(Dave)
What a trip! Planes, trains, and automobiles! It's Thursday, 1/31, and I finally get a moment to contribute to the blog. We've been able to overcome the language barrier relatively well getting here. In Vienna, almost everyone speaks english, so that part of it was easy. Bad idea of mine to ride the train from the Vienna airport to our hotel with all of our many bags! We were all exhausted by the time we reached our hotel. Vienna has a wonderful public transportation system, but the facilities are NOT luggage or handicapped friendly. Some stations had elevators, other didn't and the S-Train to the city center from the airport had steps to scale. You should have seen me trying to get all the luggage on the train hoping it wouldn't take off without us or any part of us! That really did happen to us once along the way though! We had made it to our last station where it would be a short walk to the hotel (2 blocks). Suzanne got off first with a couple of bags, then Nikolai hesitated to let another person off (gentleman that he is), then they waited for him and when nobody went, the doors closed with Suzanne outside and Nikolai, me, and about 5 bags still on the train!!! Nikolai and I rode to the next station, got off somehow, up, then down elevators and onto a return car back to Suzanne. Kinda scary getting separted in a strange foreign city! Overall, Vienna was amazing though. Everything else went smooth the rest of the way and we took an expensive taxi ride (45 Euros/$70) back to the airport. It was worth it!
