Report for Vienna

Posted on December 30, 2010

If your eyes glaze over when looking at people’s vacation photos, stop reading now and ignore all my blog posts through the 18th. We decided to take our annual family vacation in winter rather than summer and for these three weeks I will be reporting from Central Europe, a place that I have always found intriguing, but have never visited.

So we begin with the travails of travel in winter. We drove through the snow to beg our way onto the Sunday flight to Paris and then into Vienna because we were sure we would never get out on our scheduled Monday departure. We managed to get on standby and then watched as the snow fell harder, the wind blew harder, and flight after flight was cancelled. Only our Air France flight remained on the board. The desk agent reassured me that we would get on and that the flight would leave. Sure enough, we snagged four seats, we boarded, de-iced, and taxied to the end end of the runway, smug in knowing that Air France was not wimping out when all others had. The wind rocked the plane and then the pilot’s voice came over the intercom announcing that it was unsafe to take off. We were defeated.

Part Two to come next.