Saturday, April 28: Zoo and drive to Styria

In the morning we took the ubahn downtown to a flea market where we found a firetruck which sprayed water. The kids went to the Lipizzaner horse show, and I took the grandkids to the Tiergarten Schönbrunn, a zoo located on the grounds of the Schönbrunn Palace. It was founded as an imperial menagerie in 1752 and is the oldest continually operating zoo in the world.  It is arranged like a wheel around a central point with koala, pandas, kangaroos, lions, giraffes, even rats and bats and an insect house. There are several overlook points, an overhead walkway , a treetop walk and on a hill overlooking the zoo is a cliff with a genuine Austrian farmhouse and lots of authentic Austrian animals. Tirolerhof Another long area overlooking extensive areas below was the rain forest. 
Rain forest-

 

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LOCATION

| Use Underground U4 to Hietzing, from there it is about 10 minutes to walk., Vienna 1130, Austria

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Naptime on the metro

 It was by far the nicest zoo I had ever been too--I would have loved to have had more time to explore it, but we were scheduled to continue our trip.

Rain Forest

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After zoo drove to Vogau in Steiermark (Styria) Austria. We had dinner with the Gröbacher’s.  Their property had originally been a farm and contained an old barn from Luis' father, possibly even further back than that.The house had two levels.  Luis' parents had lived in the lower level and Luis had added the upper level when he and Greta married.  Now their sons lived in the lower level.

We stayed at Weinhof Kugel, place belongs to  Christian and Stephanie in the Gemeinde, a vineyard on the hills with a gasthof.

 It had 2 bedrooms, a living room, and table, and a small kitchen.