Day 02 Zwentendorf to Angern—still in the Wachau Valley
Today’s 14.5 miles (23.2 km) gave me the workout I expected and I managed it a mile at a time not thinking about it too much. Then a glass of champagne (can’t call it that—here it’s Sekt) at checkin made everything feel worth it. Staying at a hotel/winery has its advantages. But more, in the lobby they had a game set up, called: “Mensch Ärgere Dich Nicht,” (Sorry, in English). It was the only game we had room for to bring to the States when we emigrated from Austria in 1951–you can imagine the emotion that evoked!
I took a shorter route with towns rather than the longer one nearer the Danube—reasoning was that, if I needed water or energy, I‘d have it because the other route had no infrastructure on it. The drawback was having to face oncoming traffic with little to no shoulder for maybe half the time, the other half I had my own hard-packed gravel road.
Dinner at Hotel Aufreiter where I’m staying was fabulous, including their wine, a Grüner Veltliner from their estate. Everything had a delightfully unusual twist to it that was a new experience from the spinach Knödel to the apricot crepes.
The area here had significant fighting during the last weeks of WWII between the Germans and the Soviets, as attested to by the touching war memorial in the town of Traismauer. Earlier yet, one needs to remember that the Danube was at the edge of the Roman Empire, and Traismauer was founded as a Roman outpost.
I couldn’t resist taking a picture of the toilet that must have plagued people with its hard-to-find flush button. Can you spot it—even with, not one, but two signs?
