More news, more Europe. After a brief respite in Kyrgyzstan we’re back on the road to Europe – this time for some photography in Hungary and Austria with a quick family side trip to Slovakia.

Austria is a personal long-time favorite – check out the Austria archives to get a pretty easy overview of the best things to do in Vienna but, in short: the city is spectacular. Great museums and architecture, great music and coffee shops, surrounded by beautiful forests and vineyards and all of it either imminently walkable or surrounded by public transportation.

Basically just outside our hotel is the Belvedere Palace which, in addition to being a glorious building and gardens, is also a nice little museum space. If only for proximity, there’s every reason we should be able to find time to go through at least once. I’d like to get her out to Schloss Schonbrunn as well but, knowing how short on time we’ll be in the city, it may not make the cut just because of how far it is from the center.

As some point I’ll definitely be dipping back into Vienna’s coffeehouse culture as well – this may be with my wife or perhaps after she leaves, but either way it certainly is something that we’ll be doing.

My wife might find it a little excessive, but we’ll probably be going to a concert while we’re in Vienna. For starters, we’re staying just down the road from Karlskirche, which is lovely anytime but particularly when filled with the sounds of classical music. And, of course, St Stephen’s is both my own namesake and the center of the city so that’s maybe in the cards as well.

Further, museums. We’ll probably visit Vienna again one day soon with my stepdaughter in tow but, for the moment, it will be just me and the wife. Which means: all the museums. The Albertina remains a favorite from previous trips to Vienna, and I’d like to visit the newer Albertina Modern as I haven’t seen it before, though we’ll certainly also make a quick visit to the Imperial Treasury inside Vienna’s Hofburg Palace.

Beyond all that, we’ll be revisiting one of my favorite experiences from previous visits to Vienna: a Wachau Valley Bike Tour. I’ve done this just once before, in 2014 with a couple of friends that I met up with in Vienna and Prague, but between the excellent wines to taste and the cultural highlights of the Wachau Valley it’s an easy decision to repeat the experience now that I’ll be back with my wife – who, incidentally, loves wine. Topping it all off is the incredible Melk Abbey at the end of the Wachau Valley. If time permits we’ll expand on the Wachau experience with a visit to the beautiful heuriger on the outskirts of Vienna, but with how limited her time is in the city it’s hard to say for sure that this is realistic.

After the wife leaves I’ll have a few more days to play before I find home. Revisiting Vienna’s coffee culture hotspots is high on my to-do list – it was after all one of the reasons I loved the city in the first place! Aside from that, not enturely clear. On the one hand I’d like to get out and revisit some of my favorite spots just around memory: the Vienna Woods chief among them of course, particularly the Heilegenkruz Abbey up in the hills and the Klosterneuberg Stift just on the outskirts of Vienna, both of which are so incredibly photogenic and historic that getting back to either or both is an easy thing to prioritize.

However, before all of that even starts, we’ll be in Budapest and Bratislava for a bit. They’re all very close so it’s an easy overland – in fact to get from Bratislava to Vienna it’s only about an hour by bus, booked in advance through FlixBus or Slovaklines.

While we’re in Bratislava our schedule remains fairly flexible – my stepdaughter is there to compete in an international Economics Olympiad, for which we’re very proud, but without much information available yet about when we can watch her and when we’ll be off on our own it’s hard to say for sure how much time we’ll spend exploring Bratislava itself. (Though to be fair, any tourist I’ve ever talked to suggests there’s not a lot to explore in the city?)

However before that, in Budapest, there’s certainly plenty to do. My wife lived in Hungary for part of her childhood, so there are no doubt a few sentimental spots on the itinerary, but there’s also just a ton of tourist things to do in the city itself.