As you may or may not know, we’re currently in Vienna, Austria, for three months. One thing we love to do is get out and see smaller towns, alternate cities, or whatever else is reasonably close to our home base.
While Linz is hardly a day trip away from Vienna, we wanted to go there because my ancestors hail from a village just north of there. I hadn’t been in over fifteen years, and thought it’d be great to go back, see how the town is doing, and get plenty of photos for my family.
Because the town is so tiny, it only made sense to stay in Linz, which is much larger and probably often-overlooked by your average North American tourist.
While we didn’t spend a lot of time getting into the nitty-gritty of the city’s main attractions, we did walk around a lot and see what it had to offer – both in a visual and culinary sense.
Our hotel was right on the Danube, which made for spectacular views of the lush, green hills just outside of town. The downside of this is that we were visited by plenty of critters every night, being the hotel had no A/C or screens for the windows.
After finding no help from the hotel staff, I managed to make myself the hero by ridding our windowsill of a spider’s nest. For real. Gross!
The hotel itself was rather nice otherwise, and we enjoyed our stay even though it was about a 30-minute walk from the heart of the city. But hey, exercise and all that.
It seems that, overall, Linz has a lot to offer between its cultural attractions and pretty, riverside location. While we can’t give you any sort of pointers because it wasn’t the focus of our weekend in the region, we’d recommend you stop through and see it if you’re in the region. After all, Austria isn’t entirely made up of Vienna, Salzburg, and Innsbruck.
So then, here are some pictures from our brief time in Linz. Enjoy!
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Have you ever been to Linz? If so, what’d you think? Let us know in the comments!
Hi Ryan and Ang,
Just visited your Website. Regarding your visit to Linz, how far back does our family go? I know there is a town, Waxenberg. Is that town named after our family? I know there is also a castle called Waxenberg that is now closed. Was our family “royal?” I know so little about the Waxenbergs. I love reading about your adventures. I haven’t talked to your mom and dad for awhile; maybe I’ll call and get together with them before the snow comes.
Be well,
Cousin Debra
Hey, cousin! We did visit Waxenberg again during our stay in Linz. I have tons of pictures from there and will probably end up posting them here at some point. When we were there in 1999, the castle was more or less closed and just a ruin. Since then, the town got together and preserved everything and you can now go in/up/around/etc. They also have a lot of history and photos up from the preservation effort. It’s not 100% done yet, but it’s been vastly improved since 15 years ago.
I can’t exactly remember the century, but through my research a while back, I found that they actually came to Austria from Switzerland sometime around the 12-1500s. It’s been a long time since I read that, so I can’t be more specific than that vague three centuries haha. I believe the earliest date I found prior was in Switzerland in the 1100s. As was probably typical back then, there were at least 3-4 different spellings to our name as well. Ang always jokes that I should add the umlaut back above the ‘A’. :)
The history I dug up *did* talk about who they were and why they went to Austria, but we’ve still never found or seen how they got from Austria to the Ukraine, which is where there’s a huge disconnect. I believe the oldest info that Shelly had from the Ukraine was the early 1700s.
I’m not sure if my folks ever told you, but when we went in 1999, the people there were utterly shocked to find out that there are people with the same family name as the town. I guess it never occurred to anyone that we exist!
Hope all is well, and thanks for stopping by!
Hi cousins!
I just found your site and would be VERY much interested to see what you have on the history of the Waxenberg’s!!! I have the outline that Shelly did back in 1997, but can’t find much of anything earlier than our time in Khmelnik, Ukraine.
All my best,
Natalie Waxenberg
Hey (cousin)! I don’t have anything before then either, just what Shelly had. However, I believe my sister and dad MIGHT have something. If you want to contact me directly through the contact page or Facebook, I can connect you with them. Back when I was living in Germany in 2011-2012, I did find some info about the family name, talking about how it originally came from Switzerland in the 15th century and went to Waxenberg, Austria, back then. There was no connection made between then and the Ukraine though. Anyway, give me a shout and I’ll put you in touch with them!
[…] our little weekend jaunt to Linz, Austria, we decided to have a bit of a rural road trip north into the Czech Republic. Looking at the map, […]