Our tour returned to its starting place, Vienna, on May 15, 2015 after 12 days on an Insight Vacations bus visiting major cities and key sites in Austria, Hungary, Poland, Germany and the Czech Republic. If you count our drive-through of Slovakia while heading north from Budapest to Kraków we visited six countries.
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May 15 was our last night with the tour – and our last Vienna night in a 5-star hotel! We were happy to see our local expert from May 4, Peter, on the 15th. Peter took us to the Hofburg Palace and then inside Stephansdom, Vienna’s great 13th C. cathedral. We walked around the old parts of town, including the Jewish section and had a peek inside the simple, Romanesque St. Rupert’s Church, c. 800 A.D., with the oldest bells and stained glass windows in Vienna. Peter also showed us two things related to the plague that hit Vienna in the 7th C:
- The Pestsaüle (Plague Column), featuring Leopold I with his huge Habsburg-inbred jaw, and
- A restaurant called Der Liebe Augustin, after the famous 7th C. piper minstrel named Marx Augustin who brightened up those scary plagued times and wrote O Du Lieber Augustin, a simple, forgettable ditty that somehow is remembered still today – well… until my day anyway. The restaurant has an upward staring, yet somehow iconic, Augustin, complete with pipes, in a cellar below a barred trap door as you enter the place. He is sprinkled with hundreds of bright, copper coins.
Later, Kari Anne and Alex took us to a lovely farewell banquet in the Palais Auersperg that was followed by a beautiful concert in the same palace put on by the Vienna Residence Orchestra. From the first chord I realized we were in for a treat. They played, sang and danced favourites by Mozart and Johann Strauss II, with the de rigueur performance of the Radetsky March by Johann Strauss I.
A beautiful end to a fabulous bus tour of Central Europe. We spent four more fascinating self-planned days in Vienna. More later on those…
Some photos from may 15:
mightyturk 
What a wonderful trip/tour you had. So many intriguing tidbits of info you share and… your photos are great!
Your appreciation means a lot, JoAnn. I enjoy the prep and the follow-up almost as much as the trip itself. So nice to know when someone else enjoys… Thank you…