Our day starts at 2am as we get up for our 3am car to the airport. We have uneventful flights to Denver, then San Francisco and to Pape’ete, Tahiti.

It was a very nice morning, I got up early and went for a run on the path around Lake Monona. I wasn’t sore from the 100k ride yesterday.

Got there a little later than we wanted, but still made my 7:30am start time. 63/64 degrees at start. I wore my arm warmers.

We met at the Trek headquarters in Waterloo, WI for breakfast in the cafeteria and then a short introduction to Trek Travel. There were about 60 people in the room, but only three couples had taken a Trek Travel trip. We took one in Provence, France in 2023.

The ship spent the night docked at Dürnstein. We sailed by, but did not stop at Dürnstein in 2019 on our Vienna to Amsterdam river cruise.

In the morning we visit Melk Abbey. We visited the abbey and sailed through the Wachau Valley in 2019 on a Vienna to Amsterdam river cruise.

This morning our group has a tour of the historic city center of Linz and a tour of Mauthausen concentration camp in the afternoon.

There are some optional tours today that we are skipping. I had visited Prague in 2016, and had some cash left over from that visit that I brought along on this trip. The Czech Republic had changed their banknotes since 2016 to include additional security features and my notes couldn’t be spent. I was able to go to the Czech Central Bank across from the Opera house in the morning and exchange my old notes for the new ones. It was an interesting experience.

Today is the official start of our tour. We divide up into our groups and meet our program directors this morning, the go for a tour of the Old Town Prague.

Today is the first day our of tour, but it’s mostly on our own as folks are arriving today. We meet our Program Director this evening.