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 …
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 …