One of the things I had been waiting to do until Catlin was in Vienna was to do a bike tour of the Weinerwald, which is a forested area outside Vienna. I had read about it in a travel guide and also heard about it from one of my professors, and heard there were areas of it lined with vineyards and heurigers (traditional Vienese wine places). I envisioned a nice afternoon bike ride through the woods, stopping at various vineyards along the way, and convinced two of my friends, Molly and Megan, to join Caitlin and I.
Our day started off with renting our bikes from a bike kiosk above one of the UBahn stations. They have bike rental kiosks all over Vienna, and this was one of the largest I had seen (with about 40 bikes). It’s a fully automated system, where you insert your credit card, pick the number of the bike you want, and the machine charges you an hourly rate. The bikes were street bikes with big baskets on the front, perfect for our tour of wine country. The next step in our day was to take the UBahn to the last stop on the Orange Line, which would put us the closest to the Weinerwald. I asked the Student Services coordinator at Webster about the policy for brining bikes on public transportation and she told me it was allowed on the UBahn in specially marked cars. Dragging our bikes through the station to get to the correct train and line was a feat in and of itself, and fighting the crowds to then get onto the train while making sure we were in the properly marked car was quite comical. The section of the car that was for bikes was a wide open section void of many seats where strollers and bikes would fit, and trying to balance our bikes (with no kick stands) without falling as the train stopped and started is a whole ‘nother story. We were practically exhausted before we even exited the train!
When we arrived at the last stop (after 45 minutes or so) we deboarded the train and exited the station, then everyone looked to me asking, “So where do we go now?” I had read on a website that from the station you should take a certain bus to get to the correct part of the Weinerwald, but from the Student Services person I learned bikes aren’t allowed on public buses, so I figured we could just follow the bus route and ride up to the woods. This as well as the rest of the path I had planned for us to follow for the afternoon turned out to be much more difficult to follow than expected.
We started out in the general direction of the woods (as my inner compass and nothing else guided us), rode for about 15 minutes, and then stopped at the first heuriger we saw. We weren’t really in the wood yet, we were more in a suburban area (well, as suburban as the last subway station of a major European city is) but we decided now was as good a time as any for our first wine crawl stop! The place was cute and had a nice outdoor area. One weird thing: They brought us out a basket of miscellaneous types of bread, and when we went to pay our check, they charged us for the pieces we had eaten.
We continued along the road leading to the Weinerwald and it gradually became steeper and steeper until we were going uphill constantly. It didn’t help that I wasn’t really sure where we were going, and everyone was getting a litttttlllllle frustrated. We decided to veer off the main path and take a side street, and lo and behold, another little tavern with a cute little patio. Stop #2 was complete with local construction workers taking their lunch break and staring at our group the entire time we were there.
We figured out that this side street had miraculously led us to the street that we should have been on, because we saw the bus I read about go by a few times. We biked for about 15 more minutes and entered the Weinerwald where our casual afternoon ride became an intense workout. The path I had envisioned lined with heurigers was no more than a rough and tumble hiking trail void of any heurigers whatsoever. The two hours we spent half biking/half walking our street bikes up and down paths that would have been rough on a mountain biker were some of the most physically demanding I have had during my time abroad. And let’s not forget – Molly M. was in a sundress and flip flops. We finally made it out of the woods, and with everyone wanting to kill me, we headed back to the UBahn. I guess I should have done a little more research and realized that the path I took us on was definitely made for walking, not for biking. Oops.
Luckily our trip back was almost completely downhill, and we all recovered quickly. On the way back into town, we rode past a cute outdoor café with a nice deck/patio and decided to stop for a drink. One drink turned into many and before we knew it SIX HOURS had passed!! We had a mid-afternoon snack and dinner before decided we should probably head back home. It turned out to be a great afternoon and we all enjoyed ourselves immensely.
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