A year ago we had to cancel “Romantic Danube,” the Viking Tour Company’s River Cruise because we came down with Covid a month before departure.  With the travel insurance money, we went on our own to England, Holland, France and Germany, our journey chronicled here.

That experience motivated us to try again to squeeze a trip into the two-week interval between Jan’s City Council meetings.  An injury to her “good” knee  during a December workout at Gymnazo required her to walk with a cane, which made the prospect of a cruise especially appealing.  But we agreed to spend a week following the river trip on our own in Salzburg and Munich.  Before departure we reserved lodging and concert tickets and read in books about the river and its cities, including Carl Shorske’s Fin de Siecle Vienna, Politics and Culture, Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday, The Danube, A Cultural History, by Andrew Beattie, Mozart, A Life by Paul Johnson.  And we watched films set in central Europe, including The Third Man and Museum Hours

The weeks before departure concluded several open-ended involvements: the sale of Knoll House–our Canadian property since 1995–to Tai and Theo, our ten year tenants and lifelong friends,  our grandson Ian’s passing his qualifying exams as Airline Technician, our grandson Lucas’ acceptance in the five-month  Grizzly Academy boot camp, our daughter Claire’s promotion to full-time employee at the Cal Poly Food Service, Jan’s organization of. her campaign committee after a long-pondered decision to run for re-election, and completion of my Prefumo Creek Restoration and Enhancement Project.

Guided by uniformed employees of Viking Tours through the transfers at Heathrow in London and at Budapest we arrived at the Viking Gullveig in time for late afternoon lunch buffet, nap and dinner.

Entering the dining room we noticed four jolly looking folks sitting together, one sporting a bald head and an impressive lumberjack beard, and sat down at their table. Ice was broken with the discovery that they were Canadians–residents of the Maritime province of New Brunswick but familiar with our second hometown in British Columbia.  They all were or had been involved in secondary education, one about to celebrate retirement, his wife still teaching, another a high school principal, and her husband, a former teacher who became a nuclear power plant operator and spent time at Diablo Canyon in San Luis Obispo.  We shared many onboard meals with these people and a couple more who joined the table.

The boat itself was sleek, elegant and comfortable, graced with well appointed lounges, restaurants and outdoor deck space in high style Scandinavian taste,

decorated with visually arresting, and aesthetically pleasing prints and paintings,

The most notable was the wall size painting at the top of the main stairway portraying the ship’s namesake, Gullveig, a goddess associated with the love of gold, with magic and sorcery, and with the ability to return to life after being burned to death three times. This figure in Norse mythology seemed appropriate to the Viking company and to the city of Passau we visited, home of a German literary version of those stories, The Nibelungenlied.

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By breakfast time, the boat had docked at a long quai in Vienna which included several Viking River Cruise ships and  others with Swiss, Italian and French companies.  The Danube doesnt run through the city center, so in late morning we  were bussed downtown, divided into groups by differing mobility capacity.  Jan and I were led through the crowded streets listening to a guide’s halting comments through a radio earphone.

As our procession arrived at St. Stephen’s Cathedral the morning’s rainshowers were giving way to a brilliant sky illuminating lacy patterns  of light and shadow on the stone.

Inside the dark interior, Jan discovered a  tucked-away portrait of the structure’s 1513 architect she identified by his square and compasses, Anton Pilgram.

The cathedral plaza extended pedestrian walkways in several directions surrounded by elegant 19th century buildings.

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We were allowed a full day on our own until 11:00 p.m. when the boat was to depart. Jan and I rode the metro to the Karlsplatz station to reach a long planned destination–the Kunsthistorisches Museum. Along with the Alte Pinakotek in Munich, we hoped to add this visit to past peak experiences at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the National Gallery in London, the Prado in Madrid, and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

The edifice displays symmetry and variation like that of the Opera House, but here the whole structure is reflected by the identical Natural History museum building across the wide  plaza surrounding an enthroned statue of the Empress Maria Teresa.  She ruled the Austro Hungarian Empire from 1740 to 1780 as an “Enlightened Despot” and achieved great military, diplomatic, and economic  success.

Arriving before the 10:00 A.M. opening time, we faded into an organized tour group to enter the building early. The security chief  noted that we had the wrong pass but Jan’s cane persuaded him to  allow to us sit in the resplendent atrium until the general public was admitted.

Our  first stop was the gallery housing paintings by Peter Breughel the Elder (1525-1569. We had both studied most of them in college, and I had a large print of The Tower of  Babel on the wall over the desk in my bedroom all through high school.

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The overnight cruise upriver was supposed to let us off for a day in the antique German city of Krems, but an unexplained circumstance substituted the Abbey of Melk.  Remembering the narrator of The Name of the Rose as Aldo of Melk, the switch seemed promising. However much of the visit was spent waiting in a stationary bus and standing in line. Rather than a medieval monastery with a real scriptorium, Melk had been rebuilt in ornate Baroque style during the 18th century and has recently been turned into a crude theme-park like museum financed by its sale of an original Gutenberg Bible to Harvard University.

Back on the boat we entered the Wachau Valley, famed for its mountainous banks, ancient castle ruins and vineyards which produce the Gruener Veltliner wines we enjoyed on board and in Salzburg and Munich.

Beyond the valley we docked at Passau, also known as “Dreiflussstadt,” a city with rich heritage and  a unique  position at the confluence of three navigable rivers, the Danube, the Inn, and the Ilz

I took an early morning walk to a park at one of the confluence points, where I felt the power of the merging flows that periodically flood the city up to 20 feet above the street.  I could sense the age-old strategic and commercial value of the location.

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For this last portion of the cruise, I was up before dawn hoping to spend more time with the river on its twisting trajectory.  The sunrise through the moving shoreline trees reflected on the surface of the water flowing in the opposite direction.

Around one turn a grandiose architectural monument modeled on the Parthenon in Athens came into view. It’s called “Walhalla,” the incongruous Wagnerian name of the Hall of the Germanic Gods. The edifice was conceived by King Ludwig I of Bavaria in 1807 and constructed between1830 and 1842 as a Hall of Fame filled with busts of “laudable politicians, sovereigns, scientists and artists of the German tongue“–part of the effort to create a unified nationalist identity.

Soon we glided into Regensburg and docked within view of its Old Stone Bridge, built by the City in 1200 to facilitate  trade between Europe and the Orient and repeatedly destroyed and reconstructed. Since its graceful arches were too small to allow for the modern commercial vessels plying the river, a parallel bypass canal now accommodates them and the crossing is reserved for pedestrians and bikes.

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Next morning we debarked and taxied to a hotel near the railroad station.  I braved a rainstorm to wash clothes at a laundromat using rudimentary German to get a kind customer to help negotiate the protocols for payment.

Now fully independent, we checked out the railroad station from which we were to depart the next day and the nearby city park.

On the tram back downtown for dinner, we met a gaggle of girls in their cups on a bachelorette party celebrating the engagement of one of them.  In answer to the question about their hats, they said “Cows..she’s marrying a farmer!”

The old City Center was bustling with another celebration–a Gay Pride parade.

We watched and listened and then darted into a shady courtyard adjacent to the Cathedral where we found a charming brewery restaurant.

It felt good to get on the train in Regensburg heading for Salzburg and start our own itinerary for the second week of the trip

We didnt know what the place we selected to stay in for three nights called “Gaestehaus in Priesterseminar”–Guesthouse in the priest seminary–would be like, but it sounded intriguing.

When the taxi from the train station pulled up in front of the cathedral facing a plaza in the center of the old city, we thought the driver was lost.

But the number on the majestic portal was correct.

After checking in at the reception desk we approached our room on the second floor through a courtyard graced with fountain and formal garden.

The elevator was modern and the room itself  light and spacious, but with an austere flavor–no tv, minibar, decorations of any sort–looking out through heavy double paned windows on a restaurant plaza below.  Adjoining it on the corridor was a closed doorway with a sign indicating that the rest of building was reserved for the seminarians.

Eventually I came across more information :

Archbishop Johann Ernst Graf von Thun und Hohenstein, who was nicknamed “The Donor”, is responsible for the construction of the Trinity Church and the seminary. A three-part complex was built in 1693 according to the plans of the later imperial court architect Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach. The Trinity Church was the celebrated architect’s first sacred building. Since 1699, the seminary has been the training centre for prospective priests of the Archdiocese of Salzburg.

I was curious about unusual conglomerate stone which formed the pillars of the arcade surrounding the courtyard and the steps leading off  it down to a crypt.

It turned out to be a typical feature attributable to Salzburg’s geological environment:

… at the northern rim of the Northern
Calcareous Alps, within a basin overprin-
ted by glacial activity during the latest ice ages. As
a result, parts of the city hills are composed of
Mönchsberg Conglomerate which has been inten-
sely exploited as building material for monaste-
ries, churches, palaces and fortifications for many
centuries… The material was quarried since the Roman times
till the middle of the 20 th century.

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Next morning Jan and I went separate ways, she to the Residence museum a few steps from our lodgings, where the young Mozart and his family lived from 1773 to 1787.

I on a tram to Untersberg, the high peak visible throughout the City.

There I boarded the gondola rising 5000 feet to the summit ridge.

The early ascent offered views of the river valley and mountains containing the City marked by the Hohensalzburg Castle.

To the south unfolded the high Alps

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Next morning, before checking out I tried to cram in an ascent of the Kapuzinersberg. It started in a tunnel through the building to its base

and ascended past walls of the cloister built in 1600

signage about its geological formation

and episodes of its history (more…)