Day 2 (has it really only been two days?) began with a gorgeous sunrise over the river valley in the small town of Dürnstein. We were deep in the heart of the stunning Wachau Region, famous for its apricots, wine, and apricot wine. In the morning, we had the opportunity to hike up one mile to Dürnstein Castle, the crumbling ruin of a thousand-year-old castle and sometime monastery high up on a hill overlooking the town. I, of course, was so ready for it. Hiking is my favorite hobby. I can't say as much for the rest of my tour group, but I still had a good time. The view was stunning. I could see miles down the valley in each direction, and the remaining walls towered straight up out of the cliff side, wrapped in thick green ivy. The castle is known to have existed by the year 1192, when Leopold V, Duke of Austria, imprisoned King Richard the Lionheart in Dürnstein Castle following their little dispute over who really won the Siege of Acre during the Third Crusade. Since they were both technically on the same side in that Crusade, it seemed a little petty, but Pope Celestine III kicked it up a notch by excommunicating Leopold and sending Richard off to a slightly fancier castle-prison the Holy Roman Empire.
We eventually made our way back down the mini-mountain into the town, where we purchased some really delicious apricot liqueur from Wiener Wachau, a fairly popular local winery and distillery that has set up shop in a few Wachau Valley towns. We walked the cobblestone streets of the tiny town, which very quickly became packed with cyclists as it got later in the morning. Dürnstein is a very popular stop along almost every cycling tour of the Wachau Valley, and the narrow, ancient streets were clogged with bikes and ringing with the sound of bicycle cleats on stone. Instead of taking the main road back to the docks, we walked down a footpath through the vineyards and enjoyed some sunshine on our way.
We had lunch on board the ship and had a very scenic sail west toward our afternoon port of call. Mid-afternoon, we arrived in Melk, another charming Wachau town, this one famous for its disproportionately massive Benedictine Abbey. The abbey probably had more rooms than there were houses in the town below, and it is still a functional abbey and primary school to this day. It seems the abbey was a bit of a vacation home for the Austrian monarchy, which would explain its massive size. The empress would build the monks a massive facility with several huge chapels, stunning gardens and orchards, and an impressive library, and in return, she would get to treat it like her own private country home whenever she got sick of Vienna. The abbey is famous for its ceiling murals, which are skillfully painted trompe-l'œil pieces that trick the viewer into thinking the flat ceiling is a dome open to the sky in the center. The shockingly yellow striped abbey really stands out, perched on a hill 50 feet above a town half the size of the building. In a town so ancient that all the roads are narrow cobblestone paths, I can only imagine that the trek up to school at the abbey gets annoying pretty quickly.
We sailed on toward Grein in the evening, enjoying a wine tasting on board the ship. Doing their best to cater to elderly Americans, the delightful Austrian winemakers produced a series of cloying sweet wines for us to try. Wachau Valley wine comes in three charmingly bizarre, legally defined quality categories: Stonefeather Grass, Playing with Feathers (also called Falconry), and Smaragd. I'm told Smaragd is a type of small green lizard, but that really doesn't make it any less confusing. It was certainly an experience to taste Wachau Valley wine while cruising up the Danube, but I'll ask for something drier next time.
We spent the night docked in Grein, and in the morning we disembarked to hop on a bus to Salzburg, the City of Mozart, which politely requests that you please stop referring to it as the City of the Sound of Music. Seriously. They're quite upset about it.
I spent a hot second spinning around in a meadow anyway.
Salzburg, oddly enough, has one of the most elite shopping streets in Europe. The narrow Getreidegasse is several hundred years old, lined by buildings that lean in toward each other at quirky angles. But the most notable thing is that every single shop sign on Getreidegasse matches. Each one is handmade by a blacksmith after it passes an extensive approval process by the city council. You won't see the famous golden plastic arches over the Salzburg McDonald's -- here they were told is brass arches or no arches.
We had a fabulous wander through Salzburg. I spent quite a while in Mozart's birthplace, where he lived for the first 17 years of his life and composed many of his most famous early works. My mom was less interested in it than me, but hey, you only Salzburg once. Mozart is so beloved in his home town that their signature local delicacy is named after him: Mozartkugeln. It's a little chocolate truffle made of milk chocolate nougat wrapped around a thin layer of pistachio nougat and a whole pistachio, then dipped in chocolate. They come wrapped in one of two distinct patterns of metallic foil, always embossed with Mozart's face: red and gold for the factory-made kind, or blue and silver for handmade. Despite how incredibly delicious these little treats are, they've had the tragic misfortune of having their Austria named translated into English as "Mozart's Balls".
Our tour guide was an especially gregarious middle-aged gentleman with a particularly dry sense of humor, a well-oiled moustache, and a very low tolerance for shenanigans. He somehow managed to corral us all at the south end of the Staatsbrücke and shepherd our less mobile group members up and across the bridge for a delightful walk through the gardens of Schloss Mirabel, another set from "The Sound of Music" that seems to endlessly annoy the locals. I imagine this man could very successfully herd cats.
We embarked on the scenic 2-hour drive back to Grein to meet up with our ship, winding our way through the stunning Alpine landscape, full of gorgeous green meadows, deep pine forests, patches of wildflowers, and little cottages that were probably all home to a cheerful goatherd named Heidi. We kissed Austria a very sad goodbye as we drifted upstream throughout the night and the next morning, and over breakfast, as we sailed past a tiny marker that our captain pointed out to us as the German border, all I wanted was to stay floating up that river forever.