The Hunter Family: Vienna

For our third day in Austria, we headed to Vienna. We wouldn't have a whole lot of time there, so we wanted to hit some of the big sights. Our first stop was Schonbrunn Palace, which was the summer residence of Austria's Royal Family, The Hapsburgs.
I have to say that I am enjoying the review in World History... I didn't really pay as much attention to Mr. Axe as I should have, I suppose. Our children have been soaking up most of what we have been teaching them about the World around them. They were super excited to go to the palace, which included a 40 room tour. I must say that after about 20 rooms, you kind of get the point. Daphne noticed this and spent much of the time complaining that this palace doesn't look anything like Jasmine's palace.
Isaac was a real trooper and listened to the Audioguide- Matt was great with him, pointing out things that would interest him and asking him questions to see if he understood. Victoria was nestled snug into the wrap and stayed fairly content.... this time!
This pic is from the back balcony of the Palace looking out at the grounds. You can barely see the kids and me in the bottom center right portion of the pic. Just to give you an idea of the enormity of it all.

The back of the palace, which really didn't look one bit like Jasmine's palace...

The children and me in front of the beautiful fountain in the back of othe palace... Notice all the squinting. I was all prepared for rain after the downpour in Salzburg and wore my jeans and running shoes and ended up pouring with sweat and squinting into the glaring sunshine. My new plan is to go out prepared for the rain so that it will avoid us...

The kids loved this fountain because all of the people are mermaids and mermen and even the horses have webbed hooves and scales. This was their favorite part- I think because the water from the fountain splashed on them and cooled them off.
This won't be a Christmas Card photo or anything, but we are all here at least:

After the Schonbrunn Palace, we ran back to the hotel to check out and have a drink. It was at this point that we used the hotel ice machine to fill the top of our very small cooler. We stayed in a Marriott, so they actually had an ice machine. We weren't sure how they felt about us using about four liters of ice, though, since they act like ice is gold around here. Matt and I took turns doing the covert op to get the ice from the ice machine down in the lobby!! (Did I mention that when we were in Salzburg we tried several gas stations and when we FINALLY found one with bagged ice we paid about $6 for a teen ytiny bag?!) We had no idea where we would even find ice again, so we went ahead and used the Marriott ice machine.
After we got the ice all settled, I decided to change because it was so warm and sunny... what could be the danger?

We checked out and drove into downtown Vienna, in search of a place to have lunch! We parked just next to the Parlament Building...

Here is Isaac out front:

We walked through Volksgarten, which made me think of my sweet Marcy !
I pretended it was your garden , Marcy! Very lovely...

Many people have commented to me on how Daphne poses in every picture. The complete priss. And then I was looking at our pictures from Vienna, and well, I guess I know where she got that! I never claimed to be anything but prissy, so I guess I'll just accept our fate. We'll be girly-girls together, I suppose, huh, Daph?

So we marched through half of Vienna trying to find this one particular restaraunt and the kids were starving and we couldn't find it, so we finally settled for this little Italian place (which I did not get a picture of, for some reason) with outdoor seating- which is a must for us. We are so loud and our stroller is E-normous (eating outdoors makes us slightly less conspicuous). So we sat down to eat and waited and waited and waited for our food to arrive. It finally came and all the sudden we heard thunder and ... the heavens were opened! Not a little drop, drop, drop , then rain; but all the sudden we were sitting in a downpour! What was most amazing was not the rain, but that everybody screamed! As if aliens were attacking or something. It was hysterical. We were at the table closest to the door and people were stampeding over Matt who was juggling dishes and ushering in the children. It was a pretty comical scene. We ate the rest of our lunch indoors and by the time we were done it was just drizzling.

We marched through Vienna to find the Hapsburg's winter palace, which is E-normous, even moreso than our stroller. Which, incidentally, did not fit in the elevator for this particular venue. So poor Matthew had to fold the gigantic buggy up and carry it up like four flights of stairs so we could go through another palace. I'm not sure why we felt that we needed to see this palace when just about half of the first palace had felt like enough, but we did it. And once again, Daphne got pretty bored about 1/3 of the way through, this was a little more challenging because Tori was very unhappy through much of this tour as well. Poor little dear. She just doesn't understand why she can't crawl through all of the perfectly preserved rooms...

On the way, we found this fellow. He's a real person painted gold and pretending to be Mozart... I had to go stand by him because the children were a little too creeped out. He would stand there like a statue and then all the sudden start whistling Symphony Number 40 or something!

You'll all be glad to note that we resisted actually going inside this cathedral and just settled for some pics of the outside!

After our tour of the Winter residence, we were on a mission to find some ice cream. Since I have been so vocal about the difficulties of not being drinkers here (beer is cheaper than water- literally), I will be just as vocal in praising the ice cream. We can always find excellent quality, inexpensive ice cream around here. Not a good thing for my hips, but I'm not complaining just yet!

We did eventually find some ice cream- and here are some sights from along the way: