Two blokes in a convertible

About a month ago, I was awarded Omniture Consulting Employee of the Quarter, which had a nice cash bonus attached to it. I decided that I wanted to treat myself to something nice. Knowing that we only had a couple of days in Austria as tourists, I decided that I would hire a nice car and spend a day driving around the Austrian country side.

So after a night of not much sleep (totally jet lagged), I jumped on the train and headed into Vienna to pick up the convertible BMW 3 Series Coupe.
Once I finally found the car hire place, I then had to find my way back to the hotel (about 15km away)... which was not suppose to be a problem because I had the GPS navigator. Unfortunately the GPS (now known as Amy) took a while to locate the satellites... so I found myself faced with driving through downtown Vienna, trying to remember how to drive a manual, on the wrong side of the car, on the wrong side of the road, navigating by gut. Amy finally found herself and I was fortunately on track.

So after picking up Sean from the hotel, we headed off on out 420km circuit around Styria and upper Austria. Amy kindly navigated us around some very picturesque scenery.



Sean and I have decide that having a convertible sports car is completely impractical... to the point where back seat was piled up with luggage due to no boot space… But it sure is fun.

At about 4pm we cruised into Melk, where we had booked a room in a nice hotel looking over the Dunube River valley. It was a very romantic location and people could definitely get the wrong impression when they saw two boys driving around in the convertible. We had just been joking about this when we walked into the double room we had booked to find only one double bed. Sean promptly tracked down the hotel owner who helped us locate to hidden fold-away bed.



We headed into historic Melk to track down a much needed beer and dinner. Melk is a very pretty, cobble stone type of town. It seemed to be full of the Austrian equivalent of Double Bay or Toorak type of people. We found a nice pub and went to work to attempt to translate the Menu using my high school German. I have discovered that my German is still there but I seem to be able to understand every second word in a sentence. Unfortunately these words are things like "and", "is", "a", etc. so ordering food is adventurous. Having translated "Resche Cordon Blur" to be "Bacon Done Fancy", we decided it would be safer to order schnitzels.

Once we got back to the room. I was completely trashed. Apparently I sat on the bed and asked Sean "Is it too early to go to sleep?" and by the time he turned to answer me, I was passed out.