September 5

Today we headed out for Vienna! We left the dorm at about 4:30 (too early for the free cafeteria dinner, unfortunately) and walked to the train station, about an hour away. We were plenty early and found our platform right away, so Erik scavenged around for food. He found this really interesting shop. A lot of the food is put hot into these little lockers, and you put in a Euro coin to release the door to the treat you want. We bought french fries from the stand, though, so we didn't use the lockers. Ketchup costs extra here, so we skipped it.

We're trying the kroket, next time.

The train arrives!

Our first train delivered us to Liege without incident, but the second one was delayed due to a bomb threat in Aachen. We had to wait a few kilometers outside Aachen for about an hour for the train station security to check out. Unfortunately, this meant that we missed our connecting train. When we arrived in Cologne, we were lucky enough to stop at the information station right next to a train that would take us to meet up with the train we should have been on in the first place! This second train was a faster train that shouldn't have been there at all but had been itself delayed due to fire on the tracks. We made up the hour we missed and made our connection in Frankfurt. After that, everything worked out for us to make it to our overnight train from Karlsruhe to Linz. We were so tired!