Day 2: Vienna -> Innsbruck [aka wienerschnitzel day]

Friday, September 14

Sleep: maybe 8 hours, non-consecutive
Day length: 21 hours

We had breakfast on board shortly before landing. Once on the ground, we went down a ramp to the tarmac and boarded a shuttle bus to the airport terminal. Once again, we had to figure out how to get our boarding passes. This was the one leg of our trip that was still on the original itinerary but we’d not gotten our boarding passes in Seattle (it had actually shown we were checked in before we got to the front of our reroute line). We found the gate and the woman there was a little anxious that we’d not checked in as the flight was overbooked. I think, technically, we were checked in, just didn’t have our boarding passes as we had no trouble. While waiting at the gate, I finally got a chance to photograph the Austrian Air stewardesses. Of course our flight turned out to have at least a third of its passengers be Austrian Air stewardesses and stewards (including a young Asian man).

The plane was a prop plane, similar to one I’d flown on from L.A. to Monterrey years ago. I had the window seat in the back (12F) so I could watch the landing gear go in and out as needed. I also had a pretty good view out the window, although the big mountains were out the other window. The flight was only about an hour but they served us drinks and a hot “snack” that was the Austrian equivalent of a pig in a blanket.

Got to Innsbruck at 11 but our luggage did not. We filled out the necessary paperwork, tried to find a map and other info at the airport, and then got a taxi to Haus Georg, our home for the next 3 nights.

Alexandra, who is married to Georg (we never actually met the man), greeted us when our taxi pulled up. We let her know about the luggage situation. It turns out she used to work for Austrian Air and had contacts at lost luggage. She offered to call and see what she could find out. We showered and headed off to see the city and have some lunch.

We went to one of the places Alexandra had recommended and had a waiter who got the order wrong but was unwilling to admit any wrong doing on his part. (the menu had had 2 wienerschnitzels on it, and we ordered the cheaper of the two, which I’d stressed using the language on the English menu, but, since I’d left out the parenthetical pork, which is how he distinguished the two, he put the blame on us, further accusing us of being able to tell veal from pork in thinly pounded, breaded & fried form.) It upset me more than it should have. Dan just paid.

We tired pretty quickly so went back to Haus Georg around 4 for a four-hour nap, stopping at the store to get some handwashing soap. We checked in with Alexandra but she said they didn’t know where our luggage was.

For dinner, we walked to Alexandra’s other recommendation. It was uphill, and at first we chose the wrong hill, but eventually we found our way there. There was no English menu and our resources we not as good as we’d hoped, so we got the schnitzel again (Dan got their Gordon Blu verity). Dan had some nice wine with that.

We went to bed around 10:30, after putting in for a 7AM wake up call so we’d make breakfast there (I managed to leave the alarm at Judy’s. It’d somehow gotten under the pillow when we were getting stuff together Thursday morning).