I present to you….King Liam of Vienna
June 20, 2024
Schönbrunn Palace
Before leaving Vienna one goal was to get a Viennese breakfast. We headed to a traditional cafe for the classic: soft boiled egg, croissants, bread and jam. We then made our way to Schönbrunn Palace. The palace is huge and we have already given up on the idea of trying to do any real museums or tours with Liam. So we opted to check out the children’s portion of the museum and the grounds instead.
The children’s musuem was a great option as it still let us see the inside of the palace with the rooms and activities geared for kids. Liam got to dress up as a prince, sit in a thorn and play in each room. His favorite was the dining room, where he got to serve us including real china. He was truly living his best life. After this, we knew we wanted to start at the highest end of the grounds and work our way back, so we made our way to the Gloriette. This is one the highest point of the grounds so it offered amazing views of the palace and Vienna. This was built in 1775 as a place for the family to eat meals and view the grounds.
King Liam
We decided to stop in the zoo, which is the oldest zoo in the world, built in 1752 as a menagerie. It is a UNESCO world heritage site and is often ranked at the top zoo in Europe. I wasn’t really expecting to be impressed by a zoo, but it turned out to be great! We enjoyed wandering through and seeing all the animals and eating all the ice cream. We saw a black bear incredibly close up and piglets nursing. Liam enjoyed watching the polar swim play around and asked if he was taking swim classes. We ended up spending so much time there that we had to skip the hedge maze.
Our final stop for the evening (and time in Vienna) was to Prater Amusement Park. We started with the Ferris Wheel which dates to 1897. We enjoyed seeing the models they had set up throughout the lobby and seeing the history of the park. As we went up, we got great views of the city and park. Liam got to see all the roller coasters and begged to ride any of them. We wandered about the park for a bit and took in all the overwhelming sights and sounds. Liam found every vehicle themed ride he could and had a great time. We ended the night with on the creepiest, Disney-ish themed ride (similar to It’s a Small World) that had scenes of various Disney movies. Liam just kept asking what the puppets were and I honestly couldn’t answer.
Final Thoughts on Vienna:
This city is clean! Maybe the cleanest city we have been to. At one point, there was a cleaner in the playground picking up non-existent trash.
We absolutely love their transit system. There is a tram to take you just about anywhere and it felt like anytime we would walk to our stop there would be one coming in the next minute or so. It made getting around so easy!
There are also no delays on the transit here. If a tram is scheduled in 2 minutes, it will be there right then.
While every building immediately feels opulent, we enjoyed that we stayed in a more local area and got to experience some different areas of the city and the vibes that came with each one.
We were initially nervous of how we would be treated with a kid, as online forums made this seem like a big challenge. However, we found everyone we encountered to be incredibly kind and helpful.
Reminds me of the Chicago Worlds Fair ferris wheel
