Audrey (or others), any suggestions for other cities to couple with Vienna in addition to Durnstein? Trying to think of easy ground links to make up a maybe a 3 week trip. Thanks for the Durnstein info.
Did you find any guides you prefer? Rick Steves has one on
Vienna, Salzburg & Tirol .
It seems like August and the very beginning of September might be a good period according to this weather picture:
Average Weather For Vienna, Austria
If I recall right, I read in Rick Steves that Vienna gets a lot of business travel (conventions?) in September so prices are higher maybe.
We decided not to visit Vienna in August, because quite a few cultural activities shut down that month. It also can get a little warm - or at least people complain about that, especially in Salzburg where many hotels don't have AC. Summer is quite rainy in Salzburg and some parts of Austria June-Aug. In general, July and August are the busiest tourist months by far (as in most of Europe), so with the wet weather, crowds, and Vienna schedule we waited until September. It did look like the hotels were a little tougher to book for mid-Sept - something is definitely going on Sept 15-18 as lodging seemed to be really full then.
This is not a "city" per say - but the outskirts of Vienna (Vienna woods) is a famous wine growing region, and we have one day set aside to visit the area near Kahlenburg, enjoy the scenery, hike through some vineyards (do part of city wanderweg 1 or 1a), and then hang out at one of the wine taverns in the late afternoon before catching a tram back to Vienna inner district.
Don't forget Melk near Dürnstein. Dürnstein seems like a lovely place to spend a night or two. We decided not too just for logistics of moving into yet another hotel room. But if we were spending more time in that part of Austria, we probably would have. There are buses running along the Danube there, so if you have a base it's easy to get back and forth between towns.
Several people go to see the Klosterneuburg Abbey from Vienna, something we won't have time to do.
And we consider the Schönbrunn Palace to be a "day trip" from Vienna due to the immense size if you really spend time on the grounds. It's probably a 2/3 day trip at least. There is enough to do in Vienna inner district to use up several days. We're going to be cramming all our museum visits into a single day.
My main Vienna e-reference is the Rick Steve's "Best of Europe 2014" that I bought even before I had settled on this destination. This also has Hallstatt and surrounds treated in depth. I also got the mini-ebook Snapshot Munich, Bavaria and Salzburg for covering other parts of the trip. There is some overlap.
He has a pretty good free app with free downloads of walking tours for different towns and some podcasts with general info. His videos are on-line as well as several destination articles, so you can pick up a lot of info without needing to purchase much.
But honestly most of the info I got on-line. Browsing tripadvisor.com and "things to do" in various locations helps consolidate what would be most interesting to us and how many nights we might have to stay in a location to do what we were most interested in at our pace.
