2025 Biking Trip

May 24, 2025

Two bicycles leaned against a stone barrier

Our bikes!

Tato, my father

Mulled wine. From Dominoes?

May 25, 2025

We pass by a flea market

Burger King was the worst fast food on the trip, but had a good view of the town square

May 26, 2025

We drive to pick up new camera lenses for me!

A woman walks in front of a white apartment building

I just really like this photograph

This apartment complex is where we got the second camera lens.

May 27, 2025

Our bikes leaning against a train station bench

We learn the hard way that bikes can add a lot of stress to getting on a train quickly

Lunch in Rybnik

A helmet hangs from a train luggage rack

My father gets comfortable on a train ride

We relax on the umpteenth train ride of the day

May 28, 2025

Arrival in Vienna!

View of construction site outside of our hotel room window

A bad view, but a good location

A dozen parking restriction signs litter a sidewalk

12 signs for "Don't park here" seems excessive

My father stands next to a statue of Strauss

My father stands next to a statue of Bruckner

We visit a garden of famous composers

Vienna's subway system map drawn by an 11 year old and a crayon

Konstantin's map is a good start, but doesn't help us navigate the subway system.

A couple photograph something with their phones. There is a bright building through the doorway, so the door arch and the couple are silhouetted.

My father sits at a bench and looks at his phone

This generation and their phones...

A beige street with a "no horse-drawn carriages" sign.

No horse-drawn carriages allowed. This sign was probably a lot more common before 1910.

May 29, 2025

We, and a million other tourists tour the grounds of a royal palace

The main palace building

A side view of the palace building with tourists taking a selfie

My dad takes a photo on the same platform

From another angle

The interior of an orangery with orange trees in pots

I learn about an orangery, and there's even a bush maze.

After this, we walk up this hill with tall grass

And this concludes our trip to the palace grounds.

And to round out the day, we see a performance at the local Opera

The cast holds hands at the end of their performance

May 30, 2025

We leave Vienna for Salzburg

One of my mom's favorite beer gardens was here.

As we got within a few hundred feet of the place, the sound of chatter that came from above the walls was so full, that I didn't understand what the noise was until I was just outside.

Rows upon rows of bikes are parked outside the beer garden.

Bike parking!

My dad stands pointing a giant barrel of beer

6,800 liters. "Travel size"

A guy does a handstand on top of a table in a beer garden

A man does a handstand in the beer garden

We drink our beer, and continue on.

Mozart's house. There are a hundred tourists milling about it at any given time.

Also in Salzburg is Mozart's childhood home. It's one of the less architecturally interesting buildings I've seen in Europe, but the interior courtyard is very nice.

Miscellaneous photos in Salzburg:

The sign post for Museum der Moderne. The text is set in bold Helvetica, and it's made of metal.

A man takes a photograph of a church spire, and it's so high up that he's almost looking straight up.

A bus stop has a sign with digital arrival estimates.

And we hit golden hour with some wonderful views on our bike ride to our booking on the outskirts of Salzburg.

A view down the street that our booking was on

May 31, 2025

A maine coon sits on a piece of slate in the ground

We wake up to spot a cat in the yard next door

We take a short bike ride from our accomodation to a gondola base and get brought up to the mountain that we saw yesterday.

A zoomed-in aerial photo of the street that our booking was on

I put my new zoom lens to use, and spot our booking. You'll have to guess which one it was.

My dad looks through a pair of pocket binoculars

Notice the little black dots in the image? Those are flies. There were so many flies on top of this mountain, and I hated it.

If you can look through the bugs, however, the view was truly amazing.

The view is visible through two other onlookers

Locks are attached to a chain fence. Out of focus and behind the fence is the mountain range.

We take the gondola back down, and I fire up Google Maps to navigate us back to the ranch.

However, I learned the hard way that Google Maps decided to route us through someone's farm path and driveway.

Embarrassingly, the owner was sitting outside, and just watched us bumbling foreigners bike through his property. Deciding that I'd like to stop trespassing, I download a purpose-built bike navigation app when we get home. Highly recommended.

June 1, 2025

We leave Salzburg, and actually start biking around Europe.

The train we take out of Salzburg actually goes all the way to our destination, Innsbruck.

We get off in Jenbach, which is about halfway to Innsbruck.

However, instead of going towards Innsbruck, we end up doubling back a little bit to go to this small town called Rattenberg that my dad heard about.

So, we bike 20 miles in the wrong direction, but I get rewarded with some good coffee and ice cream.

My dad poses with his packed bike outside the gate for Rattenberg

It rains a bit in town, but we were able to hide in a gift shop for most of it.

We continue biking.

Along the way is the Swarovski museum / factory / thing that people visit.

We balk at the tour price, use their bathroom, refill our water bottles, and head on our merry way.

These are a lot like highway signs

We stop for dinner in a town called Hall in Tirol, and I have a pizza with runny eggs on top of it. A tolerated surprise.

I take a Facetime call while on the bike

A Facetime call while biking was an interesting thing to try out

Finally, we make it to Innsbruck.

June 2, 2025

We make a wonderful breakfast in our accomodation. There's a kitchen with pots and such, so we only needed to buy some cooking oil to fry our eggs

We visit the famous 'Golden Roof', and end up souring our memories by getting some truly mediocre beer from the McDonalds just down the street.

Because it's truly a terrible day, it's moody and dark and it threatens to rain, I convince my dad to see the new Mission Impossible movie. Conveniently, there's an IMAX theatre within walking distance.

My dad takes a close-up photo of a bike-counting sign

My dad and I don our waterproof biking ponchos, as it's the only waterproof clothing we have

For dinner, we stop at a restaurant called Burenwirt that's on the uphill walk back up to our booking. Here, I discover what a radler is. I'm in love.

June 3, 2025

It's a much nicer day

My dad takes a photo of the cat that lives around

This cat lives in the same house that we rented!

We take yet another series of lifts up yet another mountain. Again, the views are great. No surprises.

Tourists look over a short wall across Innsbruck

Tourists look on a cantilevered concrete viewing platform. Someone in the foreground extends their finger to point at something

A man climbs up a wooden staircase embedded in the hill

Clearly, we took the easy way up

Always photograph the photographer

My dad winds up his arm to throw a snowball

A photo taken a moment after the snowball left my dad's hand

I face aerial bombardment from a previously trusted "family member"

Then, we go back down, and bike across the valley to visit the olympic ski jump.

When we got there, we thought we were out of luck, as we couldn't find the entrance, and Google Maps said it was closed on Tuesdays?

We end up finding the entrance, and we see there were some Red Bull athletes practicing for a 400m race that goes up this ski jump slope. The ticket lady eventually came, and we bought some tickets to visit.

This was our view through the gates

The red bull guys hang out on the viewing stairs

The red bull guys get some photos in

A graphic telling people not to piss off the edge of the hill is spray painted onto a metal building

Signs like these are posted for a reason

My dad poses as if he's doing the ski jump

My dad practices his form

My dad poses by the olympic rings and torch

We bike across town again, and eat a snack on the rooftop of this hotel. All I can remember is how hard the bread was. Not a fan.

The view from the rooftop bar

June 4, 2025

We leave Innsbruck

We stop at a church along the way

My dad photographs a scene in the church

My dad smiles as I take a photo of him taking a photo

Always photograph the photographer

My dad stops at an address along the way of a guy who let him stay the night some 40 years ago.

Unfortunately, he's died, but my dad talks to his son's wife, who tells him that next door lives the brother of the guy my dad was looking for. We walk over, and my dad manages to exchange a few words in his Duolingo German.

We continue on. Along the way, we encounter cows grazing along the bike path. It was magical to hear cowbells and just silently bike alongside them.

Through some shrubbery, my dad is seen stopped on his bike, surrounded by cows

My dad surrounded by cows

My new bike app was rock-solid until here, but we ended up going down a thin, stony path that seemed to stop. There was no internet, and so I looked at the two already-loaded paths in the cycle app, and just picked one.

That path was a bad one, as it was ridiculously steep for our loaded bikes. We were both scared of pricking a tire, and I dropped my bike more than once, and slipped a lot. We ended up making it to a road.

In a misguided attempt to get us back on track, I use Apple Maps to continue on. Furthermore, scared of being on the main road, I followed the Apple Maps path, which was much more steep than going along the main road.

We were battered from walking up an overgrown path and taking a huge uphill detour, but we had a bigger challenge

We race against time to meet our 7pm check-in deadline. The Apple Maps ETA was 6:40 something, and that estimate kept slipping further back.

We end up getting there on time.

June 5, 2025

We leave Austria and make it to Switzerland

my dad stands with the Swiss speed limit sign behind him

Unfortunately, we did not come prepared with stickers to add to this sign

A view of the road from a steeper side road

Our stay for the night was just to the right, and essentially on a 'scenic overview' stop on this road

June 6, 2025

Sneaking further into Switzerland, we take more main roads. Lots of hills.

Note: arrive at Hotel Adler

Note: walk up to church to view at night

June 7, 2025

We bike to our first campsite of the trip. My dad's rented out a parked trailer RV

We take a funicular to the top of another mountain. It gets incredibly foggy, which makes being on top of this peak surreal.

June 8, 2025

We take the Bernina Express around.

We hastily bike to the train station in Pontresina, afraid we'll miss the train. We make it in time.

It's this famous train line in Switzerland that cuts through the mountains without needing geared tracks

So the train swirls and swirls and swirls, and eventually, we arrive at Alp Grum

I sit down to rest for a minute here

It gets foggy again, which looks very comfortable

Rejuvenated, my dad and I hike down to a lake below

There's a nice little restaurant down here, but we don't get anything

We hike back up, and manage to purchase our return ticket 3 times, because our internet was slow, and it didn't load the confirmation page.

Luckily, my dad is able to refund the two extra tickets

The train actually takes us to another small village, where we get lunch.

And finally, the train from this small village back to our camping village is the coveted "panoramic view" version.

It's nicer to look through, but the curved glass and unopenable windows actually makes this less photogenic than the normal version. It's certainly snazzier, however.

The conductor notices that we bought way too many tickets, so it appears that the reservations didn't completely disappear even after being refunded.

More importantly, he gives us a train-shaped box of chocolates, and branded juice boxes.

Finally, we're back in Pontresina.

We find a little gift for my dad - all throughout our vacation, I've seen the Siemens logo on countless trains, subway cars, and infrastructure, but today, my dad spots a door lock on the train station's little shop that was from where he worked - a smaller building access control company called Vanderbilt.

June 9, 2025

A detour to Lichtenstein

Our extremely wonderful host manages to pick the bags off our bikes during the short transfer between our train from our campsite and the train that goes to Lichtenstein. It saves us from lugging 40 pounds during oun bike-through of the small country.

We visit Lichtenstein, and manage to recreate an old photo my dad had the last time he visited

Scottish surprise

We go back to Reichenau-Tamins, and seeing how steep the bike was to our accomodation, we're thankful that our bags were already up there, waiting for us

The town looks stunning in the late evening sun.

We learn that the husband of the host breeds bunnies, and he happily shows us the little guys

We share a wonderful dinner with the host. She explains that the fog we see in the mountains is actually from the Canadian forest fires, which explains why the visibility in the mountain ranges has gotten low.

June 10, 2025

And it's the same in the morning, a wonderful breakfast

We continue

We stop at the largest water fountain in the country.

We make it to our second campsite, which is

June 11, 2025

We conquer the Oberalpass and recreate the 007 photo, again

And we bike to another interesting booking, this time, in a tibetan hut.

Again, we're saved by the owner, who catches us biking up in the evening, and nabs our bags off us to make the bike ride up much more tolerable.

June 12, 2025

Zurich!

June 13, 2025

We visit the local university