Hello, Hello,

I haven't forgotten the blog. School has started and things are busy. Then I compound dislocated my finger ( gross) typing is a little slow. I type fine with my right and only use the thumb on my left. It is a little tiring. I plan to sit down on the weekend and post all about the trip and put up some pictures.

I am going to have a little rant.

Just because you are on vacation it does not mean that you can wear whatever you want. I guess I watch too much What Not to Wear.

One of the things is: Why are people wearing clothes that are 2-3 sizes too small? You can't tell me that the clothes fit when you left home, no one gains that much weight on vacation.

Gentlemen, bathing suits are not appropriate attire for sight seeing. Pool yes, churches and museums no. I understand that it is hot but respect others and yourself.

Ladies please stop wearing halter tops wityh regular bras, I don't care how pretty the strap is we don't need to see all of it. (This includes the back strap as well) At least make an attempt to make the straps line up. Bras are pretty sophisticated and they make them so that you can change the strap configuration or even use clear staps.

I am not saying that I am perfect in any way, but when I dress poorly I am doing myself a disservice, not grossing other people out.


We took a little side trip through Zagreb yesterday. We left Budapest on the train for Ljubljana and got off for a few hours in Zagreb. I mean a few hours. We had time to eat and walk around the town. Apparently there are lots of museums but we walked to the sight seeing lookouts and saw the buildings and then that was it. We could have taken a later train to get to Ljubljana but other than sitting to drink we didn't see very much else to do. I am sure there was but you would have to stay for a while and have time to do them justice.

Ljubljana is very nice. Beautiful country side green, lush hills and great old buildings. It is neat to see from the train some of the old brick buildings and farmyards. (Reminds me of the farms outside of Ottawa on the way to Montreal) As you get closer to the city centre there are more and more concrete buildings for big box type stores. A little sad but at least the tourism keeps many old buildings from being bulldozed and rebuilt.

We fly to London tomorrow and spend a few days there before coming home. Sorry there are not many pictures but very few computers will upload them. I will do it when we are home.

Here we are in Budapest.It is August 20. Vienna was great, one day is not enough time to see things. We visited the catacombs under the city. The Sissi museum about the Empress Elisabeth. We went the the Leopold museum and that was a bust. There were only 2 paintings by Klimpt. We visited a butterfly room. Lots of live and pretty butterflies flying around. Not really an Austria sight but it was neat all the same.

Budapest is good. Very busy, lots of tourists. We saw an interesting exhibit on the Inca. The castle is neat, right now they are having a folk festival which is fun to look at all the crafts. It was super jammed with people. They had some sort of airplane races on the river and that was pretty cool to watch, they fly fast. It was the national holiday on Monday, everything was closed so we missed out on the baths but we got to see great fireworks. When I say everything is closed I mean everything but souveneir shops. We tried to go to Tesco to buy the final Harry Potter to read on the train but no luck. He did find it at the train station, we paid full price but what can you do when you have a 5 hour train ride ahead and have nothing to read. So if anyone wants a copy you can buy one off of us for $14. (we now have two)


We have done so much stuff it is all starting to run together.
Off to Croatia and Slovenia tomorrow.

Wow, when you stay in a Hilton it makes you not want to leave the hotel. We were upgraded to an executive room. (Ryan was a gold card member when I booked the room) We now have access to the executive lounge. Complimentary beverages, snacks and free internet access. Otherwise you would not be hearing from me. Access is darned expensive. In the room there are great toiletries, a bath bomb for goodness sake. I have been talking about the bathroom and bathtub for the last two days. I knew it would be nice but I had no idea. Two weeks in the same set of 5 outfits only washed in the sink and 30° weather with high humidity have made me yearn for a bathtub. And I don't like baths. There is even a rubber ducky!

Living high off the hog. Ryan is less impressed but he spends half his time in a hotel room. I like to be pampered.

We took a boat down the Danube from Bratislava to Vienna. It was a very nice way to travel. We went through the meseum about Emperess Elisabeth (Sissy and found it pretty neat). I hope to go the the Leopold museum tomorrow and see some of Gustav Klimt work. You have all seen the print. I think Andrea might have it on her wall. Not that everyone has been in Andrea's room. I guess that part of the post was for my family. I posted the picture for those that did not know.

We are having a great time. Can not believe that we are 2 weeks in. It is flying by.

I will post again soon. (no pics this time because the CPU is locked up)

Here are a few pics. I finally found a computer that recognizes the camera.

This is the first dinner in Warsaw.

Wow an entire octopus. Well prepared not chewy at all.

Ryan can be half way around the world and still have pizza and beer for dinner.

This is in the disosaur caves at the castle in Warsaw.

Auschwitz

View of the Castle in Prague. We went to black light theatre in Prague. The show we say was a little cheezy and high school production level but neat and didn't cost us a fortune in ticket prices.

Prague is a great city, very busy, lots to see We got to see the Bodyworks display, the one with all the real bodies preserved with silicon. Really cool. National Museum had lots to see some of it was like re-living my undergraduate degree. Great squares to visit, shop, people watch, eat etc. Wonderful transit system made life easy.

Brno was good. Small but we were only there one day. I dragged Ryan to the Mendel Museum and forced him to learn about genetics and Punnett squares and stuff. We also went into the crypts and saw really mummified bodies of preists and monks. They were really dried up.

Bratislava is nice. It is now very hot and not a drop of rain in sight. Castle was neat. We are staying on a boat for our hotel. http://botelmarina.sk/ Pretty neat, the swaying is hard when you have had a few beverages. We went to the Sovak Pub http://www.sovapub.sk/ realy great. Huge place, 12 inch plank wooden floor and huge wooden tables and chairs and loads of people. It is a university pub and has great prices if you can proove you are a student. It was loud and rowdy and great.

Ryan took a crapshoot at the huge menu and picked something not really knowing what it was and it turned out great. It turned out to taste like perogies without the wrapper. Finding the place was a fluke but a good one.

There is so much smoking in Europe, our most disturbing sight was a woman 8-9 months pregnant with a cigarette in one hand. (In Ryans mind she was drinking too)

Off to sail down the Danube tomorrow to Vienna. Life is hard.

We are now in Prague.Lovely city lots of neat spires.Very busy and lots of people. Auschweitz was amazing, we took the guided tour once you get there and it is well worth it. Ryan hates tour groups but this was only 25 people and when you go to Birkenhauer you are outside so there is lots of space. Hard to imagine 1.5 million people being killed in less than 5 years. The Germans had a pretty sophisticated scam going on. But a 3.5 hour tour seemed to fly by. Then a hour long wait for the 1.5hour bus ride back to Krakow. The waiting in lines almost killed Ryan but he survived.

The saltmines were neat but a very long wait in line and then a 2 hour captive tour. You end up 134m into the mine. Lots of stairs!!!!! Interesting carvings but some of the published photos of the place capture it better, there are just too many people to really take it all in. But neat just the same.

Met some very nice people in the line for the mine. Samantha and Mike, are from England and they just finished University and are touring Asia and Europe for 6 months. Pretty impressive, I don't know if I could travel for that long with one person.

Daniel and Nicole were a couple from Switzerland (but really from Tennessee) that we met in a Vodka bar before our night train to Prague. They were great lots of tips on what to do in Prague.

Train was fine, Ryan didn't appreciate the 3 am banging of the "gustapo" to check our passports as we crossed the border. Apparently I could have slept through it all.

Once in Prague we went to the Castle and looked around. Climbed more stairs, 244 or something rediculous like that to go up one tower. I do have to say I am way more fit than lots of tourists, some people were dying when they got to the top or even before (there was a lot of panting).

About 6pm the skies opened up and we got to use the rain jackets that we have been packing around. It poured for a few hours and then we headed back to the Old Town to get dinner.

Now we are having breakfast and about to head out again. I will get some pictures up eventually.

Well we made it to Poland. One thing that I can say is F***ing air Canada. In Calgary they told us our flight would be delayed 2 hours. Making our connection in England a little/very tight. Luckily they actually fixed the problem and we were in the air in 1.5 hour and British Airways was great and moved us though Heathrow very quickly.

In Warsaw we spent a little time recouperating from the jet lag. 19 hours of travel and a 9 hour time difference is a lot to deal with. Super nice hotel, Warsaw itself is pretty plane. You can see most of it in one day. We went to the park one day and old town the next. We are pretty museumed and churched out after the last two summers so if that is not the plan then there is less to do. I might of said this before but a wheat allergy in the land of the perogi is tourture.

Krakow is great. A lot like Venice. Lots of people and lots to see. We just watched some fire dancers in the square. Nothing like some fire after a good mexican meal! Really!! We went to Wawel Hill and checked out the castle and some dragon caves, pretty neat. Off the Auschwitz tomorrow and to the salt mines after that.

He Mom or Andrea I forgot the milk in the fridge could someone through it out.

Test shot. This is just a shot of Kosmo so that I could figure out how to upload pictures directly from the camera. It worked.

3 more sleeps then we are off. Everything seems to be booked I guess we shall find out! I hate waiting. I don't do anything because I am obsessed with the trip. I figure I can always find something to research about somewhere we are going to be. I don't feel as ready for the tourist part as I did last year. Oh well two whole days to figure it out.

OK so now all the hotels are booked. I took the weekend to completely ignore hotels. Now I am on the fun quest to find how to get from airports to hotel, train stations to hotels, boats to hotels. You would think this would be simple but for some reason the directions on the hotel web sites are a little vague. On trip advisor people just say use a cab.

I am not that much of a princess.

We are not afraid of public transit!

We will figure it out. We did it last year without having that much in advance and this time our arrival times seem to be more reasonable. Less arriving in the middle of the night when very little is open and we don't have a map or know how to use the metro yet. I am confident in our abilities. (What I am not mentioning is that Ryan probably did all this last year and had it in his head. I am having a new admiration for all the work he did last year, I had no clue!)

8 days to go. We have started the packing process and the search for liquid supplies that are in less than 90ml bottles. Pretty good so far just a few things left. We feel a little more seasoned in the travel department because we realized that we are going to have less clothes and we are gone for a week longer. The cameras are smaller as well.

Oh yeah. Ryan made it home OK. Walmart was open and his battery was in stock. After purchasing a few tools and a little time in the parking lot he made it to his hotel fine. Good thing he is a little bit handy.

Holy Crap. Booking hotels is not fun. I have been doing research for quite a while and I thought I had it all under control. First things first, the hotels that we have points for are not worth it or out of the way. By not worth it I mean that Ryan uses the points to book hotels for his Masters weekends and a few points gets him a nice place, so the places in Europe would have to be low points for an expensive place to be worth it. To make a long story short Ryan has figured out how many points per Euro each of the hotels is worth and his hotel in Vancouver is still the best use of points. So we have to pay for all the nights. Not that bad but it takes a lot more research to find a great location, air conditioning and breakfast included for an average price of $100-110.

I know I know you are thinking what a princess. She could stay at a hostel or a pension for way less. I admit it I am a whimp. I feel pretty brave for going to foreign countries where dumplings are king and having a wheat allergy. Some of you might have experienced my oh so patient mood when I can't find food. We run into this problem quite a bit. Ryan can go forever and I am stubborn and proud and suffer in silence until it is too late, the bitch has arrived. Having a minimalist hotel on top of this makes things not so fun. (There are tears) (I told you I am a whimp)

So I spent from 8:30 - 4:00 parked in front of the computer doing research. The TV didn't even turn on, for those that know me well they know that the TV is always on. I don't really watch it it is just on. I stopped a few times to get food and take the dog out to pee. Kosmo was kind enough to force me to leave the house for a short trip but running through the raspberry fence at the back and heading out into the grasslands, by himself. Chasing him down was a 20 minute diversion but then back at it (Kosmo only got to be in his run to be outside)

So I spent all of this time and only got half the hotels booked. I won't fool myself into thinking that I have it all under control. It is agonizing to actually book. Is it the right place, is it too far away, is the tram/metro easy to use, did every one on trip adviser lie and the place is really a dump, is it actually going to work or am I going to show up and have no room. Then once booked there is the sudden panic that I booked the wrong dates, or that the room has no amenities etc. I know I am a freak but these are all things that went through my mind.

Now it is 11 pm and I am sitting back with a glass of wine looking forward to doing it all again tomorrow.

I am also sitting here worrying about Ryan. He called me as he sat in his car at the border at 9:45 and lets me know that the car is having electrical problems and that he had to get it jumped to get is started. We think it is the battery, the car runs well as long as his foot is on the gas. The line at the border was fun. He calls again and then I begin the search to find a 24 hour Walmart as close to the border as possible. No Go. I then search near his hotel in Surrey but they close at 10. I do find one in Langley that is open until 11. Pedal to the metal baby. I sit here now just waiting for the call about the results. Then I am going to bed, long day ahead of me.

I am finally organized enough to post an itinerary.

Aug 3 Travel to London

Aug 4-6 Warsaw Poland

Aug 7-9 Krakow Poland

Aug 10 -12 Prague Czech Republic

Aug 13 Brno Czech Republic

Aug 14-15 Bratislava Slovakia

Aug 16-17 Vienna Austria

Aug 18-20 Budapest Hungary

Aug 21 Zagreb Croatia

Aug 22-23 Ljubljana Slovenia

Aug 24-26 London England

Arrive home 7 pm on Aug 26

Flights to Warsaw are now booked. We are pretty sure about the beginning part of the trip but still not sure about the end. We are scheduled to spend ~8hours in Zagreb Croatia and a Day and a half in Ljubljana Slovenia. This seems like a decent amount of time in each but it is hard from a travel book and the flight back to london is getting more expensive as I type (or so it seems) Ryan found a flight from another Slovenian location for one european penny. There is a huge appeal for taking a flight for a penny, but there doesn't seem to be anything to do in the town for a day and a half and there is nothing worse that just waiting for the next thing to happen (i.e. the flight) so I don't think that we are going to book it. It would be a good story but I am not sure the story would be worth it.

4 weeks to go!

Quick update,

The flights to London are booked. School ends tomorrow so the hard core research begins. We have a general idea but we need to pin it down.

PS we're a little sad about leaving Kosmo for 3 weeks.

As I do my research I can see that I am going to be drooling over a lot of food I can't eat, or indulging and then feeling like crap. I will probably just drool, but I am cursing Ryan already. A wheat allergy in the home of perogies is torture.

I find it funny that we travel to europe and we usually end up staying in a Holiday Inn Express. I like them (breakfast included) but they seem so north american. I guess that is the point.

so much to see
so little time

Well school is almost over and we have been looking at flights. We are trying to decide whether to fly to London and then take a domestic flight elsewhere of fly directly to Krakow, Poland. There is also a dilemma about whether to fly out of Kamloops or Vancouver. all of them have different prices but there are many different considerations.

My next job is to figure out where to go and how much time to spend in each place. We have three weeks and you think it would be easy but I need to research what there is to do in each location.

First Krakow and then a visit to Auschwitz. I have not moved beyond that but it is a start.

Tomorrow I will try to figure more out. As for now the wine I have been drinking has made my attention span for the Internet a little cloudy.

ps Kosomo is great!

I am so happy. I finally got Kosmo crate trained. I can now put him in a crate for the entire day and he doesn't freak out. He will actually walk into the crate every morning without protest. Such a relief, I don't have to feel guilty about leaving him alone all day.

New fun things that Kosmo does. He has this squeaky ball that he likes to play with. I think that it is hilarious when he takes the ball to the top of the stair and then drops it down so that he can chase it down the stairs. He will bring the ball back to the front room but when he decides that I am boring he runs to the stairs and chases it down. Nice to have a dog that can entertain himself. He also chased his tail. Nothing funnier than a dog chasing his tail on laminate floor. It is very entertaining to watch him spin out on the floor.

On a travel note we have now decided that we really have to start booking things before we run out of time. There will be updates when we actually make our first booking.

Oh yeah, there are only 17 teaching days left.

OK so now the planning has stalled. I got a dog. Kosmo, he is great, I love him so much. Ryan likes him too but he is really my dog.

I figured since I am alone so much I need there to be an actual living being that I am talking to. I do have to say 6:30 AM to go for the first session of fetch is a little early some days. Kosmo also suffers from a little bit of seperation anxiety so he has left some interesting chew marks in various places. (rugs, door frames, base boards) I can't make it home every lunch so he is just going to have to deal with it.

On a totally unrelated note Ryan ran his first marathon. His time was 3 hours 27 minutes. Apparently that is a great time for your first. I personally can not imagine running for 207 minute straight.

Did I mention that there are only 27 teaching days left in the school year. Yipee!!!!

I am sure that trip planning will continue but for now there is no news.

We have started the planning. Right now looking into flights. It is crazy stupid how cheap intercontenental flights are in Europe. From London to most places is dirt cheap. We really don't plan to visit London but there are more flight options to London than most of the other places we looked into. Once in London we will fly out to other destinations. While Ryan is out of town this week it is apparently my job to research where to go. I don't know how much of that will get done but countries of interest are Germany, Poland, Slovakia, Czech Republic. But who knows. It is all a great mystery.