Day trip to Wachau Valley, Austria

Our first day trip of the season was to the Wachau Valley area in Austria. It was a pretty short, but beautiful drive from the town we were staying in. The majority of the drive was a long the Danube river, and apparently they have cruises that go past all the little towns in the valley which sounded so fun. We were only making two stops so decided to just take the car.

Our first stop was at the Aggstein Castle, that you can see in the pictures above. We were lucky enough to plan it just days before it was going to close for the winter, so we're glad we were able to get there. You can hike up which would have been a beautiful, but it was pretty long, and on a rare day off we like to just drive to our destinations, haha.

The castle dates back to the 12th century and is a ruined castle, so its not operating anymore. These are my favourite kind, because you get to actually explore everywhere and I'm not left being curious what was behind the closed doors. Plus, they look great in pictures.

The castle overlooks the Danube river and rolling hills as far as you can see. We visited when the trees were still in full fall color, so I'm sure it looked even better than normal.

The castle wasn't huge, but there were a few different buildings to go into and different sections of stairs to climb for different views. It was a pretty quick visit because there wasn't a ton to see, but it was definitely worth the stop.

We couldn't pass up the opportunity to get more fall-colored photos before moving on to the next stop:

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Our second stop of the day was to the Melk Abbey, one of Europe's biggest Baroque ensembles. We toured the building and the ground, but missed the english tours, so we didn't get to learn much about its history.

We were only able to see certain areas due to the fact that there are still monks living and working in the building.

You're not supposed to take pictures really anywhere inside, but there wasn't a sign next to these stairs, so it's the only one I took. I tried earlier and someone caught me, so I was too scared to try again, haha.

The courtyard and gardens were beautiful though and we got there just before sunset so we were greeted by more stunning views I'll post below. :)