Ok, been most of a month but it seems like we just haven’t stopped doing things that kept me from posting. Neil finished up the images below a couple days after my last post but then…ya know…life interfered. We had a couple doctor’s appointments, Neil got a skin thing taken off his neck but the pathology is all fine. Turned out to be basal cell carcinoma which is just on your outer layer of skin and doesn’t spread. So it was just a quick removal with some local lidocaine to numb it and then some stitches to close the gap. Never hurt at all, he got the stitches out earlier in the week and the pathology report almost 2 weeks back. The dermatologist looked him over and there are no more of them to worry about. We also had dental cleanings and he’s still trying to figure other what he needs for his trigger finger on his right pinky. It locks up periodically…he’s had 2 injections of cortisone to try and quiet the inflammation down…and while it’s better it’s not all better so he needs to call and figure out what to do next.

Connie’s been practicing a lot for her MasterSingers concert next month. They’re singing the Mozart Requiem on the 25th anniversary of the terrorist attack on 9/11 accompanied by the newly formed Fort Myers Philharmonic in their inaugural concert. We looked at the rest of their calendar for the upcoming season and it turns out they’re either pops performances which we generally skip or classical pieces we dislike.

Neil got his bike tires switched over to tubeless. He was getting repeated flat tires and his wheel rims are actually designed for tubeless tires which makes changing a tube a lot harder and he just doesn’t have enough hand strength anymore to easily change them plus the tubeless design means that only 1 out of 3 don’t get pinched needing another replacement. Switching over to tubeless solve all of that and there is some latex liquid inside the tires that will seal up to an eighth inch hole. He needed new tires anyway so the only extra cost was the 30 bucks for each of the tubeless valve stems and the 10 bucks for the latex sealant in each one. 

He’s signed up for a winter photo workshop in Yellowstone National Park where they’ll spend 4 days wandering the park in a snow tractor. But he doesn’t have any warm clothes any longer so will be forced into getting some; they’re planning on running down to a couple of the thrift shops to see if he can find any decent used ones as one of her singing folks in the chorus told her many people donated their old winter gear to them. He’s not gonna hold his breath that he will find any but we’ll go look anyway.

Ok, moving on to our Viking Cruise, today’s entry covers the last afternoon and evening in Vienna Austria. First up was a visit to the Schönbrunn Palace which was the summer home of the Habsburg family who were the ruling family in the Austrian empire. The property dates from the Roman emperor Maximillian II who established a  mansion in 1569 that contained a hunting lodge. The property was purchased by the Austrian empire in the mid 1700s and was purchased by the dynasty and presented to Maria Theresa by her father as a wedding present and he also built the current 1,441 room palace and it was used throughout her reign as the summer residence instead of their home in Vienna. If you’ve ever seen the annual Vienna Philharmonic Summer Concert on PBS then you’ve seen the palace as it has a huge (like a half mile deep and 300 yards wide) rear garden where the orchestra performs. 

The name comes from one of the earlier owners of the land who was out horse riding on a hot summer day and ran out of water…but after looking around he found a single spring that had good water among the dozen or so that aren’t potable. He described it as “Schöner Brunnen” meaning Beautiful Spring. That was condense into the Schönbrunn name. The spring is still providing excellent drinking water on the property although these days there is also municipal water supplied. The property also contains a ‘Roman ruin’…except it was actually built in 1778 and is most definitely not from the Roman empire.

The afternoon was pretty brutally hot and the palace isn’t air conditioned but we went on the tour inside anyway.

View of the front of the palace as we came in from the parking lot. Neil took the liberty of deleting the thousand or so people that were originally in the shot as he did in several others below.

Various views of the rooms inside…as you can see much like several other palaces we toured it is Baroque and pretty darned gaudy.

Looking out the center rear where the band shell for the Vienna Philharmonic concert was being built…it was the week after we were there.

Looking from the back side of the palace toward the garden…the marble building in the far rear is still not the end of the property. The orchestra shell is just to the right side of this image point of view and faces out to the garden. Chairs for paying attendees are in the front of the garden and it takes at least a year in advance to get a ticket and seat. The seats only take up about 1/4 of the garden and the remaining standing room only tickets are free to residents.

Turning slightly to the right to see the shell.

And while we missed the actual concert it will be on PBS sometime soon, here is a shot I grabbed from the internet of the palace lit up and the audience in place. There are dancers for some of the pieces on the program and they perform up on the balconies of the palace. We always watch the concert when it comes on PBS later in the summer and it is a pretty spectacular performance.

We hiked back to the bus and had another 30 minute ride back to the ship where we had dinner then headed off via another bus to our concert that had been rescheduled from the night before. This was a concert of music by composers that lived in Vienna…Mozart, both Papa Strauss and his son…and included a 9 or 10 piece orchestra plus a couple of singers and a couple of dancers for some of the pieces. It was in a fairly small venue in the middle of downtown with a wine break halfway through. We enjoyed all of it as well as enjoying the afternoon at the Palace despite the heat. 

As you know…the summer in Europe has been far hotter than normal with resulting low levels of water in the river…and few buildings in Europe have air conditioning installed.

Shortly after getting back aboard the ship it left for an overnight transit to Melk to see the abbey there and then on to Passau Germany.

Cyas.