Ohhh Vienna: What to See and Do in the Austrian Capital in Three Days

The February half-term holiday was approaching and I decided that I needed a trip to look forward to following a very trying few weeks at work.

This is where “Ryanair Roulette” steps in- you check the cheaper airlines to see where has the ideal combination of cheapest flight prices along with most convenient dates and times, then you check hotel prices and availability and you go from there. It’s not about finding the absolute cheapest holiday, but about having an open mind to go somewhere that might not necessarily be your first choice but somewhere that presents itself as an economical and convenient opportunity for this particular time.

Obviously, there are other factors to take into consideration such as weather, safety, and whether or not the place does actually appeal to you in some way otherwise there is no point.

This strategy has lead me to Bordeaux, Tallinn, Porto, and now Vienna, the capital of Austria.

Everybody close to me already had holidays lined up around this time and Andrea, my partner, had just returned the day before after a month in Italy studying hard towards his final veterinary specialism exams that will take place in Frankfurt at the end of March. I moved abroad to Córdoba alone, took several trips to Málaga and Madrid alone whilst living in Spain, and I’m no stranger to driving across the country to visit family alone, but I had never gone on a holiday travelling abroad totally alone. I decided it was time to take that adventure.

Continue reading “Ohhh Vienna: What to See and Do in the Austrian Capital in Three Days”

From Austria with Love: Learning to Ski in Höchfugen!

This blog entry comes two months after the trip but testing positive for Covid the day after our return and feeling unwell for around four weeks then the everyday busyness of work and a trip to my old home city of Córdoba, Spain, have delayed this a bit!

I’m a secondary school teacher and was part of a team of 5 staff who took 50 of our students on a ski trip to Höchfugen in the Zillertal region of Tyrol in the Austrian Alps, for a week. We were supposed to go on this trip back in 2020 but for obvious reasons, it was postponed a couple of times until February half term, 2022.

We were originally meant to travel for 28 hours via coach and I was not exactly enthralled at this prospect and had started scouring online for a decent neck pillow, so when it was decided that we would fly into Salzburg instead, it was excellent news for all. It was still a full day of travelling, however, with an hour’s coach to Manchester airport, a few hours waiting, two hour flight, then 2 hours to Höchfugen.

We were tired and freezing when we all arrived into the dark, chilly, Austrian night around 10pm with snow quietly falling down all around.

Continue reading “From Austria with Love: Learning to Ski in Höchfugen!”