Central Europe: September 8 1998

Graz

This day Eva's Dad gave us the car to drive to Graz. Graz is the nearest large city to Weiz; the are only five large cities in Austria: Wien, Linz, Graz, Innsbruck and Salzburg. We would eventually visit all but the last two.

I had to drive since Eva cannot work a manual transmission, so this was my first driving experience on the Autobahn. I must have been doing 200 MPH!

Just kidding Herr Jettmar! Actually, the Austrian Autobahn has speed limits, although higher than the U.S.A. equivalents. It was around 80 mph.

But anyhow, we drove into the center of town. Graz has the oldest contiguous area of historic buildings. That is, there is a very large section of town which is completely uninterrupted by anything built this century. We walked through part of this section on our way to the Uhrturm clock tower which is high on a hill overlooking the city. Eva knew a lot about this city so she could point out things like historic shops, statues and brothels.

To get up the hill to the clock tower, we rode a funny cable car which runs on a rail track set at a 45 degree angle up the hill. There are two cars on the track and they are connected via a pulley at the top, when one goes up the other comes down. Once at the top we walked around the old fortress and Eva told me stories of going there with her grandfather when she was little. I also learned some of the history of the fortress. The name of the hill and fortress is Schloßberg and it was built in the 1100's. It was a very tough nut to crack and was used defensively even up to a seige by Napolean's troops. The hill is riddled with secret tunnels and passages, in fact on our way down we passed through a newly opened tunnel. Even Eva had never been in one of the tunnels before.

When we drove back to Weiz we took the country roads instead of the highway. The drive was full of hills and curves and little villages scattered about in the night. It's very dark in the Austrian countryside at night.

The old square with the clock tower above	A view of the hillside
All aboard!	The trolley/lift as we enter the double track section.
A view from up top	The clock tower

The top two pictures are from a post card Eva's mom sent me, the weather didn't change that much on our climb up!