Sunrise at Schönbrunn!

I woke up at 6:00am to a phone call from Zan, who was letting me know he was almost to my place. Why 6am? Because we were heading to Schönbrunn palace, the former summer home of the Habsburg family, to watch the sunrise! Abe and I had planned to do this Friday, but he wimped out, so we did it Saturday instead. I made hot chocolate for the cold morning, which we transported in regular mugs because it's all we have, and we went and hopped on the U-Bahn.

We got to Schönbrunn shortly after and I hoped to God the place was open, which it was, but every closed gate we passed, Abe made some snide pessimistic comment. We got to the main gate which was open and went searching for the entrance to the gardens. We had about 20 minutes to sunrise and could not find a direct route, but eventually got into the gardens and started heading toward the hill, where we planned to watch the sunrise.

Of course, at 12:30 the night before when we made plans to do this, none of us thought to check the weather, so it was cloudy and we all knew we weren't really going to see much. But once we reached the top of the hill, we settled onto some benches and watched as the city of Vienna got slightly brighter and the street lights started going off.