We slept in a little this morning but not Queenie style, and went down to our free breakfast. Mom packed our stuff. That's a job. Check out from the Stephanplatz was 11am. We took the cab to Wien HBF, the main station in Vienna. It's huge and under total construction. Our train into Slovakia leaves at 12:21pm and we're there 45 minutes early. No first class on this one. We're traveling legal now with our passports in Mom's neck pouch underneath her clothes. We shouldn't have to access them anyway.

The 1 hour train ride is uneventful. I called the hotel to arrange a limo (actually a cab) to meet us at the Bratislava train station for €10 or $13. The train arrived on time at 1:27pm but the station is old with no elevators or escalators. We've seen this before so here we go. We get the luggage to the top of the stairs. I take two bags down to mid level while Mom waits up top. I return to the top (about 12-15 steps) and grab the last two while Mom makes her way down. I take these two bags all the way to the bottom as Mom continues her decent. I leave two bags at the bottom, return to mid level and retrieve the other two bags and bring them down just as Mom gets to the bottom. We repeat this feat going up the other side. We do this to go down under the other tracks and come up at the exit. Sometimes it's up and over, sometimes down and under.

The driver was there to meet us and took us near our hotel. The hotel is situated in a pedestrian area of the old town so we rolled our suitcases two short blocks over cobblestones to get there. The room here is beautiful with a sitting room, nice big bedroom, free breakfast and a window looking out over the action.  

We headed out to explore the streets and shops. Mom likes that. I took my usual picture at a McDonalds although we never eat there. Just a picture of the menu board. I bought Mom an ice cream cone, me too. Only 50 cents each. Martin would like the beer, $1.50 for big glass. It's actually cheaper than milk or soda. The prices are now starting to come down even more. Dinner for two $25. We sat outside like everyone does here and people watched as we ate. I had vegetable soup, sauerkraut and potato balls.  Mom had the soup and Hungarian goulash. Very tasty.

We walked around a bit before heading back to room. Lots of young people like Nickole here at night. We left the window open as usual and could hear them laughing and cackling into the wee hours. Tomorrow we'll spend the morning here but we have to catch our train to Budapest and Romania about 4pm tomorrow and spend the night on the train. This will be new. Our next stop will be Brasov after that. No Internet on the train so we'll see you in Brasov.