Goodbye Austria, hello Germany!

It was an early wake up day today, it's been a while since we've had to set an alarm, but with an 8:44am train to catch, we did not want to be late. despite setting the alarm, I still woke up before it went off, so got up and had a shower with plenty of time to get ready, so decided to FaceTime Mum and Dad.

It was nice to see them both and also they had my brother and his partner at their place, so I got to say hi to them too. We has breakfast at the apartment and left at 7:30 to give ourselves plenty of time to get to the station. We caught the metro and arrived at around 8:00am at Wien Hauptbahnhof. This gave us loads of time to grab a drink and find our platform for the train.

We had not reserved seats as in the past we've found this is a bit of a waste of time as there are always plenty of unreserved seats. The train pulled up right on time and we got on, and sure enough, true to form, loads of seats available and typically German, it was a lovely train. Plenty of leg room and super quiet carriages.

We left right on time and travelled through the picturesque country side at high speed. It was such a pleasant journey, certainly very different from our Romanian train experiences :-)
We arrived into Nuremberg right on time at 1:26pm. Our hotel was a short walk from the station, however it was raining so we had to use our umbrellas so as not to get too wet.

We are staying at an Ibis hotel here in Neuremberg, it's quite a pricey place for accommodation and this was reasonably priced at $300 for 4 nights. We checked in and I have to say, the room is quite nice, it will certainly be more than sufficient for the next 4 nights.

After checking in we too, a walk around the immediate area around the hotel, we did not wander too far as the weather was not great and we also want to spend the full day tomorrow seeing the sights. We went for a coffee and a bite to eat, took a bit of a further stroll before the call of German beer getting the best of us. We want to a little Paulaner beer hall and had a couple of beers, and of course a pretzel!

We headed back to the room to freshen up before dinner, I was getting quite peckish as lunch had not really filled me. For dinner we found another beer hall not far from the hotel and enjoyed a lovely pork roast with sauerkraut and potato dumpling!

Once we'd eaten dinner, we both felt it was time to call it a day, feeling very tired after almost 5 hours on a train and having woken so early. We too, a walk back to the hotel, enjoying the evening as the weather had turned quite pleasant (hopefully it stays that way tomorrow).

It's been a pretty quiet day, as days of travel generally are. But it's been quite relaxing and we enjoyed our German beers, as always we feel very at home here in Germany! It's great to be back.

Tomorrow we will explore the city of Nuremberg, there is a lot of interesting history here and I'm sure there are going to be lots of photo opportunities!

So folks, whilst I sleep, I hope you enjoy your Monday :-)