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I’ll pick up from Salzburg where my ability to stay up a type up what we have been doing waned. This was probably something to do with the 2 town a day 6:30am starts finally getting to me.

On Tuesday 3rd of May we had a long day of travel. We were starting to feel a little tired after our previous hectic schedule. So we decided to get the 10:10am train to Linz. Regrettably we missed it by 2 minutes and had to wait an hour for the next train. We then took a slow region train to Melk and swiftly walked across town to hop on the last ferry to Kerms for the day. This ferry from Melk to Kerms was on the Danube river and allowed us to get a good look at a few castles and village along the river. The area called the Danube Valley is one of Austria’s world Heritage sites.

After arriving in Kerms we had a 2km dash with our packs to hop on the 18:02 train to Vienna. That night Susan hunted down a restaurant called Vegieasia. Susan loved her cheap tasty Asian vegetarian and the free Lychee soaked thank you drink they gave out at the end or our meal. Personally I couldn’t get over that I ordered crispy chicken, what was served to me looked like crispy chicken, smelled a little like crispy chicken but had more of a soy taste…Yuck… soy meat… is not meat at all so lets call a spade a spade. Perhaps soy rubbery white cheesy stuff is a better description.

Vienna (Wien)
Vienna was quite good. The Public transport system is excellent, we paied €5 to use all the buses, trams etc for 24 hours. The weather was a bit of a let down and we struggled as it fluctuated between rain and the sticky hot sun. Still it made a change from the boiling hot almost draining days we were experiencing in Salzburg. We had Coffee and Strudel in a 1950’s theme café and spent the day perusing the city.

In the late afternoon we went to the Museum of Music where you can learn all about the Vienna orchestra which holds a very popular New Year’s concert. We also played with all the multimedia displays about music and even tried to conduct a virtual orchestra.

On Thursday we left early to stock up at the supermarket. We had forgotten that Thursday is ascension day and is a major public holiday in Europe. Fortunately this didn’t really end up effecting our plan of going to Schoss Schonbrunn (the Hofburgs summer palace). We spent most of the day looking around the gardens and learning how to make apple strudel. In fact we didn’t end up having lunch till 3pm… had a whirlwind tour of the palace and then raced back into the city to catch one of the last trains to Prague.

Things seemed to going very well, we had 25 minutes to make the last 20 minutes of the journey to the train station in Vienna when we leaped onto a train travelling in the wrong direction! As you can imagine that created one very stressed Susan who dashed for the rail boards to find out which platform the train was leaving from as I sprinted to get our packs from left luggage. Alls well that ends well though and we were siting in our seats in the train with a whole 5 minutes to spare.

Arriving into Prague was the most unusual experience. In with a bit of retrospection no city train station at 10:30pm is a desirable place to be… However it felt like I had arrived into some scene from a Bond film.. or perhaps The Saint. The station had a really soviet air to it. There were armed police loitering around and loads of dodgy looking people just hanging around for now reason. I felt very sorry for the Canadian girl who asked us if we going to her hostel by any chance… regrettably we weren’t but perhaps in hindsight we should have made a bit of a detour.

We have been in Austria for the last three days… things are going well.

We trained from a Small town in Switzerland called Buchs to another small town in Austria called Feldkirch. It was on this train that my British passport got its first stamp.
I was also very happy that like the Russian siting next to us, I didn´t hold a passport from an eastern European country as I get the feeling the Austrian customs official (carrying a gun) could be quite tough if he wanted to.

We arrived in Innsbruck,a town which acts a hub for hiking, skiing etc. Like the rest of Austria, what really stuck out was the pastel coloured buildings. We visited the Holfburg which is a palace created by the arch bishops. Austria is quite unusual because their was no royalty so all the palaces and castles were built buy the catholic church. In fact the church still owns large areas of land which is usually leased for farming and alike.

For afternoon we traveled to two small villages outside of Innsbruck. The first called Hall pronounced Hull (winner of England’s dullest town award). Fortunately that place has loads more going for it and in the 15th century was a large Australian town. Waiting for the train to Schaaz we meet two interesting Plumbers from Frankfurt. One of their daughters was giving a presentation on the Maori people and we learn a lot about infra red saunna systems.

Salzburg has been great we have looked around the old town and checked out the garden from the Sound of Music were the kids sing Do a Deer.
Last night we attended a Mozart Concert at the Marble Hall, Mirabell Palace which was great if only to see the amazing building.

Today has also been quite Sound of Music orenitated. We have been on a tour for much of the day checking out the Gezeebo and abbey Maria and captain Von Trapp married in etc. I now know the notes to sing but do not want to sing almost anything.

Also a little cultral fupah on my part, Austrian’s are into manners and always seem to say hello and thank you and have a good day. I though I had learnt the correct hello with Servus. Servus I say, Servus kids say back to me… things are going sweet… but for some reason the old folks don’t like it…
turns out that Grüss Gott means good day or literally ‘greet god’, that’s the correct expression for saying hello to everyday people… Servus is the g’day mate.. or howsit oldies don’t like you using that unless you know them?

Tomorrow all going well we are taking a boat trip up the Danube to Vienna..

Welcome to your Bi monthly dose of what the Webbers have been up to.

The weekend before last we went to Bristol Zoo and also caught Fame the Musical at the Bristol Hippodrome. Sadly that is about as exciting as it gets.

Over the last few weeks work have been quite crazy so apologies that the updates have been few and far between. We have also been quite busy booking accommodation for our Central European Excursion to Switzerland, Austria and the Czech Republic which starts next weekend.

We have booked in for a ‘Sound of Music’ tour in Salzburg and also a Mozart concert so I will let you know how it all goes.

Apart from that live is sweet…
I’m working on a Lyric Quiz at the moment, anyone know the song that features the Lyrics
“Take me on a trip upon your magic swirlin’ ship”…
No looking up on the web.

The exciting new this week is that we have just booked our latest European trip. After brief breaks in many of the Western European Countries, we decided to do a big tiki tour of Central Europe.
As Easyjet doesn’t fly into many of the countries we want to visit we have come up with the following combo.
1 Fly into Geneva in Switzerland
2 Train to Zürich
3 Train into one of Europe’s smallest countries Lichtenstein
4 Train over to Salzburg
5 Then do the same to Vienna
6 Finally Train to Prague and fly back to Bristol

We are going to be away for 13 days in total and many of those days will be in the 2 most expensive countries in Europe. So this weekend will probably be spent organising hostels to try to keep the cost of the trip down.

Susan is stoked as she gets to see Lichtenstein. If you are like me and have never heard of this country….Let me fill you in:
Lichtenstein is a very small landlocked country in a valley, it’s the only country which is locked by two other landlocked countries (Switzerland and Austria). Apart from that it produces valuable postage stamps and people go there mainly to get a stamp in their passport. I’ll be sure to upload some pics and let you know if we can find someone from border control.

This weekend we had look around Clifton Village which is the posh part of Bristol. It is where all this years’ model of BMW congregates with the for show pet poodles outside trendy cafes while the owners sip lattés and read the times. A complete contrast to ASDA in Bedminster let me tell you. While in Clifton Village we found a deli which sells South African food so Susan was kept busy for a while deciding which favour of Mrs Ball chutney to purchase.

Apart from condiments keeping to our boardgame geeky traditional we have purchased another game. It’s called Carcassonne – Hunters and Gathers and is a bit like a cross between Dominos and Settlers. The highlight for me being that I can beat Susan at it… Yeah!

My keeping fit New Year’s resolution is going quite well and I’m managing at least three gym session each week. This dedication combined with the fact that Susan seems to have become the latest GI diet devotee is bound to ensure my success or at least consolidated misery.

All this training has hardly dented my rowing time (dropping by 20 seconds). Last week my time was the worst of the field. Weight and Age adjustments resulted in Susan beating me which as you can imagine made me an easy mocking target for the guys in London today.

Current Rowing time 8:16