Wine on wheels! Hopefully google translate served me well there. Well, I’ve really been slacking here. Amanda is a little fed up with me because I said I wanted to post some of the Europe trip stuff but haven’t gotten around to it and she’s been waiting on me before she posted again, so here it is finally. In my defense I’ve been doing a lot of important stuff that she didn’t have time for.

Hello, Austria! You’ll see many pictures of our bike tour through wine country (which was amazing) and barely any of Vienna because the city was really kinda boring compared to Budapest and Prague. We met up with the rest of Amanda’s family and maybe 15 other people for the tour. We road the train out to our starting point and rented bikes. Here we are at the start, Catherine was very excited about visiting the Kremser Bank.

We started riding out of town. My knee was still pretty sore at this point and not very flexible. Jacking the seat way way up had the double effect of making me only a few inches shorter than our tour guide and letting me peddle without having to bend it too much. Look how happy it made me!!

One of our stops enjoying delicious Austrian wine. Here’s a great pic of everyone except me!

And here we are with Amanda’s brothers. We’re about to drink apricot schnapps with a big chunk of alcohol soaked apricot in it. It was delicious! We also got a bottle opener souvenir for a friend in this little town. It was hand carved from apricot wood. Do you notice a theme here??

After the Schnapps my buzz was strong enough to attempt the climb up to the ruined fortress seen below. King Richard the Lionheart was held in the dungeons here for a while. I made it most of the way up but decided not to push my knee too hard. We had a couple great views during the climb although I wish I had seen the view from all the way up top

On the way up we spotted this colorful little lizard bro. He let me get nice and close for a good picture I named him Eidschse mit blauem gesicht or lizard with blue face 😀

I have to give Dan credit for one of the more hilarious photobombs I’ve seen here. He was having a great time ruining our pictures 🙂

Lunch involved stopping at the house of a local family who helped with the bike tours. We had a huge grill full of sausages going when we arrived and were given plenty of potato salad and wine to go with them. The cheese filled bacon wrapped sausages were incredible!

And finally a pic of boring old Vienna. Here’s the opera house that I took a picture of mostly because I felt like I should. It was a cool building though.

We wrapped things up with coffee and dessert before heading back to our hostel.

This marks the end of the first week and most of Amanda’s family heading back home. Still to come, Berlin with stories of amazing walking tours, pictures of great architecture and puke-boy. After that you’ll hear about our Sangria fueled trip through Barcelona, or at least as much as we can remember 😉