After our hike we went back to Richard & Erika’s house in Ternitz, a small town about 1 hour outside of Vienna by train. Richard and Erika have a cute little house with a garden that rivals any botanical garden I’ve been to. They spend hours each week maintaining their yard, garden, and vegetable garden. Richard is very handy and seems to do almost everything himself, including building a treehouse for his grandkids, a new wooden deck/patio thing so when they have parties they can dance on a solid surface, and a self-refreshing pool that looks more like a pond to me but that they enjoy cooling off in on hot summer days. We lazed in the garden all afternoon and chatted while Erika brought course after course of food. Sometimes when I’m with the Austrians it seems like all they do is feed us!
Another cool thing about this couple – they bought a VW camper, shipped it to South American, and for four months last year drove through the continent! They gave us a mini-tour of the camper and it was awesome. From the outside, it looks like an unassuming van but it has all these bells and whistles that make it just like an RV! The roof pops up to make a bed in the ceiling, there is a hydraulic system that levels out the car in case you’re parked on a hill, and there’s even a stove and refrigerator inside.
The last part of our day was taking the camper to a local heuriger, which is only open a few weekends out of the year. They serve only food and drink produced on-site, and are only open every so often due to local regulations. This means that when they are open everything they serve has been butchered, baked, or brewed within the last few days. Talk about local and organic!
At around 5:30pm we said our goodbyes and Caitlin and I boarded the train back to Vienna. Fourteen hours later Caitlin was on a plane en-route to the United States.
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