It has been a week of highs and lows — the high of launching our guidebooks and the low of snowy temperatures.
I’d hoped to avoid getting sick this winter, and so far I’ve done well. But this week Austria decided to give up on spring, and the sudden drop in temperature seemed to weaken my immune system and now I have a cold. Ah well — now I can drink as many lemon honey drinks as I like!
Monday 11/3: Today was the big day: the official launch of our Las Vegas and Buenos Aires guidebooks! We’ve been working on them for quite a while and the launch had been plagued by delays, so we were stoked to finally get them out.
In the afternoon I headed out for a run while Craig continued working — there’s a river near the hotel, which is joined by two or three tributaries a few hundred metres upstream; it was a pretty run.
We’re experimenting with this healthy eating thing.
In the evening we made use of the kitchen facilities in our room to prepare a bean salad and a carrot salad for dinner: yum.
Tuesday 12/3: We decided to have lunch in the hotel restaurant again, since the food was tasty and well-priced, and we ended up chatting with our neighbour at the next table. Well, she mostly chatted at us, since our German isn’t quite conversational yet (to put it mildly), but we understood that she was impressed that we were from New Zealand.
In the evening we walked over to the local brewery for a (tasty) beer, then had dinner back in our room.
Wednesday 13/3: Since we’re making lunch our main meal, we hadn’t wanted to eat a lot at the brewery the night before, but the ribs that another patron was eating had caught our eye. So we headed there for lunch and ordered the “ribs for one person”, which could easily have fed three — we were stuffed by the end of it! I didn’t want to think about how big the “ribs for two” would be.
We spent the afternoon working and relaxing, and watched a bit of TV before bed.
Thursday 14/3: When we woke up in the morning, the world had been transformed — the roofs were covered with snow and flakes were falling softly from the sky.
It wasn’t snowing too heavily when we ventured out, though the novelty wore off pretty quickly and we decided that we’d be better off inside. We did head out again in the evening though — back to the brewery for fish for dinner.
Friday 15/3: Somehow, despite the fact that we’d been working all week, we’d not quite found time to record the podcast that was supposed to go up on Monday. So we recorded it on Friday evening, along with the one for next Monday — time saving at its best! Of course, by this time I had caught my cold, so I probably sound a bit gravelly!
Now that is a breakfast!
I spent most of the afternoon “studying German” by flicking through the TV channels, while Craig edited and uploaded the podcasts. In the evening we had a light dinner (lentil salad and guacamole) then headed down to the hotel restaurant for a couple of glasses of wine and an apple strudel.
Saturday 16/3: The breakfast put on by the hotel is spectacular, and I’d been enjoying it every day. Craig, however, isn’t so big on breakfast and, after giving it a try on Monday, had eschewed it completely. Today, though, he came down with me in the late morning and we made the most of it — I had muesli with fruit salad followed by scrambled eggs; he had deli meats and cheeses on brown bread, ham and eggs, and a pastry. Delicious.
After checking out at 11, we worked for a while then judged our departure time very badly — we got to the train station five minutes after the last train had left, and had to wait 25 minutes in the cold for the next one.
We’d planned to spend the day exploring Vienna and trying out a new app made by some friends of ours, but I was feeling under the weather and spent the rest of the day in bed while Craig worked.
View from the train window as we left Vienna.
Sunday 17/3: We’d given our clothes to the guesthouse owner the day before to wash but she hadn’t hung them out to dry. So she put them in the dryer — disaster! My black trousers are creased almost beyond repair and Craig’s brand-new, expensive shirt has shrunk considerably. We’d had a good stay apart from that, but left with a bad taste in our mouths.
Since we love wine so much, a stay in the Weinviertel (Wine Quarter) of Austria is almost compulsory — and Mistelbach is conveniently located in the middle of it. We arrived without any problems and checked into our nice room before a basic lunch (of schnitzel) in the hotel restaurant. Then I went back to bed to recover from my cold and Craig got a fair bit of work done before dinner in a pizza restaurant in town.
Travel diary: Highs and lows in Schwechat by Linda Martin was originally published on Indie Travel Podcast (find in iTunes). They also have travel books, travel resources and guides to Asia, Europe, Oceania, South America, and more.
Travel diary: Highs and lows in Schwechat
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