Vienna/Wien

I drove from Hallstatt to Vienna and luckily had GPS Navigation to guide me. Although I love the challenge of driving in a new city I would be lost without GPS. Every street and every turn is new and I have to focus, which is one of the things I like about driving-it needs constant mental input and observation. I don't talk much as I am all eyes and ears to the new world I have found myself in.

Carol and Ciaran are excited by what they see. I see lines in the road and cars in my rearview mirror. I see red green and yellow traffic lights and Germanic roadsigns. I am excited by all of that.

Carol once asked me (in Berlin) how I could be so calm and confident driving in a strange city and my answer was- I just concern myself with driving 100 yards/metres at a time and (this comes from driving in the USA for 30 years) expecting other drivers to do the unexpected-which doesn't really happen in Germany or Austria.

We are staying in the Grand Hotel Wein, as always chosen by me from TripAdvisor reviews. A classic, elegant hotel offering great hospitality.

We were given a quiet room at the back of the hotel looking down on Mahlerstrasse from our large sixth floor balcony. It was the first hotel we stayed in which had a bedside phone that operated the lights and the curtains. It could also be used to make Phone calls!

One good reason for booking this great hotel was it's proximity to the Vienna Opera House just a five minute, slow stroll away. We had tickets to two shows. One was Wagner's "Siegfried" and the other an opera that doesn't get played very often- "Die Tote Stadt" (the Dead City) set in Bruges, Belgium and written by Erich Korngold, a favorite of ours.

Vienna Opera House

City and country tour buses run from just in front of the Opera. We took one of the city tours to get our bearings, passing the Prager, a huge park where the famous Ferris Wheel from the classic movie "The Third Man" was filmed and went as far as the Danube river before turning back towards the city center.

We spent two nights in the Opera House, seeing world-class performances. Here's a detail from the house at night.

And the rear of the house, where through open windows you could hear singers warming up their voices. Photo taken from the Cafe Sacher in the hotel of that name.

We found our morning breakfast place at the Opera House -the Opera Cafe, where we would sit outside and enjoy the wonderful coffee we were unfamiliar with-Josef Meinl coffee (which you can buy in Chicago, we later found) and some ham bread, eggs and cheese. A simple but filling meal to start the day.

This would give us the energy for our morning walks around the beautiful city streets

During on such walk Carol finds the location of the small hotel she stayed in when she visited Vienna with her mother over 30 years before. It was above the famous coffee house Cafe Hawelka.

There was a permanent exhibition of the artwork of Paul Klee, not someone whose work I enjoy but Carol does and so while Ciaran and I sat enjoying our cold beers on a sunny day she went to the museum.

We found the trams very useful and easy to use to move around such a vast city. There are also subway trains. The Audi was left to wait in the hotel garage for a couple of days.The red and gray tram is seen at left.

Carol used the tram to pay a visit to Belvedere Palace for a solo visit. These are her photographs.

Carol is the World's number 1 Mozart lover...

I was Palaced-out and chose instead to take an underground train out to an island, popular with the locals. Ciaran and I went to Donauinsel (Danube Island) an island in the river that is 13 miles long by 400 feet at it's widest, to sit by the water and drink beer, watching the tourist boats go by.

At the end of a day's sightseeing though we would be ready for a night of Opera...

More to come...