Currently I’m sitting in an outdoor cafe trying to eat a ridiculously large pastry with a ridiculously small fork. But that is the only complaint—if you can call it that—I have on this beautiful morning in Vienna. The rest of the Guideposts inspirational travel tour is visiting the Habsburg Summer Palace a few miles outside the city but I stayed behind to explore a little on my own and write this blog.
This inspirational travel tour has been, well, inspiring. And as always it’s the people who are most inspiring. Take one of our travelers, Debra, from Austin, Texas. Now that her children are grown and she sold her internet marketing business, she’s using our Oberammergau trip as the start of an extended vacation…three years, to be exact. She’s going to travel the world in order to grow in her faith. She’s also a diver and plans to hit as many of the world’s 20 best deep-sea diving spots as she can. It’s hard not to be inspired, right?
Then there’s Brigitte from Florida, who talked her husband into letting her go on this trip after reading about it in the magazine and feeling that the Lord was prompting her to go (her husband is not much of a traveler and needed to stay home and run the family business). This is the longest they will have ever been separated (they were high school sweethearts). Ten years from now, Brigitte vows, she’ll return for the next Passion Play with her husband in tow. “I have to expand his horizons,” she laughs. We hope they’ll be traveling with Guideposts.
The thing that everyone is saying they love about this tour is its relatively small size (80 people), comfortable accommodations, unhurried pace and unusual points of interest, religious, secular and especially historical. We had a blast yesterday leaving Hungary when we stopped at a famous Hungarian stable, had a hearty country lunch and were treated to the most amazing and daring display of horsemanship you can imagine. Tonight we’re all having dinner together (Wiener schnitzel, anyone?) then attending a concert of baroque music.
All right, I’ve managed to dispatch the monster pastry without getting too much whipped cream on my iPad screen. Now it’s off to find the Leopold Museum, which positive thinking blogger Amy Wong says I must see. I fully expect to be inspired.
I’ll check in again from Prague, our last stop before the Passion Play at Oberammergau.
Photo courtesy of Habsburg’s Summer Palace-Schloss Schonbrunn, Vienna, Austria
