Turned Skyward

Our group of fifty is mostly gathered at the hostel in Vienna ahead of our actual start tomorrow (Friday) morning, so the bike lockup has gone from being busy to being pretty much solid bikes. My own is in the near row in the centre, not that you can tell in the crowd!

What’s actually interesting is how many bike tourists are staying here who aren’t part of our giant group. There are even posters up in the hostel about the bike routes along the Danube and elsewhere in Austria and the other hostels along those trails.

Or, jetlag-induced ramblings and notes, in lieu of an actual post…

Toronto Pearson airport was surprisingly empty, parts of it creepily so in the stretches between gates. The international departures area is the land of 10,000 iPads, one per seat for dozens of tables. Power and USB charging at every table too, which is nice.

Frankfurt airport is a giant, sprawling, chaotic monster. I’m still not sure how I got from my arrival gate to my departure, but I made it… Good coffee there, anyway.

Vienna airport is surprisingly elegant and well organized, although the signposting of the bike route unto Vienna proper leaves something to be desired.

Biking in Vienna is fun, taxis and pedestrians actually respect bike lanes, and theres a lot of bike infrastructure from a North American perspective. More on that in a future post, actually…

Anyway, I found my way to the hostel we’re all booked at, which is a classic German-style Official HI hostel: very well run, huge, scrupulously clean, and otherwise pretty boring. And full of teenagers on some sort of school trip…

Tomorrow we’re biking off toward Bratislava on the EV6 to meet up with another part of our group who flew unto Budapest and are heading up toward Vienna. Hopefully we reach Slovakia, it’ll be a new country on my life list!

More soon, hopefully with less rambling as I get rid of the jetlag!