Seeing Magnificent Melk in Bulgy Shorts

Day 4 58.5 kms

Our intention was to take the train to Melk Abbey, in order to give us enough time to appreciate Austria’s most magnificent Baroque monastery (as the guidebook declared). Unfortunately, the train schedules didn’t cooperate with our intention.

It had seemed, when I signed up, that it would be the simplest thing to hop on and off a train or a ferry … wrong! Trains did not run often and not all of them could accommodate bikes. As for the ferries, there were many that crossed from one bank to the other several times a day but going up or downstream was more complicated. They went upstream on one day and downstream on another … and we usually wanted to go up or downstream on the wrong day. This was one of those days.

It was a grizzly, drizzly day and I was a little bit afraid to bike down that steep, probably slippery, hill. But Val and Myrna were untroubled so I followed their lead and went for it. Charo decided to have a lie-in, take the train and meet up with us later.

We were wrapped in our plastic raincoats against the wet. In addition, it was foggy so we started out very cautiously, as we had been told that people had taken bad falls on that road. But as we descended, the fog lifted bit by bit, we relaxed, and before we knew it, we were coasting effortlessly down the hill -- what joy! -- for a good 40 minutes. To top it all, the rain cleared and by the time we reached the bottom, the sun was out.

Melk Abbey was, indeed, magnificent. Although built in the 11th century, it was destroyed and rebuilt many times and then completely remodeled in 1702. As with everything else in Austria, it looked freshly-painted and neat as a pin. What I found nice was that it is a working, flourishing monastery. There is a school on its premises, it holds retreats and workshops and seems to be very active in the community. It looks like it is a very rich monastery. I loved the way they exhibited ancient artifacts in modern settings and illustrated religious concepts in a very contemporary and original way: a statue of St. Benedict and a book of his monastic rules in a neon blue room, leading to a neon-green room housing various relics. Gold monstrances were housed in glass cases in rooms that were mirrored from floor to ceiling -- a gaudiness meant to illustrate a passage from Corinthians, “Now we are seeing a dim reflection in a mirror; but then we shall be seeing face to face.”

According to Baroque sensibilities, the gilded carvings, the frescoes, paintings, and marble-clad rooms were offerings to the Lord that could never be too beautiful or extravagant, and were physical expressions of the joy man had in his faith. But on a superficial level, it felt like an embarrassment of riches, especially, I am sure, to the Protestant Val at my side, exposed to this overwhelming display of the material riches and glory of the Catholic Church. Proceeding on, we came to an equally impressive display of worldly wealth, the library. The room was almost 2 storeys high, its walls were lined with shelves of antique leather-bound books, and its ceiling was lit up by a glorious fresco, To think that the 16,000 books it displayed was only a fraction of the 100,000 in the monastery’s collection.

The four of us wandered around these princely surroundings in our sneakers and biking gear, carrying our helmets, sweaty hair plastered to our heads. After four days of hard biking, we didn’t give a thought to how we looked and strolled about unself-consciously in our padded nylon shorts, with bulgy buttocks. Actually, there were other groups of bikers, some of them maybe older than us, unconcernedly walking around looking like Lance Armstrong or, maybe more of our era, Eddy Merckx.

The Abbey had beautiful gardens but we had to pass this up as time was pressing. After a bad lunch in the Abbey restaurant, we set out to catch the ferry to Spitz, which didn’t materialize so we tried the train .. foiled again. So, with encouragement from Val and Myrna, but mostly because there was no other choice, I pointed my handlebars towards Spitz with grim resignation.