Meg's Life: Day Trip to Melk Abbey

This is one of my favorite pictures from this semester and was taken during our first excursions at the start of the semester!

On the Sunday after the students arrived, the whole campus took a day trip to Melk Abbey. This was our first excursion and excitement was in the air. The buses were so comfortable and we felt as if we were traveling in luxury...until we got to the winding road that climbed up the mountain just before our arrival. More than a few children on board got motion sickness but quickly recovered once we departed from the buses.

Are we there yet?

Melk Abbey is a Benedictine Abbey located above the town of Melk, Lower Austria. It is positioned on a high mountain that overlooks the Danube river that happens to connect the Wachau Valley. According to Wikipedia, Melk Abbey contains the tomb of Saint Coloman of Stockerau and the remains of several members of the House of Babenberg described as Austria's first ruling dynasty.

Upon our arrival, we were ushered into the restaurant where our entire group was served a delicious warm yummy buffet style breakfast. I was too busy eating to take pictures other than this one of Fr. Seraphim interacting with some of the children. One of the families who is here from Steubenville with us has five boys seven (or six?) and under so for this first excursion, our family rode on the same bus as them.

After breakfast, we were able to take in some incredible views of the Danube River and Wachau Valley from the balcony at the rear of the restaurant. It was on this balcony that I connected with a friend of the lovely student who stayed with us this past fall! She remembered us and offered to help us with Charlotte this semester. She just happened to have availability during the two mornings Adam and I are in class together, too. Praise God! It was such a huge relief knowing we had a helper lined up as classes would be starting by the end of the following week and this had been one of my biggest concerns!

It's a beautiful thing to see members of the religious interacting with the families and children here. Charlotte gets so excited when she sees her friends during mass or out and about on campus.

Here is some history from Wikipedia:

The abbey was founded in 1089 when Leopold II, Margrave of Austria gave one of his castles to Benedictine monks from Lambach Abbey. A monastic school, the Stiftsgymnasium Melk, was founded in the twelfth century, and the monastic library soon became renowned for its extensive manuscript collection. --- It was in this esteemed library that Charlotte came running over to us after one of the college students had been holding her. As she came running over, a wet spot appeared on her brown pants...and got bigger and bigger as she approached us...! She had leaked through her Pull Up as she ran across the carpet in this library full of history! Oh no! I immediately scooped her up and held her in mid-air as Adam and I looked at each other with horror on our faces. What do you do?! There was no public restroom in this old room. The tour guide was about to take our group on to the next part of the tour. It was too cold to change her outside...so we did the only thing we could do. We changed her in the stroller while trying to keep the leaking wet pants off the carpet. Thankfully, the diaper was only wet as Adam and I tag teamed to get the dirty diaper replaced with a clean dry one. Charlotte found the whole exchange quite amusing and was soon bounding her way back to her college friends as we navigated our way to the next part of the tour with everything hastily tossed into the bottom part of the stroller...whew!

What a unique color of building!

This is when Charlotte's love affair with trying to pick up alllllll the tiny pebbles to give to her new college friends began. It's a favorite pastime of hers when we go on trips now. The college students were none too eager to take these prized pebble offerings from her.

This is one of my favorite pictures of the semester thus far....doesn't it look like a toy village with small moveable buildings? I just love it!

Notice the change in Charlotte's pants compared to previous pictures thanks to our library wardrobe change. ; )

More from Wikipedia:

The monastery's scriptorium was also a major site for the production of manuscripts. In the fifteenth century the abbey became the centre of the Melk Reform movement which reinvigorated the monastic life of Austria and Southern Germany.^[3]

Today's Baroque abbey was built between 1702 and 1736 to designs by Jakob Prandtauer. Particularly noteworthy are the abbey church with frescos by Johann Michael Rottmayr and the library with countless medieval manuscripts, including a famed collection of musical manuscripts and frescos by Paul Troger.

Due to its fame and academic stature, Melk managed to escape dissolution under Emperor Joseph II when many other Austrian abbeys were seized and dissolved between 1780 and 1790. The abbey managed to survive other threats to its existence during the Napoleonic Wars, and also in the period following the Anschluss in 1938, when the school and a large part of the abbey were confiscated by the state.

The school was returned to the abbey after the Second World War and now caters for nearly 900 pupils of both sexes.

Since 1625 the abbey has been a member of the Austrian Congregation, now within the Benedictine Confederation.

In his novel The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco named one of the protagonists "Adso of Melk" as a tribute to the abbey and its famous library.

Among its alumni was the nineteenth-century Austrian dramatist and short-story writer, Friedrich Halm.

Melk Abbey is also the metaphorical climax ("a peak in a mountain range of discovery") of Patrick Leigh Fermor's autobiographical account of his walking tour across pre-WW II Europe in A Time of Gifts, which includes a description of the abbey at that time. ^[4]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melk_Abbey