Landgut Cobenzl

[click to enlarge] On Wednesday we decided to get out of town. We rode to the end of the line and then took a bus up to Cobenzl to find a petting zoo Rob had read about. It was hilly and sunny and the kids enjoyed feeding the animals. Joss in particular could not believe that we let him out of his stroller to play in the grass and skin his knees in the gravel paths. He was in heaven. Sebastian liked the baby chickens. Will liked the geese and we got to see an actual goose chase (the geese were domesticated, but it looked like a pretty wild goose chase to me!). Maddie loved feeding the lambs, which proves that the grass really is greener on the other side of the fence, and also that she would be a great shepherdess. She had the three in the photo above named and identified within minutes as Jeff, Josephine and Amelia.

Joss was eating a milchbrot and this hen kept sneaking across the fence until she grabbed the whole thing out of his hand and ate it herself!

[click to enlarge] There were cherry trees and Maddie asked if we could pick some cherries. They said "Pick as many as you want!" and gave us a newspaper cone to put them in. They were teeny tiny and so black. Very popular, as you can see.

[click to enlarge] This was called bauern golf, or golf for farmers. There were half a dozen stations where you had to throw a rubber boot and land it on a wheel, in a wheelbarrow, ring a bell, etc. The kids enjoyed it quite a bit. Rob thinks that Thanksgiving Point and the Little Farm at Tilden should get their own version.

[click to enlarge] We were hungry and went across the street and had lunch here at a very pleasant place. Wednesday seems to be schnitzeltag in many places, so we all had wiener schnitzel and potato salad with some of their local grape juice. We were supposed to have rain and it turned out hot and sunny, so there were very few overworked waiters and lots of city folk like us who had bussed out to the hills.

When we arrived at the bus stop, Maddie and Will had immediately recognized this as a place they had come last summer with their Kinder Uni Wien class. So after lunch we went for a walk through the wiese or meadow behind Cobenzl, looking for the treehouse that they had built with their classmates. They found it, and it was still there! So they clambered up and reminisced and we played on the swings and enjoyed the view of all of Vienna laid out below us until we were good and sunburned and scratched up and tired.

We made it back down and met up with our friends who had just arrived in Vienna that day. They came up to our apartment and just at that moment, HUGE drops of rain started to fall. It was an amazing thunderstorm that lasted for an hour or so, during which time we got the kids Hallo Pizzas from across our plaza, and the adults went down to the beisl on the corner and had dinner under a big umbrella outside. It was a pretty good day for a forecast of 70% rain. Which is good. Because it's forecasting rain for the next week!