Hello from the Frankfurt Airport, where Chris and I are waiting for our flight back to the US. The cruise was a lot of fun (posts to slowly come out), but now it’s time to go back to reality. And it’s probably time to finally close out the posts on Vienna.

I left off on our afternoon break following a long morning and afternoon of touring and a lot of carbs. After dragging Chris to countless musicals over the years, it was about time that we did the classical music performance in a musical setting like Vienna. We had looked into several venues for music (and, admittedly, I did pitch an opera before we couldn’t find tickets and didn’t want to spend the day in line for standing room), but ultimately settled for a performance in a church.

We weren’t sure how to dress, so we went with not grungy tourist and a little nice, but somehow seemed a little over dressed.

The church, St. Anne’s Church, was very pretty and the acoustics also were pretty good. It was a fun performance and Chris was happy, so that’s the important part.

What we almost forgot was that this evening was also the night of the Champions’ League final. The performance ended right around the time the game started, so we would need to hustle to find a place to watch it. We had spotted a sports bar near the Stadtpark the day before and assumed that would be the ideal place to watch it. We hustled to the sportsbar, passing a few very crowded bars and some colorful concrete blocks along the way, but the bar was closed for a private event. 🙄

The hotel the bar was attached to was also playing the game, but there was zero space, so we thought that maybe our own hotel would play it. It wasn’t and it turned out that they didn’t have the right channels for it either. They recommended we go to a restaurant a few minutes away, but they weren’t serving food (we were also starving at the time) and only their hookah lounge was open. As that wasn’t ideal, we came up with the best solution. We ordered pizza delivery and watched on Chris’s phone. If anything, I think it was one of our more memorable Champions’ League final viewings.

Our next morning involved a trip out to Schönbrunn Palace, the summer residence of the Hapsburgs. We had reservations for the Strudel Show and wanted to look around the palace. Unfortunately, we learned from our guide the day before that it could take hours just to get tickets to see the inside of the palace, so we decided to just look around the palace grounds.

We found a small train that could take you around the palace grounds for about 8 euro. It seemed excessive before we learned how big the palace grounds are, but still somehow tempting. We ended up not catching it, however, as it would have ended after the Strudel show started. Instead, we just decided to walk around.

Like I said, though, the palace grounds were enormous. We passed many people using the palace as their morning jogging track, which would have seemed like a nice idea if it wasn’t already incredibly warm by that time.

There are also horse carriages that do tours around the palace grounds. We briefly considered that as well because Chris has wanted to do that, but they were expensive and I also wasn’t big on the idea.

We found some “Roman ruins” (not actually built until the 18th century).

The bigger fountain of the palace, however, was the fountain of Neptune.

The fountain is huge and you can even peak in from behind the water. Above the fountain is the Gloriette, which was added to symbolize the power of the Hapsburg family. It was too hot to walk up the hill to see it though.

Instead, we continued through the garden, past the labyrinth, through a rose garden, and back to the restaurant where they do the strudel show. As we approached the palace, we tried to come up with ways to fill the over 1000 rooms of the palace. There were a lot of game rooms.

We walked through a lot of the palace grounds, but only hit a small fraction. There’s also a botanical garden and zoo among other things, if that gives you a sense of how large this place is.

After our tour, we got into the much-needed shade to queue up for the strudel show. You get to taste strudel with most tickets, but ours came with pretty large portions and included drinks (we booked in advance via GetYourGuide). Leading up to the show, Chris had to put up with me singing one line from the Sound of Music repeatedly. Poor Chris.

The show was also pretty fun. It helped that the chef was pretty entertaining. You get strudel recipes after the show, but it doesn’t look like an easy dish to make. The inside looks straightforward enough, but the dough looked like a challenge. Maybe we’ll try it at some point. I’m sure it’ll be a disaster.

We left Schönbrunn Palace shortly after the show to check out of the hotel and wander around Vienna a little before we had to get back to the airport. We didn’t do much in the city and just ended up eating Italian food, but it was nice to get in a little more of Vienna before we left.

The airport was equally uneventful. The flight back wasn’t fun because I had the start of a cold towards the end of the weekend. My ears were a mess after the flight.

That’s it for Vienna, which is good because the flight home is about to board. As I said, the cruise posts will start rolling out, but probably will be coming out slowly. I’ll see y’all on the other side.