Having made our way into Austria, the tour of Gottweig Abbey was very enjoyable. Surprisingly from a geographic perspective, the Wachau Valley is able to produce not only grapes for wine and apples, but also apricots for a certain number of months per year. The abbey, founded 900 years ago, (Benedictine order), at some point started cultivating these and became famous for the fruit, their own wine and a special dumpling they make. We chose the added segment of the excursion to watch a demonstration of how the dumpling is made and have one with a cup of coffee. It is basically a whole apricot surrounded in dough, boiled, then drained, rolled in a breadcrumb topping and served with apricot sauce. The taste is a lot like a deep dish fruit pie.
The abbey grounds are quite large with multiple buildings. Only three are original as a fire destroyed most of them in the 1700s. A few were added even later. The church is of course magnificent and the library (not accessible) has never been wired for electricity. With over 150,000 items, the monk work only in natural light as they don’t want o risk another fire. High atop the hills, the view is wonderful too.
We returned to the boat where we left almost immediately to make it to Vienna. We will be here three nights as about half the passengers opted to attend an evening Mozart concert . We go on a “panoramic City tour” this morning, and have the rest of the day and all tomorrow. I did not book us on their other excursions here so we will plan out what we are going to do tomorrow. I think maybe we won;t go anywhere extra this afternoon; we’ll see.
Oh, we also had a demonstration of making apple streudel from the pastry chef yesterday so it became a “pastry day”. The dinner specialty was herbed pork tenderloin which we both went for. We did share a carrot cake slice rather than each have one.
This is a long link; you can probably do another link and find something shorter..
https://visitworldheritage.com/en/eu/g%C3%B6ttweig-abbey-%E2%80%93-the-austrian-montecassino/176bf525-ebbe-4cc3-a4db-989158b4c760
