Esterhazy Palace

July 18 (posted a day late):  Breakfast was fine, though perhaps not 4-star.  We walked the town, which has some interesting buildings and churches to offer.  Sopron has a Roman as well as medieval past.  Both are visible in one archaeological area with a Roman road and building outlines adjacent to a medieval wall.

Sopron--Roman ruins with the medieval wall above

We hopped on the bike at 11:30 heading for nearby Eisenstadt AU and the Esterhazy Palace there.  The first available tour (in German) was at 1, so we spent the intervening time in the handsome Haydn Concert Hall.  Haydn lived there off and on for 30 years as a guest of Prince Nikolaus II, and many of his compositions were first performed in the hall.

Haydn Concert Hall at Esterhazy Palace

The tour covered the rooms used by three Esterhazy women during different periods.  They have been restored and include bedrooms, sitting rooms, dressing rooms, lady-in-waiting bedroom, servants quarters, and the chapel. An English guidebook helped us somewhat.  Following the tour, we ate our picnic lunch in front of the palace and then picked up free audio guides and viewed other staterooms and some of the many fabulous valuables acquired by the family. The Esterhazy family was close to the Hapsburgs from the 17th to the 19th centuries, and intermarried with many of the European nobel houses.

Restoration is ongoing and discussed in some detail where parts of earlier wall and floor sections are laid bare. One room is devoted to Melinda Ottrubay, a classical dancer who married Paul Esterhazy V in 1946.  She eventually inherited all the E. estates, and in the 1990s set up a trust to provide funds to restore this and other properties.

We finally had to leave at 3:45, not having time for the surrounding gardens. Our original travel plans have changed, since we are unable to meet our friends in Vienna (they had to cancel) and our rear tire is asking for some attention. Turns out, Rob says, that we're exceeding our planned 4000 miles by a bit, and so it's questionable whether the tire will make it to Heidelberg. So today we wanted to put some miles on the bike (better now than on the weekend), and spent the next 4 hours, through quite pleasant Austrian hills and later along the Danube, to our current location of Mauthausen AU, right on the Danube.