Vienna - Melk - Ragensberg - with any luck!

Flooded footpath

If only one of us (Brown girl family member) were travelling on our own, I'm sure that it would have just kept raining or perhaps they may have run out of our favourite cheese or something fairly insignificant like that, but because there are two of us travelling together the power of the Brown Curse TM. is stronger and instead the river Danube has flooded and therefore too dangerous to pass through the locks and to high to go under the bridges. The Danube Lock Police have closed everything down and all boat traffic has been stopped!




Naturally it's the highest rainfall they've had and the highest river level in 50 years!!! Thousands of works of art were being removed from cellars in Vienna in case they were damaged. Roads and walking paths along the Danube were all flooded, 3-4 metres above the normal water level.




So - we packed our bags and said goodbye to the Scenic Ruby (our home for only 4 days), boarded a coach and headed upstream past the worst of the flooding to where the River would be open again - luckily, this is also where another Scenic boat had stopped, not being able to go any further in the opposite direction. The Ruby's sister ship is called The Emerald and we will be swapping ships with those passengers in the evening - after a marathon bus ride. The Emerald is a year older than the Ruby and there have been a myriad of complaints for the older, whingier people about the Emerald not being as good etc... We took our cruise director - Tanna - who is fabulous, but we sadly leave behind all the other crew members. It's funny how you become a little attached. We loved George, our waiter on the Ruby. He made us laugh with his Hungarian accented stories about how he'd personally cooked our meals and personally went out into the fields that morning to pick the mushrooms for meal that he'd prepared for us that night, etc.... He didn't cook the cake, but he knew the lady who did. He was funny and everybody loved him. You could tell this - on the last night on the Ruby, all of the crew were introduced to us and when George's name was called out - everybody clapped louded and whooped and he did a victory lap around the buffet table - hilarious! The next ship's crew has a lot to live up to!

The banks of the Danube have broken in some places and so the roads have been closed which means that our plan of coaching along the river is replaced with plan B - take the high road. So we headed inland in search of higher ground - it's like "Man Vs Wild"! and into the outskirts of Vienna. We reached the peak of the mountain and it was FREEZING! I'm talking a wind chill factor of like - 0 degrees. From there we headed for Melk where hour by hour and layer by layer everyone stripped down to the bare essentials - it was the beginning of the German heatwave we'd heard about. We now have blue skies and no rain = yeehah!




xxx