Just after New Year’s in 1990, when we had been living in Salzburg since late August and our son was not quite a year old, I decided I needed a change of scene from the demands of running a study-abroad program. In a brochure from a tourism bureau (this was way before the Internet) I found an old vintner’s house available as a vacation rental in the village of Egelsee (literally “Leech Lake”) up the hill from Krems on the Danube west of Vienna. I called the landlady, who was the wife of the Lutheran pastor in Krems, and booked the place for three nights.

On the autobahn trip from Salzburg to Krems I had occasion to use the fifth gear on the program Peugeot for the first time. I accidentally went from fourth to third, and I was afraid I might have damaged the transmission. We stopped at a rest area near Amstetten and had lunch. I ate very tasty Blunzengröstl (roughly “blood-sausage hash”) while worrying about whether the car would work when we got back on the road.

We found the woman’s house on Martin Luther Square in Krems and followed her car up hair-pin turns (the transmission being in fact intact) to Egelsee, a wine-growing village that was rapidly becoming a bedroom community. It was home to a motorcycle museum and several condominium construction sites.

We arrived in the village. I was relieved not to have swerved off the road into the dark pine woods. In the middle of the old quadratic house was a clay-and-tile stove for heating.  It extended into each of the four large rooms. (The Swiss writer Jürg Laederach calls such an arrangement “equal opportunity freezing.”) It was the only heat in the house. The landlady patiently told me how to stoke it and keep it going. I was worried that I would let it go out (she said it was very hard to get started again from scratch), causing my family to freeze to death in Leech Lake the week after New Year’s.

On the wooden kitchen table there was a big round of rye bread, probably a kilo, and a two-liter bottle of local Grüner Veltliner. These bottles are called Doppler, “doubles,” because they are double the size of a normal liter bottle. And of course, the result of drinking one of these is called the “Doppler effect.”

This was much better than a mint on the pillow, and I ate and drank happily, or at least eagerly. (Christen doesn’t drink, and so the Doppler wisely never got finished.) The oven door was in the kitchen, and I spent much of my time between bites of rye and swigs of white trying to put wood on the fire without extinguishing it. It was not good to open the door too often—it tended to put out the fire—but how else could I judge the embers? I have no memory of the bed in that house, or of how we slept, but I do remember that the bathroom was cold until heated with an electric space heater. I’m pretty sure there was no hot water. Very romantic.

It was a beautiful, quiet week in the fragile January light before Epiphany. We walked through pine woods past giant stacks of timber, and drove back down the hairpin turns to Krems to get dinner, once at a Chinese restaurant, and once at the ancient inn Alte Post. Back up on the hill we discovered the Donauwarte, a tower overlooking the Danube valley. You could look down across the vineyard-covered slopes to the medieval center of Krems and, right below Egelsee, its neighboring town Stein (home to a penitentiary). The little town of Und (German for “and”) is tucked between them. (“Krems Und Stein are three towns.”) In a slight haze on a promontory across the river stood the massive fortified monastery of Göttweig.

There had been a bit of a thaw and the ground near the outlook was muddy. Our son Coleman got out of his stroller, toddled in his yellow one-piece snowsuit, fell down, and got right up, showing a big brown spot on each knee. I realized it was the first time he had ever walked outdoors.