Linz & Gaming

Chris and I had split with the girls who had gone with us to Salzburg, they went on strait to Vienna but we stopped in Linz. We arrived in the evening after a packed day in Salzburg. We did some planning for the next day, Sunday, and went to bed.

Early in the morning we got up to go to Mass at a chapel of the Fraternity of St. Peter, they seem to be a reoccurring theme in my travels. Unfortunately after a long tram ride and much confusion we did not get to Mass with the Fraternity. Our audible, we decided to head for the city center knowing that the Cathedral had Masses all day long. We ended up walking into a beautiful Carmelite Church just as Mass was beginning so we attended Mass there.

We saw a few other churches that morning before taking the city tram out to the very edge of the city to try to get some lunch at a highly rated local restaurant. After getting of the tram we walked for ten to fifteen minutes in drizzling rain, but when we reached the place we were told they were completely reserved and so without a reservation sadly we were turned away. Another fifteen minute walk and tram ride and we were back in the city center, but because it was Sunday most places were closed. So in Linz Austria, we decided from our very abridged list of choices to go to a Chinese food buffet. It was actually a very nice place, probably the best Chinese buffet I have been to so, can’t complain. I stuffed my face with fried bananas for desert while a deluge of rain soaked everything outside.

After lunch, rain and too many fried bananas we stopped into the Alter Dom, the old cathedral of Linz, as well as a parish church. After those we walked over to the new cathedral, a neo-gothic church with some beautiful mosaic work. I love the seeming collision when gothic meets and incorporates mosaic work, it always weaves splendor of height and color for the glory of God!

The highlight of the day was our final destination before heading to the train station. We once again took the tram, this time way out of town up the nearest hill to the city, on which sits the parish and pilgrim church of Wallfahrtsbasilika, more easily called the Church of the Seven Sorrows of Mary. The church possesses a glorious view of the city below as well as splendid baroque architecture which really has been the prevailing theme thus far in Austria. We spent some quiet time in the church before taking the tram back to the city. We grabbed our bags that we had left at the hotel and headed for Gaming Austria.

Our trip to Gaming was about two hours long with a few train swaps. We headed to Gaming because there is a program run by the Franciscan University of Steubenville there. I just happened to run into the director of the facilities for this program on a train platform in Cinque Terre last week. We hit it off pretty well and he invited us to come stay for a fe

w days, which we did.

Gaming is kind of in the middle of no-where Austria, and so our train there was very small, pretty much the size of one metro car. On the train we heard some girls speaking English, we introduced ourselves, they were students from Franciscan on their way back from weekend trips throughout Europe. Once off the train we had to get on a bus, which took us thirty minutes closer to no-where before finally reaching Gaming. We got our room squared away and went to bed early after a long day of travel.

The next was full of relaxation. Chris slept in super late so I went to the chapel, where Eucharistic adoration starts at 8am daily, and then took a stroll to downtown Gaming to get us some breakfast from the local supermarket. We both went to daily Mass held at noon and had lunch after with the students. In the evening I went to confession and a talk , “philosophy on tap” with about one hundred students. Chris and I both went to bed and woke up the next morning heading for Vienna with a pit stop in Melk.