The Martin Odyssey: Detour Vienna

Jill: So we were sitting at the Barcelona airport waiting for our flight to Vienna, which would then take us to our next destination of Menton, France. If you think Vienna seems a bit out of the way when you're going from Barcelona to Menton (basically Nice, and about 700km away), you're right, but as it turned out there was no easy way. It would have been four trains over 8-12 hours, or driving a car and paying a heavy fee to \drop it across the border, so Vienna it was.

Checking in

Our flight turned out to be an hour late which was only a problem because we had just one hour before our connecting flight at 1:00pm. Realizing we wouldn't make the connection, Todd and I looked at each other across the aisle and shrugged our shoulders. I decided to double check the boarding passes and noticed that the boarding time for the next flight was listed as 18:45. This seemed odd since our flight was scheduled to depart at 13:00. Looking more closely, the departure time on the boarding pass said 19:30. The good news was that we weren't going to miss our connection, which had been changed unbeknownst to us, the bad news was that we had six hours to burn.

We asked the flight attendant how far it was to downtown Vienna from the airport and she mentioned the City Airport Train which runs between town and the airport every half hour for 16E round trip, and kids under 12 are free. (PS it seems like kids under 12 are free for a lot of things: breakfast at the hotel, museums, monuments, etc.)

So we attempted to buy tickets, somehow messed it up, and may have bought the wrong set of tickets for 62E. Oh well, when we have WiFi, we'll see what happened. For the time being we were able to show our receipt to the train operator upstairs and convince him to let us on board despite that fact that we were missing one of the actual tickets. The train operator downstairs said with a smile, "so you're the American family with one ticket?" and let us board the train.

CAT to downtown Vienna, a 16 minute ride

We wandered around aimlessly for about 30 minutes armed with only a Japanese map (courtesy of aforementioned downstairs train guy). We couldn't quite figure it out so we stopped in a hotel that happened to be a Marriott. We got some great information, a map, and a finger-point in the direction we needed to go.

So we headed out to explore the city, starving and not quite equipped for the 90+ degree day, but hey we were in Vienna! We learned some great facts along the way: Approximately 1.7 million people live in Vienna, it's the 10th largest city in Europe and in a 2005 study of 127 world cities, Vienna tied with Vancouver for first place for quality of life. Definitely a place I'd love to revisit!

We had a great lunch, a fun time seeing a few sights and then made our way back to the airport and eventually to Menton. Luckily my French was passable enough for me to alert the car company that we would be arriving late. After such a long day, it was a relief to see the little sign with our name on it! It really was a beautiful city, very clean with lots of people everywhere, little cafes, American shops, designer boutiques and plenty of charm.