Monday 11th of July Vienna to Wisla
After enjoying a full size camp shower we headed into Vienna with our day train passes. At 7.00 am the camp temperature gauge was already showing 21 degrees so we are dressed appropriately for a scorcher.
Our first stop was the Naschmarkt which starts off as cafes and merges into proper produce, clothes and souvenir stalls, with a lot of emphasis on Turkish and Greek type foods. Having fasted all morning we settled for the Do An Café which for 8.60 euros we got eggs, cheese, three different veggies, bread, jam, freshly squeezed orange, tea or coffee and water. Everything was perfect even the coffee apparently.
The second thing to do on the list in Vienna according to all the guides is to have coffee and cake as Vienna has a lot of traditional famous cakes and a renown coffee culture. However we were full from breakfast and the coffee connoisseur was already satisfied so we weren’t even tempted by all the nice things in the market.
Number three on the list was to take a ride in Vienna’s 1897 Giant Ferris Wheel. It still has old box car carriages that swing when the occupants move around. Not all of them take tourists as sightseers, as some can be booked for private or group dining cars.
Having done everything we wanted to do in the big smoke we headed off for what was to be a 5 hour drive through the Czech Republic to Poland in order to see another concentration camp. The Czech Republic isn’t the most inviting looking country and doesn’t do euros, so for the sake of not having to change money and cope with another language we decided that just inside the border of Poland was where we wanted to be. However the roading contractors were not on our side, nor was the weather, so we took eight hours and not once did Roger disobey the GPS.
We had left Vienna at midday when the camp temperature gauge said 37 degrees Celsius and headed straight for the supermarket and brought two really cold drinks and a litre of lemon sorbet, of which half was consumed in the car park. Then we hit the Vienna traffic jam, due to road works and sat with the air conditioning doing overtime because the van temperature gauge said it was 36 degrees outside. We managed to get out of that traffic jam for a short while and then hit a massive one on the Austrian side of the border. There was a small town with a narrow S-bend corner between old buildings that every truck going from Poland to Austria via the Czech Republic has to pass through, and let me tell you there are not 100's of trucks, but 1000's going this way. The local council had decided to repair a small pothole in peak hour traffic in preparation of our arrival, obviously we gave them the wrong day and they thought it was next Monday.
Having lost our cool in Vienna and after being made to stop at the border, because they randomly selected our German registered van for examination, we stopped to demolish the second half of our sorbet at a holiday camp by the river in the soaring 34 degree heat. We hopped back on the motorway only to discover that the Czech Republic had a whole lot of EU money to spend so they ripped up half of the 100km long motorway.
We have had a contrast in roads throughthre countries throughout the afternoon. Vienna has uneven littered roads; the Czech Republic had better roads, even though only half were open, but their towns were big industrial cities with apartment blocks everywhere and paddocks of sunflowers; Poland had nice motorways with greenery. Our camping spot tonight is Wisla, sister city to Whistler in Canada we suspect as they do skiing in the winter en-masse and sunbathing in the summer. It’s now down to 30 degrees at 8.00pm, time for driver to consume cheap wine and celebrate eight hours of tense driving.
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Sunflowers at the roadworks
Atop the big ferris wheel
Produce market
Breakfast in the Nasch Markt