Road Trip to Vienna

Thursday morning 4am start. Radek and Jana arrived for us and we filled the car with cases and rucksacks, I haven't been up this early in a long time.  For the start of our journey to Vienna we would be heading south east from Prague on the D1 towards Brno, Petra quickly settled down and started to nod off, I find it hard to go to sleep because I am too excited about the trip, after about 80km we had a short delay because of a nasty accident- the car was a terrible mess. Then at about 120km we made a coffee and nature stop. This I needed as I love to grab a coffee even though I don't normally have it in the morning at home, and always seem to need the loo.  I noticed in one of the trucks standing in the petrol station there was a small white poodle peeking through the curtains which separate the cab from the sleeping section, I commented that it was probably the truckers’ girlfriend, which amused us for a while.

At Jihlava we took the E59 south along a single carriageway obviously this was slower but it's the only way to go. The benefit is being able to look around at the beautiful rolling Czech countryside, and creep through the fascinating old villages. It seems to me that each village has its feature pond somewhere in the middle, which I think doubles as a communal bath. In the fields is ripe corn (cereal) and occasionally corn on the cob. A thing I love about Czech is how much more commonly you will see owls and eagles or storks flying above these fields and roadsides. In fact, at the weekend I even saw a tiny lizard sat on a rock when we visited Podebrady. I also watched a bird of prey hovering above a field at the side of the road watching and looking for a tasty snack, and right then as I was watching he dived towards the ground, hit the deck, and returned to the air carrying a little mouse. I was so pleased to see the activities of nature for real and not just on the TV.

We continued on through villages Zeletava, horky meziricko, litohor, moravske budejovicke (a small town) with many photo opportunities that I managed to miss, such as 3 huge statues made of rolled hay stacked together and 'dressed up' to look like a farming family complete with a large dummy in the babies mouth.




Another surprise awaited us at the Czech-Austrian border, situated between the 2 is a kind of theme park. It looked like Disney world with big statues and models of dragons and knights. There were buildings that looked like Castles and atificial mountain lairs. I suppose this must have been a place to stop of and enjoy with the kids, I think they also had many shops and retail sections for Tax free shopping

I am not sure what a 'Tiercentre' is but as you can see from the photo we could see form the road a restaurant and pizzeria named 'Dr Dolittles Tiercentre'. A pizza would have been very tempting at this point but we just continued our journey.

Much of the journey the weather was a mix of light showers and sun and the view to my right over the sunflower fields was beautiful, under a gorgeous rainbow forming a complete arch. The fields we passed were colourful and interesting. I noticed how farming methods are different and this only strikes you when you go to a place and see it, here they farmed in strips across the field, so instead of just having one whole field with one crop, they farmed it in strips and I could see up to 3 different crops in one field.

The Rainbow looked stronger to the naked eye, but I still think the pictures are pretty.

Just at the side of the road, by a roundabout was this silo, I can only assume it was convenient to put it here because of the proximity to the fields but without any other farm buildings or machinery and stuff around it, it did look rather out of place.


This is my second trip into Austria and again I was impressed by the cleanliness of the country and the good quality roads. We were only about 60km from Vienna now and back onto motorway. At about 40km to go, we started to see the wind farm propellers, some people say these look ugly but I disagree and I think they are amazing to watch and so much better for the environment to produce energy.

There were a large number of sunflower fields which because of the way a sunflower grows with its head facing the sun (hence the name--sunflower) it reminded me of looking at a field of soldiers all in formation of rank and file. This picture isn't a particular good one to show you that, but I like it because it's very 'arty'.

I switched on my SatNav around about now to help us to our apartment which it did of course without a problem. The apartment was really nice, on the first floor of a typical block, it was what we would call a 2+1, which means apart from the lounge and bathroom, it has 2 bedrooms and a separate kitchen. It was a really comfortable place and only about 15 minutes from the centre.

We visited a couple of historic buildings high on the hill just outside the town, and from this view point you could see more of the windfarms and so much of the city and the country around it. The views were absolutely amazing. In the picture below you can see the island, a long strip in the middle of the river, this is manmade and stretches for about 15 miles through the city. The island itself is fantastic, and is used for recreation, paths krisskross their way along it and it's perfect for skating and cycling. We skated here on two of the days and really enjoyed it. It's not just for exercise though, many many people go here just to relax, sunbath (completely naked) take a dip in the river and barbeque their lunch.

The trip took about 4 hours door to door, which being so short makes it even more worth while visiting again, the distance was 280km and as the weather got hotter over the 4 days, my skin got redder. I will get a few more pictures of the trip to Vienna and the lovely historic buildings on here soon.