Austria - Vienna

Why Vienna? Vienna is so cool!! Our daughters loved the culture, music, great parks, good food, one of the best palace / museum / playground complexes, it’s just a great city to visit. Schönbrunn Palace: The Schönbrunn Palace is one of our kids’ favorite places to visit in Vienna. The gardens behind the palace are free and are an awesome place to walk around and enjoy a picnic of Haribo gummies. A favorite is the Neptunbrunnen (Neptune Fountain) is located at the foot of a hill in the garden, and it serves as a centerpiece that adds to the grandeur of the landscape. The fountain portrays the Roman god Neptune, who is often associated with the sea, as well as other water-related elements. It's a large, sculptural fountain with Neptune standing on a shell-shaped chariot pulled by sea horses and surrounded by other water creatures. You can walk behind the fountain and peek out and get some awesome photos. Schönbrunn Zoo: The Schönbrunn Zoo is one of the oldest zoos in the world and a great family destination. It features a wide range of animals and educational exhibits, making it an engaging experience for children. It was opened to the public in 1779, making it one of the world’s first public zoos. Playgrounds - Spielplätze Schönbrunn Palace has one of our favorite playgrounds! At DIY Travel we love finding cool unique playgrounds. They balance out the lots of walking and sightseeing and make for fun memories. This playground we’d spend a couple hours at because it’s awesome! There’s a maze area with legitimate hedges and you can explore through it to get an elevated platform that is the destination. There’s also a separate maze. Museums I haven’t been to any museums in Vienna. I’ve done some research and Vienna offers numerous museums designed to engage and entertain children. The ZOOM Children's Museum, for instance, features hands-on exhibits that encourage learning through play. The Technical Museum and the Haus des Meeres (House of the Sea) with its aquarium are also popular choices for families. Churches The most famous cathedral in Vienna is right downtown - St. Stephen’s Cathedral (Stephensdom). Architecturally it looks cool, you can climb the south tower of the cathedral and look over the city, and there’s cool catacombs and crypts underneath that you can visit. Our favorite part is the stained glass windows, which have fun scenes to try to identify and make a cool serene atmosphere inside the cathedral. Opera Vienna has one of the most famous opera houses in the world, the Vienna Opera House (Wiener Staatsoper). It’s beautiful inside and the opera really is top-notch. Here’s our secret - get standing room tickets, watch an act, then leave. Day Trips from Vienna Vienna is a great home base for visits throughout the beautiful Salzkammergut, or the Austrian Lake District. Our favorite town in that area is Hallstatt. Check out our guide for our day in Hallstatt. How did we prepare? If you’re going to an opera, listen to the music before you go. Being familiar with the music - even if opera isn’t your favorite - makes the experience much more enjoyable. Just have it on in the background, or perhaps listen to some specific arias of what you might see. We have girls so they liked to dress up and go somewhere fancy. Our visit to the opera our kids were aged 7-11, and I was quite surprised with how well they followed the plot and the show even without reading the subtitles. I think they saw it as a challenge to figure out what was going on. :) We have German ancestry so it was easy to get our kids excited enough to learn some basic German phrases. Duolingo was helpful with this. Getting them to say it to Austrians? A little more tricky for us, but I managed to coax out a “Danke” and a “Auf Wiedersehen” here and there. What do we still want to do there? How did we get there? DIY Travel espouses doing things on your own. Our research found a couple of different ways: 1. Train Deutche Bahn - the German rail company - has a pretty easy search engine for something like this. How did we get around? Where did we stay?