cop, when we asked about our car and how to buy a parking sticker, noting the Hungarian plates and struggling to communicate in English, told us to enjoy our stay in Vienna – for free! That was fantastic, and we were quite glad we asked, as I’m sure we would have gotten ticketed—or even towed—in that space.
We continued further west to the town of Krems, where we reconnected with the Danube for a stretch of incredibly memorable little towns and castles. The Danube runs through both Vienna and Budapest, but it begins further up in the hills and passes through these towns we were seeing. The day was gorgeous with the sun shining and some clouds floating by, and it made for a great time of picture-taking. We wound along the river for several miles, detouring a bit to take in Burgruine Aggstein, a beautiful 900-year old castle perched high above the river. Unfortunately it was closed to visitors, but we were able to take in the incredible panoramic from up there. We continued on to Melk where we found a cute little B&B to stay in and then had Weiner Schnitzel in an outdoor café. Seriously, who can pass that up when you’re in Austria!
Day number 2 in Austria took us to Salzburg along the Salzach river, situated at the base of the Alps. ‘Salz’ in German means ‘salt’, and it’s easy to tell that it’s a staple in most of their cuisine. Salzburg boasts another beautiful fortress perched high above the city, and the most well-preserved in all of Europe as it was never successfully conquered. We wound our way up some tiny streets and through alleyways that without our GPS unit we would otherwise have never found (which taught us to trust that wiley GPS guy – a lesson we would regret at various points later on) to the base of the mountain. The fortress is essentially a small village on top of the mountain with a panoramic view out to the Alps to the west and the flatter terrain of the city and beyond to the east. We walked through the courtyards and took a short tour inside part of the castle and left with a better understanding of the history of this place. 
After a quick lunch with rain beginning to spit at us, we set out westward for Innsbruck. This city is situated in a huge valley surrounded by the Alps on all sides, and had it been a clear day I’m sure it is breathtaking. As it was, the cloud and fog obscured the upper peaks and it rained off and on the whole night we were there. We set about the task of finding a place to stay, but this proved to be a bit more difficult here. After looking all over town and even a detour onto a steep, unpaved lane—that we had to back out of because there was nowhere to turn around (strike number one for that GPS guy), we finally landed on a not-so-fantastic place about 5 buildings away from where we started in the first place. But it had a bed and we made the best of our night on the town, taking the umbrellas to a small café for dinner, and then another small café for dessert. The food was great and the night was a success!The next morning, as mentioned earlier, gave us a rude awakening and the inspiration for the title of this blog. It also added a year or 2 onto our ‘family plan’ (if you know what I mean).
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