Day 8 Vienna to Hainburg

We forced our refreshed buttocks back onto the bikes and headed out of the city centre. After a few false starts we soon reached The Prater which is the funfair area of Vienna and the home of the famous ferris wheel which appeared in the film The Third Man starring Orson Welles and Trevor Howard. A quick 15 min spin for an eye-watering €14 each seemed almost worth it.

After that we faced a 40km ride along the north side of the Danube almost entirely on top of a flood retention bank. 20 of those kilometres were in a dead straight line with no variation in profile, views or landscape. For most of that distance the river was completely hidden. This became more of a mental challenge than a physical one.

The monotony was broken by only a few things. The first was a series of bathing beaches beside the cycle track inhabited almost entirely by nudists who were proudly displaying their nutbrown overall tans as well as their not-so-well honed middle aged bodies. Suffice it to say that we were so busy staring at these mounds of buttocks that we missed a crucial sign for the Donauradweg causing us to have to retrace a couple of miles of our route – back past the nudists again!!!!

Another enjoyable break in the monotony was our passage right through the middle of the Zentraltanklager Lobau de OMV – or oil storage works to you and me. who wouldn’t enjoy a cycle through that on Sunday morning.

Then much further on we had been discussing how little wildlife we had seen on this trip and then lo and behold we spotted a little mole at the edge of the track. Sadly it had met its demise sometime earlier in the afternoon and so that didn’t really count. But then a few minutes after that we saw our first cows (10) a couple of goats, horses (2) and a small flock of sheep. These were the first actual animals we have seen since the start in Passau over a week and 330km ago.

We arrived in Hainburg around the middle of the afternoon. Consumed some cold beer, consumed some meatballs then walked into the town centre and consumed more ice cream from Daniel’s Eissalon. I can thoroughly recommend the honig (honey) ice cream. We ate it on the steps of a fountain overlooking St Philip and St James Catholic Church.