Whoa, Vienna is  BIG city.  Not NYC big, but bigger than Boston, Seattle or San Francisco.  And after Salzburg, it seems huge.  We started the day in Salzburg and took in the Mirabell Garden.  Just something one of the emperors cooked up for one of his girlfriends. 

If you look at the photo, we’ve re-created one of the classic Salzburg postcards.  Gardens in front, Fortress in back.  We even got a corner of the municipal building where we researched birth certificates yesterday.  Well, those buildings pale in comparison to the palaces that are just all over Vienna, at least in the old city.  More about that in a moment.  But first… car!

We took our longest drive in the car so far.  About three-hundred kilometers.  I’m pretty clueless about speed limits.  I figured out Germany pretty quickly, but I understand Austria does not have any unlimited speed zones on the autobahn.  So mostly I tried to pick out someone hauling you-know-what and basically shadow them.  Which worked great except every once in a while, that person would slow down for no obvious reason.  So I’d slow down, only to be blown away by some other guy hauling you-know-what.  So I’d take off behind that guy.  No tickets, but no understanding either.  The car goes great. It’s very comfortable at speed, tracks great, goes where you point it and stops very, very well.  We listened to David Grey and a KMTT compilation disk.  (The Seattle people know what KMTT is.)

So, Vienna, or Wien as it’s written here.  Things get pretty darn urban quite a way from the center, or Zentrum.  Tight streets, lots of people and traffic, and slow going.  Then you hit this super-wide ring road where the walls to the city used to stand.  And everywhere you look is some palace-like building.  And not small ones.  Huge buildings that span blocks in some cases.  We spent a little time walking around and then grabbed dinner.  Tomorrow we plan to take the street car all the way around the ring and then walk around in the center to see the sights, take some pictures and get the lay of the land.  Saturday looks like rain, so we’ll save the museums for then.

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