On The Way Home

We are back in Amsterdam, and will fly home tomorrow. It took 14 days to get down the river to Budapest, and a little under two hours to fly back here! Here are a few more photos. Even I’m getting tired of them…

The town of Melk, where there is a magnificent Abbey and a very cute little main market area.

Then we came to Vienna. Neither of us has been there before, but it is a city I could easily return to for a week’s vacation. Here are a few highlights:

That’s the town incinerator. You might wonder why I would find that fascinating. It was designed by a man named Friedensreich Regentag Dunkelbunt Hundertwasser. Those of you who are knitters know that the sock yarn company, Opal, used several of his designs as inspiration for one of their sets of sock yarn. I knitted a pair myself, and might just have bought some more on this trip.

ABC in Vienna:

That’s the Hotel Sacher. We had to stop and eat a Sacher Torte. Yum!

I’ll bet you’d like to see a close up. Here you go…

 

That was in a bakery window. It’s a baked replica of the imperial crown! They wouldn’t let me try that one on, either.

We also saw the summer residence for Maria Theresa and the rest of the Hapsburg gang.

I suppose they needed a big house, since she had sixteen children. Only eleven survived to grow up, but still, that’s a lot of bedrooms.

That’s a photo taken in Bratislava. I missed that stop, since I finally caught the respiratory bug that swept through the cruise boat for the whole two weeks. I still feel like I have ebola or something equally as dire.

Next up is Budapest, but I’m saving that one for its own post. Both John and I agreed that it was our favorite place on the trip. We were on the boat overnight there, and then stayed on another day and a half, and could have stayed another several days at least. I’ll show photos later when I get them sorted.

Last but not least, new socks in the making:

The yarn is Frolicking Feet sock yarn, by Done Roving, color Pot O’ Gold. I got mine here. There might be some left in the shop, though I tried to remedy that. This might be my new favorite sock yarn. The colors are splendidly intense, and the yardage is amazing. It might even be better than Wollmeise (shhhhh…don’t tell anyone).

We head home in the morning. I’m off to dinner; we’re staying in the same B&B in Amsterdam where we were on the first leg of the trip, and our hosts kindly offered to make us supper tonight. Since Petra is a chef and does cooking classes, we weren’t about to turn that down!