Walking with Sigrun
Today Sigrun introduced us to the Vienna Woods around Tulbingerkogel. She and Oma often visit the Gasthaus Popp in the area for lunch and Oma wanted to make sure we got to try it out before we left. Sigrun knows we like to walk in the woods and she is a regular hiker as well, so she invited us to join her and walk to Gasthaus Popp from a few kilometers away, giving us a chance to explore this neck of the woods. It was a marvelous walk. The weather above the woods kept shifting from cloudy to sunny, making for a wonderful lightshow beneath the canopy of trees as bright speckles of light would shift and dance into being and out again. The trees were tall and the ground beneath was full of summer-green growth. Nathaniel enjoyed balancing on the trunks of trees that had been blown down by storms earlier this year. Along the way we came to the Leopold Figl. Warte, a tower in the woods that looked out over the ridge into the Wachau. We could see Tulln clearly and even as far away as Stift Gotweg. Someone had organized a cool lesson in scale by marking the center of the nearby town of Königstellen as the Sun and then identifying landmarks that lay on the (to scale) orbits of the planets around the area. The tower was on the orbit of Uranus. Lunch was nearer the orbit of Neptune. And lunch was delicious! This was easily some of the best food we ate away from home in Austria. The kitchen of Gasthaus Popp is a traditional Austrian kitchen, Oma made a point of saying they didn’t even have a microwave. The food was absolutely homemade and my hendle-nature was melt-in-my-mouth fabulous. Helga and Heinz brought Oma up from Vienna and we had a very nice time all together. Afterwards, we returned by another path to Sigrun’s car, picking blackberries along the way. It was a wonderful afternoon. ...Eric
Saturday, 4 August 2007