1 May 2025 – Vienna Stress Part 2

Miles driven today = 13

Total Miles to date = 4,779

I got up good and early this morning.  Reception at the Klosterneuburg campsite opens at 8.  I got there a few minutes later to give them a chance to open up shop and found myself already 4^th in the queue.  My German isn’t fabulous but from the consternation on people’s faces I kind of expected what was coming when I got to the front of the line.  I explained that we had arrived yesterday and we would like to stay for another 2 nights.  The girl behind the desk asked my name.  I told her and said we hadn’t booked at which point she told me very abruptly “You have to go!”.  And that was that.  They are fully booked for the rest of the weekend and they already had people queueing at the gate for reserved spaces, so we were homeless once again. 

She did at least have the decency to give me a card for their sister site in Tulln, another 20km upstream, so I rang them and their response was basically “get here now and we might be able to squeeze you in”.  So we packed the van in double quick time and headed for Tulln.

It’s not ideal.  It’s a 45 minutes’ drive from Michael’s house and it’s going to take us at least an hour on the train to get there for the family day we have arranged for tomorrow, but we’re in.  It’s a nicely shaded site with lots of mature trees full of birdsong and we managed to shove a bedding wash through the laundry facilities to ease the load a little when we get home next week. 

They also have another of those fabulous toilet cassette emptying machines we saw yesterday so I’m still hopefully going to have a chance to have a play with that before we leave.

Michael and his wife Andrea drove over to spend the afternoon with us and go for a walk and a meal.  Neither of them had spent a great deal of time exploring Tulln before so it was as much an experience for them as it was for us.

Close to the campsite is a swimming lake where the locals come to sunbathe and splash about.

Or possibly to picnic amongst the dappled shade of the freshly leafed trees.

Then we headed towards the town centre along the banks of the Danube.  I’ve always thought that old Johan Strauss was imagining things when he when he wrote his famous 1-2-3 1-2-3 about the river but there is definitely a blue hue to it with the summer skies reflected. 

The bridge here is the first upstream from Vienna, some 30km away.  We’ll be heading over there when we leave here on Saturday.

This statue of Emperor Marcus Aurelius is a bronze reproduction of a Roman original.  Tulln was the site of the Roman Cavalry fort of Comagena.

There are some old walls around the town which certainly don’t date back to Roman times.

But this heavily restored old tower apparently does.

Tulln was also the birthplace of the painter Egon Schiele, who died in the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918, aged just 28.

The house he was born in is now a museum in his honour.

When we tired of walking we sat ourselves down for a drink and then dinner at a Greek Restaurant.  Michael thought we might be missing all those Mediterranean delights and he wasn’t wrong although I did go for the Zander which is a rather more Central European choice of fish to have with your tzatziki.

2 May 2025 - Family Time