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 …
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 …
This afternoon, our first stop in London comes to an end and we head to Poland. It all went so fast. Yesterday morning we visited the Cabinet War Rooms and Churchill Museum. The War Rooms are simply incredible containing much of the original fixtures and furniture as it was left on VE day in 1945. …
Saturday, 7 May We finally called it quits about 8:00 Friday night, so predictably, Saturday morning found me up about 4:00. After a little post-travel organizing and a couple of kilometers of walking around to find some WiFi (situation in the Hotel is not great) and breakfast we were off to do some real tourist …
One of the first things I’m always struck by when arriving in Europe is the ubiquitous attention to energy conservation. Approaching an escalator on our way to baggage reclamation, I noticed it was moving very slowly, but when we got to within about foot, the moving stairs kicked into a normal pace—save those watts. You …
After so many years, I think we’re finally getting the travel planning thing under control. It’s over four hours until we head to the airport and we’re all packed up, the house is clean, various maintenance tasks are done and my lengthy checklists have very few open items. Right now I’m sipping a 1664 and …