The worst of times for us was also the best of times. Vienna’s foothills are beautiful and are great to ride your bikes on if you go the right way. Uncle Dick's "7 Ps" come to mind: Proper Prior Planning Prevents Pitifully Poor Performance. The trees are green and the people are friendly and helpful. One person actually invited us into her house for a cup of coke and talked to us for a long time about this and that.

Traveling on bikes there is not a recommended thing, though. It was just a 7 km hop from one campground to another and yet it took us all day up and down hills while our backs ached and legs burned but only because we did not go with the river. Even though we were going through a cold mist and even though we had to push our bikes up 25% ascents, we still marveled at the beautiful landscape we were passing...the rolling hills and the deep greens of the trees, and all the waterfalls rushing over the brinks of cliffs just to smash into thousands of tiny little droplets below. We even watched the rolling clouds as they tumbled by us in a mad rush to get somewhere. We watched as they poured like water over the mountains and then rushed at us as if they were trying to beat us to our destination. They did, of course.

Gabriel Miller is a member of the Youth Travel Blogging Mentorship Program.

Photo courtesy and copyright Gabriel Miller