As I alluded to in my opening post, I should really be qualifying the title for this post with the fact that the scenic route become more scenic lol. But first things first.

We knew we had a rushed morning ahead of us, so got up and got ready much quicker than we had yesterday's leisurely morning when he had woken up about 10 am. We went down for the breakfast at Flemings Hotel near Westbahnhof. It was one of the best (non-Indian) breakfast buffets I have ever had. There were choices galore even for vegetarians and though I didn't get to sample each and every one of them, I was stuffed in thirty minutes (photos will follow in the next post).

It was just our ill luck that I had not selected this place for yesterday (though on the flip side, that worked out fine as we were able to visit the Belvedere Castle) and that the next time we would be at this place (next week), we would need to leave way early and before breakfast time, as our flight would be out of Vienna at 8:55 am. Anyway I didn't dwell on it too much as we needed to be out and about asap.

Setting ourselves a deadline to start our return from wherever we were in Schloss Schonbrunn, so I could get a shower upon our return and prior to checking out at noon, we walked out back to catch the same tram we had taken last night to check out the palace area.

Without much ado, we reached Schonbrunn and walked around to the back of the palace - we didn't have time to go inside and were planning to check out only the gardens behind. Having visited a few similar castles/palaces and their gardens, I would place this right behind the palace at Versailles, followed by Belvedere that we visited just a day ago and the Mirabell palace in Salzburg. But then I have not seen that many palaces :-)

The garden area was truly vast. We kept walking until we came upon a little hill at the top of which there was a building that even housed a restaurant. Along the way, there were several photo ops that we took advantage of, culminating with a few photos from that building at the top from where one could see the palace building with the panorama of the city of Vienna in the background.

By now, we realized that it was time for us to make a quick getaway so we could reach our hotel in time and we moseyed out. We reached the tram stop in record time and got a tram within a few minutes which took us back to the hotel. While waiting for the tram, I took the opportunity of railfanning, as there were train tracks within a block from the tram stop, helped by the fact that the tram stop gave us an idea of how long it would be for our tram to get there. We loved this helpful feature.

Showered and changed, we quickly packed our stuff and left the hotel. We had a change of metro trains at Stephanzplatz, so we took advantage of that fact and came out of the subway to spend a few minutes inside the St Stephens Cathedral which we had been unable to do last night as we didn't have enough time. In spite of all that, we were at Wien Hauptbahnhof with more than enough time to spare for our train.

When planning this leg of the trip, I had been intrigued by the description on my favourite train site seat61 about the alternative scenic route. Normally, it is just a two to three hour train ride from Vienna to Salzburg. However, Mark at Site61 suggested the alternative route for those who wouldn't mind going by a longer route. This would put us on the Semmering railway with nice scenic views and we would need to change at Leoben. Purchasing the tickets was quite easy and so here we were.

Prior to boarding time, we had enough time to do some more railfanning (me) and get some to-go food (both of us).