Gryphon Travel

Today we are saying goodbye to Germany and headed by train to Vienna, Austria.

When traveling this way, by train, subway, bus, and walking we do our best to keep it light. We each have a carry on sized suitcase with good rolling wheels. We prefer luggage that can be pushed fully upright as well as pulled behind. I travel with a seat cushion and stuffed in my backpack is a small pillow for back support. I have had tailbone pain in the past caused by a poor office chair (don’t get the ones with mesh seats, that’s not enough support for an 8 hour day!) so the ‘butt pillow’ is a necessity for me.

We each have a backpack, mine can be seen in numerous travel photos starting in 2019 as it has extra clasps for security, designed specifically for travel.

We each brought only 2 pairs of shoes, casual walking shoes and something slightly more dressy, but still comfortable enough to walk around cobble streets.

Because I was trying to be as light as possible I ended up with a color palette of mustard. I have several pieces in various shades that allow mix and match expecially of the layers.

The main train stations in Germany are called Hauptbahnhof, Hbf for short. Here you can catch a train, subway, or bus and they usually drop you off right at the City center. Most the signs are in German, but we usually find enough English to figure it out. But it all works the same as a train system in the US. Find your train on the reader board, find you platform, find a seat.

Finding a seat has been our biggest challenge actually. You can reserve seats, but it costs more and isn’t usually necessary. But the system for marking which seats are reserved and which are available took some learning on our part.

At first we didn’t see the small digital information above the seats, then once we knew where to look and figured out how to interpret it, we couldn’t find very many seats that were not reserved. On this last train, the way it was displayed was different than what we had come to expect and we found ourselves confused again. We asked some English speaking Germans and they were unsure too, so that made me feel better. We eventually moved a few cars back and found a whole car of unreserved seats and got ourselves settled.