Tag: Vacation

Simply Raw Bakery, Vienna

There are the obvious places in Vienna where it’s easy to get something to meet your dietary needs: looking at you Hard Rock and TGI Fridays – they do good food, are extremely well up on cross- contamination and were well aware of how to adapt meals to meet our needs.

However, one of the big stand out places on our visit wasn’t one of the big chains but a little café called Simply Raw Bakery.

“A cute little vintage café which only held around five tables, plus bar seating. This meant it was cosy, although it never felt cramped, even when it was full. Tea was served in little teapots and the clink of china filled the spaces between the chatter.

The breakfasts were amazing – tasty porridge with fruit was my favourite – I didn’t know that porridge could taste so good!!!

+ Cater for Gluten Free, Dairy Free and no refined sugar

+ Beautiful decor

+ Wood-burning stove keeps things toasty on cold Vienna days

+ Amazing food – everything was gorgeous and very filling

– A little expensive – but perfect for a treat!

Walking Tour of Vienna

When on a short city break, it can sometimes feel like you are trying to cram everything in. One of the best ways of seeing a lot in a short space of time is to take a walking tour.

Luckily, on our trip to Vienna, the hotel was offering a free walking tour of the city and we decided to make the most of it. When picking a tour, I like to look for ones that don’t just visit the popular tourist spots; I can do that perfectly well on my own. Instead, I like to pick tours that offer something a little different, usually places that are just off the beaten path. The free tour we joined was just the ticket as it was centred around the Jewish quarter and surrounding areas, slightly out of the main shopping areas.

We spent a couple of hours hearing tales of historical sites down the twisty streets next to the Danube. The architecture was incredible, often showing glimpses of the changes made to buildings across the years: Art Deco, Baroque and Gothic in places, splattered with an array of Roman style statues.

Stories of bar tenders who were so drunk they were mistaken for Plague victims and thrown into mass graves, visits to the places Mozart studied and incredibly ornate churches behind plain wooden doors: the tour was excellent and gave a sense of Vienna’s history.

As this tour took place on the coldest day of our trip in Vienna, we rounded off the morning with a hot drink in a toasty café. Once we’d suitably warmed up, we were off again; this time making up our own little tour locations as we found out way back towards the Danube.

The Secret Location for the AllSpark and Megatron – Otherwise Known as the Hoover Dam

My main memory of the Hoover Dam was heat. It was blisteringly hot and that’s coming from someone who had just spent a day or too baking in the Vegas sun. The problem with the Hoover Dam is that there is no shelter, none at all. So if you are planning to visit, lather up on sunscreen – trust us it’s worth it!

Once you get past the heat, it’s easy to be blown away by the sheer size of the Hoover Dam. It. Is. Huge! If you have vertigo / get dizzy with heights, this could be a challenging place. One peak over the edge of the wall had my head spinning. But it was worth it. The views are incredible and as we visited on such a sunny day, the colours of the dam walls against the blue of the water and sky was striking.

Wandering Beeb was enthralled with the sheer engineering feat of building something so huge. Being a bit of a history buff, he was completely fascinated with the history of the build and there was plenty of information dotted around the dam to keep him busy.  He worked his way around the site, absorbing information on the construction and the stories behind the dam.

I’m a bit more visual, so I spent my time snapping pictures and taking in the site. I also wanted to get my geek on by spending time looking at the place where they stored Megatron’s body in Transformers (the dam was the base for Sector Seven in the Transformers movie).

I’ve heard a number of people talk about the costs at the Hoover Dam, and it’s true, you can be charged for everything; a tour inside the building, a tour around the site, for drinks (don’t forget that heat I mentioned before – make sure you take loads of water!). However, if you want to go on a budget, just don’t take any of the tours! We spent an hour or so there and didn’t spend a penny.  The site has lots of information dotted around and there is plenty to see without paying for a tour.

A product of a design competition winner, the winged statues guard the entrance to the dam. The unusual method of installing the statues involved using blocks of ice, which melted in the sun to help the engineers to get the placement and finish for the statues just right. Known as ‘Winged Figures of the Republic’, they sit on jet black bases, reminding me of those two statues Atreyu had to pass through in ‘The Neverending Story’.

With over one million visitors each year churning through the Hoover Dam site, you can expect any visit to be busy, however I think that we were quite lucky. We stopped off at the dam fairly early in the morning on our route to the Grand Canyon. It was a long day but it was well worth it to avoid the crowds.

Whether your visit is due to an interest in the history of the dam, to wonder at the sights or (like me) to see where the AllSpark is hidden (Transformers again!), Hoover Dam is a great place to visit and is guaranteed to get you some great photos.

New Year, Old Goals, New Focus?

As new year rolls around again, we’ve been looking back on some of our posts from last year and reviewing the goals that we set for 2018.

This time last year, we’d set ourselves the goals of doing more short breaks and perhaps getting another big trip in to somewhere exotic. None of that happened in 2018! Instead, the money we would have used to travel ended up helping us to buy a house. Houses are expensive little f@&kers (who knew?!) and that meant we had no spare cash for travelling.

I really struggled with that (Wandering Beeb is far more relaxed than me!) and a combination of ants in my pants, a travelling bug and the inability to relax unless I’m physically away from home meant that I scrimped and scraped to cobble together some cash to manage a couple of days away in Plitvice Lakes and Split in Croatia. So what if that meant that we had no flooring in the house (in a contest between flooring and travel, travel wins hands down, right?!).

All of the expenditure on the house has meant that we needed to change our outlook on travel this year. Local places needed to be seen through fresh eyes and we explored things closer to home. We wrote about our approaches to this here.

One of the things that has really helped us to do this is the ‘Manc_Wanderer’ account on Instagram (check it out if you are an Insta person). Seeing our home town through these amazing photos really forced us to look at our surroundings with fresh eyes.

So, this leads me to 2019. Our goals are a combination of looking a places close to home with fresh eyes, building in smaller weekend city breaks and (hopefully) getting away on a bigger trip later in the year. Yes those goals sound familiar. We set similar goals last year but 2018 had its own ideas. Our goals might not all happen; but that’s what goals are, things to aim for, not things set in stone. Ether way, it will be an interesting ride.