This has been my favorite day so far, including my two weeks traveling before this class (upon reviewing these posts, it still is). Everything worked out perfectly. As the man we rented the bikes from informed us beforehand, the wind was at our backs, it was absolutely clear skies, and there was even a wine festival in Weißkirche.
I am extremely glad that the guy at Vienna Explorer told me what train to take, as the tickets we got were wrong, stating St. Pölten on the ticket when we wanted to go to St. Valentin. Asking inside the train station, the assistant in the information booth simply crossed out St. Polten and said take St. Valentin. The conversation went something like this.
"I need to go to Melk"
"Yes"
"And I heard I am supposed to take St. Valentin?"
"Yes."
"The tickets here say St. Pölten."
"Yes. St. Pölten is a big city."
"But I need St. Valentin to get to Melk?"
"Yes."
"So why does this say St. Pölten"
"Here"
He grabbed my ticket and scratched out St. Pölten. I'm still not sure what exactly happened there.
Arriving in Melk at 10am, everything seemed to glow. That is a very golden city. We got up to the Abbey, but I was stressing out about some of the people in our group already complaining by this point, so I suggested we move on instead of entering. We managed to lose a few on our way down, but after meeting up, we got on our way towards the great ride.
After casting off some of the fears of one member of our group, assuring her that the wind is only in our faces because we are going fast, not because we are going the wrong way, we came upon the bridge. By this point I was right angry, as there were constant complaints (one person, five minutes into our day-long ride, expressed the fact that she 'hates bikes'), but as soon as I got up to the bridge to cross the Donau, I fell in love and all went silent. A perfect river with castles and churches dotting the towns all the way up, and vineyards everywhere.
The next several hours of the day were to be punctuated by my sporadic swearing, as I lack the capability to express my awe with everything, and instead got angry at how perfect the ride was.
Everything went great. Everything. Not only did we stop at a fruit stand for marillen jam and liqor, and at a wine tavern full of delicious smaragd wine (as well as teaching me about the levels of quality to Wachau wine....Smaragd is the best), we found a castle ruins that I had not expected! The ultimate goal of this ride was to get to the castle Richard the Lionheart was held captive in, but the Hinterhaus ruins were actually more amazing.
While stopping for water, I turned around, and up the hill was the Hinterhaus! Sean and I immediately said eff yeah, while some people complained about not wanting to go. I can't even comprehend not wanting to scale the random castle you could find along the road, so the majority of us took off, and the naysayers caught up shortly after.
I still don't know too much about Hinterhaus, I haven't had the time to translate the only page that I have found about it. There were no tours or information there, it was just a simple castle ruins. We still were barely halfway by that point, so we carried on, keeping our hunger for the Rieslingsfest at Weißkirche.
Great food (though the chickens were all sold out), and great schlagmusik by a whole orchestra in lederhosen. I am overly spoiled here.
And finally, Richard the Lionheart's prison! This place was quite a hike, but the view from up top was to die for. There was a distant castle, I'm not sure what, that was absolutely massive. The town was surprisingly bustling too. We finally got on our way back home, left with a few days of post-bikeride high.
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