As luck would have it, a very direct route to the next library on our list (at Melk Abbey) is a boat ride down the Danube River. It didn't take much for us to decide to book that half-day tour! A bus picked us up in downtown Vienna and drove us out to the suburbs (with gorgeous farms and vineyards) to meet the boat.
After that, it was a leisurely ride on the water with a perfect view of all the bucolic towns along the shore.
When we arrived in the town of Melk, a bus took us to the top of a hill to the Melk Abbey: beautiful views, stunning architecture, and a breathtaking library with some of the oldest manuscripts in the world. Sadly we were not allowed to take pictures inside the library, but you can imagine how gorgeous it must be based on the rest of the Abbey!
After our tour, we stopped in a small local town for lunch and got to enjoy our first wiener schnitzel (a classic Austrian meal of breaded deep fried veal). We thought maybe there was some secret ingredient in the schnitzel that has made it so iconic. But it turns out it pretty much tastes like any breaded fried meat. Granted we only had the one sample, but it looked nearly the same in every other restaurant we visited so we didn't feel the need to try it again. Very tasty though! Certainly worth having once, especially in its place of origin.
And fortunately, the tour got us back just in the nick of time to get to the historical section of the Austrian National Library before it closed. In a word: awesome.
No doubt about it:
We love Austria!
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