Austria, Slovakia, Volcanos and Badger Butts

Great read! Thanks for sharing. Some of the food looks delicious and the rest doesn't.

Glad you had a good time mate.

Spring has officially arrived in Ramsau Am Dachstein and it is currently clear blue skies and very hot in the sun.

hey frostback!

Very good report, except for the picture of me! it was nice meeting you and i´m glad you had a good time in our country.
its kinda strange to see some of the landscapes and towns around here in your report.

Seppo - I too always get a kick out of seeing what visitors to my haunts find noteworthy. It is like having fresh eyes again. There is much much more to Austria than the cliché's of lederhosen, alps and old churches. In some ways I was glad to have been restricted to the relatively low parts of the country. It leaves other rides for another trip.

I must say I was indeed impressed with the ease of getting around and renting a bike over there. I was able to rent for a week with unlimited mileage for 1/5 of the cost of shipping my bike over and back (which I would not have done for just a week of riding of course). Undoubtedly there are great tour leaders but they are not essential for the budget traveler. Your roads are good, traffic polite, scenery great, internet and cell coverage widely available and accommodations reasonable if one shops a bit. It really is a very civilized country.

I will be back. Thanks again for all your help and do consider setting up that motorcyclist assistance program!

Lee

That was a hilarious report, really entertaining!

I'm from Vienna but live in Canada now. It's always great to see how someone from far away experiences your own place.
I don't know if you care but I'd like to add a few notes to your report if you don't mind.

Those cobble stones in the picture aren't ancient in this case. In Vienna and many other old medieval towns in Austria there is indeed still ancient cobble stone. But you might be surprised, they actually still make roads of cobble stone as a means of preventing speeding or just because it looks nicer and goes better with the image of an old town.

Those half submerged brick bunkers you saw close to the solar panels were not buildings for workers, that sounds rather horrible :d, no one would live like that in Austria, that sounds more like Africa to me.
Those bunkers, unless you really saw something totally different I have never seen, are in fact wine cellars full of humongous barrels of wine which is kept submerged deep underground to keep it cool through the summer.
So those bunkers you saw are actually the entrances to many wine cellars.
I am not sure if it's a unique thing to Austria and Germany, but in those two countries at least you will find them anywhere where there are vineyards.

The german name for Vienna is Wien, not Wein. Wein is in fact wine, making a Wein Keller a wine cellar.
Confusing, I know
Therefore also the name of the sausages. Wiener in german, or wieners in English. Meaning Viennese sausages. Which is funny because in Austria they are called Frankfurter, Frankfurt being a city in Germany.
Those sausages you had in the picture, the small fat ones, were not wieners, not in the original sense anyway. Maybe the same substance but not the same shape. The ones in the soup later in the trip, those were the real ones.

It's funny you thought of Burg(castle) Kreuzenstein as a movie set. Because it was one indeed. Well, it is an old castle of course but because as you also probably thought as well it looks very much like one would picture a typical castle, it was chosen as the main shooting location for Nicholas Cages "Season of the Witch".

That motel with the credit card seems really odd, that's definitely not a normal thing in Austria. That's more something I would have expected in America actually .

And lastly, I hope you don't take offense when I say pretty much all the names you mentioned where misspelled making it really funny for a German native speaker to read
Again, no offense, I know I'd certainly make the same mistakes being in a country I don't know the language of)

Well Apostis, there is probably a reason for tour guides. Clearly my submersion into the Vienese life was a glancing blow and my impressions were, whle honest, very uninformed and full of wrong conclusions. I was glad to guess right on that castle!

The notable oddities and differences in everyday life are some of my favorite aspects of travel to foreign countries. As misperceptions are erased or exploded, it always reminds me that underneath, all people are the same (except Texans of course, just ask them!).

Thanks for the clarifications.

Lee