Gym's Ramblings: Summer 2022: The Danube Caper.

Upper Belvedere Palace

On August 19, 2022, our hero and his lovely bride were comfortably quartered in Suite 569 of the Bristol Hotel. The bed was comfortable and it served as an ample platform to sleep off the wiener schnitzel they had consumed the previous evening. The room had a large sitting area furnished in the style of an upscale cigar lounge and although most of the furniture wasn't very functional, there were two very comfortable leather armchairs that Gym used to plan a number of forays into the various Viennese points of interest. The hotel deal included breakfast, so every morning Gym and Mrs. Gym would have a good breakfast and then go back to the room to put the finishing touches on the day's plan.

Their first foray was to the Belvedere Palaces which were just 2 kilometres away. It was a pleasant hike from the Bristol and a chance to test out whether Vienna was pedestrian friendly. The route itself took them away from the old town and the Ringstrasse, to a very nice park in front of Karlskirche (St. Charles Church). The park itself is aptly named Karlsplatz and it has a large reflecting pool there that you can stand behind and see a mirror image of the church on a calm day. Hike around the church and past the ornate French Embassy and and then you can cross the street to a massive fountain erected in 1945 to honour the Soviet soldiers that fell in the Vienna Offensive. From the fountain you are about 200 meters to the entrance to Lower Belvedere Palace.

Belvedere was built for Prince Eugene of Savoy. Eugene was an extremely successful military leader for the Austrian Empire. His win-loss ratio was on the scale of Lord Marlborough of Britain and U.S. Grant of the United States. He routed all the enemies of the empire including Louis XIV of France. Beating King Louis was very gratifying for Eugene because he originally wanted to join the French army but Louis told him to get lost. Eugene served Austria for three Emperors and won so many battles that the rewards started to make him very wealthy. And just like rich people do today, he built fancy palaces and collected artwork to decorate them. Belvedere was just one of his many estates. The property includes an Upper Palace and a Lower Palace both full of art exhibits. A massive rococo garden separates the upper and lower palaces. Gym and Mrs Gym did a thorough exploration of this estate over 2 full days.

You can walk around the gardens for free but need to pay to get into the palaces. Our undaunted adventurers checked out the gardens on the first day they went to Belvedere and by the second day they had purchased a Vienna Pass which gained them access to both of Eugene's cribs.

In between the two trips to Belvedere, the Vienna Pass was good for a guided tour of the Vienna Opera House. Situated right across the street from the Bristol hotel the opera house was very handy to our travellers. The opera house was also a good landmark that was used when Gym needed to find his way home to the Bristol.

After traipsing about all day our exhausted wanderers would seek refuge in the hotel bar. It's a comfortable hole-in-the-wall place, off the hotel lobby, called The American Bar. The walls are adorned with pictures of celebrities and you can listen to Frank Sinatra crooning in the background, between sips of Aperol Spritzes and very good gin martinis.