Tuesday, May 24th Judging by the station signs, I’d say we’ve just crossed into Austria on our way to Vienna (Wien). Gone are the Ceskys and in are the haufs and burgs. Hotel Konvice, our home for Monday evening, was set in a beautiful 16th century building and with but six rooms it was wonderfully …
Will they have any of those plump little sausages in a can? Read More »
One of the reasons this trip was planned to begin in early May was because we’d hoped to avoid some of the crowds associated with summer tourist season. The success of that logic has been less than stellar. It’s is true that we’ve run into very few U.S. travelers, but every place we’ve been has …
Monday, May 23 Today we’re on the way from Praha to Cesky Krumlov with a change of trains in Ceske Budejovice. About a half hour before reaching our connection point we were told the train was stopping for ‘technical reasons’ and we’d be boarding a bus to continue to the connecting train. Board the bus …
Sunday, May 22, 2011 Keeping on top of this blogging stuff is hard. Other than for sleeping, we just haven’t spent a lot of time in the hotel rooms Laurel so painstakingly researched. Today, however, has been a departure. Up after 7:30 and then down to breakfast we then spent a few hours doing admin/booking/computer …
On our foreign travels we seem to create some sort of international incident on an almost daily basis. This is generally quite inadvertent and as a rule, we have no idea what we’ve done to create the situation. In Warsaw the other day we’d no sooner boarded a bus than a lady began speaking and …
Tuesday, May 17 It’s hard to write anything about Auschwitz that hasn’t already been written. The two things that probably got to me the most were the piles of children’s shoes in the first camp and the unimaginable vastness of the second camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. We traveled today by “Regular” or non-express train from Krakow …
Monday, May 16 Being in Europe is fab, but for a good portion of today, my body was in Poland, but my heart was in Florida. Space Shuttle Endeavour lifted off on its final mission and we were supposed to be there, but a launch delay combined with our travel plans made that impossible. We …
Sunday, 15 May Wawel, atop the only significant hill in this rather planar portion of Poland, is the site of the Royal Castle and a cathedral and it was our first destination for this cool and rainy day. Wawel, like most castle complexes, developed over centuries and construction here began in 9th century. For me, …
Aloha Friday, May 13th The last two days, we’ve spent quite a bit of time on the PKP, the Polish railway. Thursday was 6+ rather quiet hours from Gdansk to Warsaw. Today’s trip from Warsaw to Krakow was a bit more of an issue. The problem was, we got a little stupid on a number …
Wednesday, May 11 I’ve been trying to understand something. Why, in a British pub stocked with the usual dozen or more carefully-crafted cask ales and draft beers would these places also have a cooler full of Bud and Corona? I believe the Budweiser part is an artifact of Anheuser-Busch being acquired by Inbev, brewers of …