Danube River Cruise

Our first day was in Vienna. The downtown area had no cars except early in the morning to restock the shops. All but one building was very old tradiational styling.


This is Jeff, Renie and Jim. We met Jeff and Renie our first night on the cruise at dinner. They were also from Texas. We enjoyed them so much. We were at the Vienna city Park. In the background is the 100 year old Ferris wheel.

Downtown Vienna, we took this picture from a little coffee house, "Aida" that was on the second floor.

Mozart's house was behind St. Stephen's Cathdral

We had to go through this door to get to the street where his house was located--yes a door!

We found it! Morzart's house--one of the 70 residences he had inVienna--he moved every six months.

Mozart's street, his house is on the left.

The Spanish Riding School of Vienna--a scene in the movie Patton was filmed here.

Christmas decorations in downtown Vienna

St. Stephens Cathedral in Vienna. If you look closely you can see that the right side of the church is covered with a huge canvas so you don't miss what it looks like.They were steam cleaning the facade.

Carriage rides--10 euros a person or about $15. We walked.

After dinner on the ship, Jeff, Renie, Jim and I went for a walk, these were some apartments.

The third morning we woke up to picturesque scenes passing us on the river as we floated into the cities of Buda and Pest.

Ft.Worth--Finally

Whew! We finally made it to Ft. Worth!! When we got up this AM I-20 was still closed so we went the back way from Abilene-Brownwood-Bangs-Cisco and then to I-20. We got in late this afternoon. The road was still icy most of the way. The total of ditched cars------73.

When we got to our room there were Christmas presents, brought to the hotel by our daughter. Bittersweet. I am sure they are having a wonderful Christmas in Oklahoma with their family.

Tomorrow afternoon late, it is off to Vienna. We will arrive in London at 7:40 then another 2 hour flight to Vienna. The adventure begins!

No pictures today--just more icy roads and ditched cars! I will continue the trip on the blog on January 4th--too expensive to blog, text or talk on the phone from Europe.

Off to Europe--gotta get to DFW first though!!

Our flight to Munich isn't until the 26th,

but we decided to go to Dallas on the 24th so

we wouldn't be traveling on Christmas.

We woke up to a surprise this AM--Snow.

Due to the weather we put off leaving until 11:00AM. By then we thought the wind and the snow would have stopped and the ice would have melted off the streets.

The snow stopped--but the snow didn't melt and the streets were icy and treacherous.

We made the first tracks down the alley-----------------------------------

Down our street---

Past the house and onto Hwy 84---we followed the "Casket Truck" foreverrrrrrrrrrr

The snow let up but the ice and snow on the roads did not.

Fortunately Jim has done a lot of driving on icy roads and we didn't end

up in the ditch like the 51 cars we counted on the roadside did.

They evidently didn't know the

SNOW RULE #1: Drive slowly and don't use your brakes!!

Tomorrow we only have a 3 hour drive to Dallas------or do we?