Sunday June 21, 2009 - Our last day in Vienna

Today was our final day in Vienna, the only musical event being a mass in Laxenburg, about an hour outside Vienna. The choir sang during the local mass and also gave a recital afterwards. Laxenburg was the summer seat for the Hapsburg dynasty, and the palace and church ("kirche") are still there, nicely restored. The choir boarded coaches at 8AM in choir attire and we went straight to the kirche:
Here's the outside of the church. As you can see, yesterday's wet weather has gone, and today was a beautiful sunny day -- up in the high 60's again and perfect for sight-seeing.
Here our chaperones point out the poster for the Sunday attendance of the Gunn HS choir.
The church is rather small -- our choir and chaperones alone could have almost filled it had we all sat in the pews. The townspeople who attended seemed to enjoy the music quite a lot. Below Bill is rehearsing the choir:


Here's the choir singing after the mass, a recital for the residents. The church is very light and airy, with some beautiful paintings.


After the mass and performance, the kids changed clothes and we headed to a surprise destination which wasn't in our itinerary. Vienna has a park, the Prater, centered around a large ferris wheel (Wiener Riesenrad) -- once the largest in the world:

Today it's center to an urban park and an amusement park, a good place to relax and enjoy some of our final day:







After leaving the Prater, we then embarked on a guided tour of the Ring Strasse -- the street that surrounds Vienna along where the old town walls used to be -- and of some other sites. This is in the Hofsburg Palace:

Clouds started arriving in the afternoon but never turned to rain, thankfully.
Once our guided tour was finished we went to the Alter Bach Hengl Restaurant for our final dinner together. The specialty was the Wiener Schnitzel, and everybody had a great time relaxing -- with all the performances complete the kids felt pretty good.













The Bach Hengl also had music, which even had some of our kids dancing (you can see that in Don Anderson's photo gallery when he uploads the pictures)
We returned to the hotel at about 9:30PM, enough time for some socializing before we packed up our stuff and turned in for a quick nap -- we're up at 3AM for our coach to the airport, and then back home.

It was a busy final day, with music and fun and memories that the kids & chaperones will carry for a long time.

Before I go, here's a video from the Votivkirche performance:



The quality's not so great -- I shot it with my little Canon camera, but it gives you an idea of the performance. I'll be uploading the other numbers after I get home, where my bandwidth is bigger -- it won't take days to upload there.

Next post will be from home!