Schonbrunn Palace

Instead of a walking tour, today we made our way to the bus terminal to take a coach over to the Schonbrunn Palace, This was the summer residence of the Hapsburgs. it is a short distance from the city centre, so not far out. The coach took us along the city ring road, a wide boulevard which was built to impress with many imposing buildings, including the parliament, city hall and opera house.

After a light breakfast, coffee and apple strudel in my case, we took the metro to the bus station. The weather is due to change today, and we are promised rain and thunder storms. We are lucky with the visit to the palace as there was no rain and it remained quite warm.

We got back to Vienna just in time for a late lunch. As we arrived at a restaurant it was just starting to rain. We were able to sit outside under a canopy, but many of those already eating were not so well protected and had to be moved inside. I finally managed a nice Viennese sausage. We waited at the restaurant until the rain and associated thunderstorm had passed over. In the evening we went to L’Osteria. Vienna seems to be dominated by Italian restaurants, I have been trying to avoid them as we will be in Italy tomorrow, nonetheless we had a nice meal before returning to the hotel for a couple of glasses of wine on our final night in Vienna.