Home again

I thought I wrote something since we got back, but nothing is here.  We were not really tired after our 17-hour trip, in fact, we couldn't sleep.  The tiredness hit about 2 days later, then I got really sick for about a week.  It seems that happened once before.

We have been busy trying to cope with the aftermath of losing the IDs and credit cards.  Automatic payments were not made because credit cards were cancelled, so our auto insurance was cancelled and we had to get a more expensive one. Manfred has a temp drivers license and is working on the passport.  The credit card I used for things like iTunes, Amazon and eBay was cancelled, so I have to put in a different one on each of those sites.

Bill came to visit on July 3 to spend his birthday (July 7) with us.  We put on a beautiful fireworks display for him on the 4th, then went to see Spiderman in IMAX 3D in Seattle on the 7th.  We all loved it.

Last leg -- Frankfurt - Dallas - Seattle - Port Orchard

We have not had good wifi connections lately, and we have been very busy.  We went to Dresdan for 2 days, then to Berlin for 2 days, and the travel days in between are quite grueling (since we lost the EuRail Pass, so we have to travel the puddle-jumper Regio lines).  We are now in Frankfurt.  It took 4 trains and 6.5 hours for a trip that would have been 2.5 hours straight on the ICE.  Also, we are traveling 2nd class, which is much more tiring than the 1st class of the Pass.  I'll see if I can put posts on about Dresden & Berlin and past-date them.  

Now we are in Frankfurt, our jumping off place for the long trip home.  We wanted to rest up for it because in addition to the 12+ hours of flying, there is a 6-hour wait in the Dallas airport.  So we planned 2 nights here, to avoid that "check-in at 7 pm, sleep, check-out at 6 am, head for endless flight" rush/hassel.  

Right now, I am kinda stunned.  We thought Murphy's Law had decided to leave us alone, but it has struck again.  Our reservations here in Frankfurt were mistakenly made for May 19 instead of June 19.  We didn't know it until we went to check in.  And we hit town when "there is a fair on, all rooms are booked."  I presume it's some sort of trade fair, since Frankfurt is the financial capital of Europe.  We ended up getting rooms we don't like for horrendous prices ($250 more than our booking price).
Note to self:  always check reservations at the next stop before leaving any place.  We could have stayed one more night in Berlin and saved one of these expensive nights.

We are just across the street from the Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof -- the central train station -- this photo is taken from our balcony.  P.S.  I love Photo Stream.  We take photos on my iPod and Manfred's iPad, and they are here on the computer, ready to put into blogs and such.  

This Good Bad is Beautiful

"Bad" is German for "bath" as in thermal or mineral baths from hot springs.  This is thermal activity area, and there is a really nice spa in the nearest town, Lenti, 16 km from here.  It is also a conflux of earth energy lines.  

Today we went to it, the Lenti Thermal Baths and St George Energy Park.  What a day.  We came at 9 am and spent most of the day in warm and hot baths and relaxing in the oh-so-comfy lounge chairs.  We also had a nice lunch there, sitting in our swimming suits.  It cost us US$8.50 each, for the whole day, + $4.75 each for lunch.   Click the link to see more.  

Yesterday I had a riding lesson.  The horse was good, the teacher was good, I was not too terrible, much better than last time, but was very stiff after.  But the baths took care of that.  

It makes up for not getting Manfred or Bill to go to a Bad in Budapest.

Staying longer

This time-share exchange condo is such a good place to rest up.  We will be staying on here until Wednesday, June 13, when we will drive to Budapest, turn in the car, and take a train to Dresden.  We were supposed to go to Prague for 5 nights, but we are skipping that because Manfred has fallen in love with this spot.  It really is quite unbelievable.  It's called the Abbazia Country Club  There are no engine or motor noises to be heard, day or night, just birds and occasional cat, dog or horse.

Last night there was a spectacular lightening storm, with lots of rain, so the weather is still cool.

I finally got the Hungarian maps downloaded to our TomTom GPS.  It took about 4 hours.  I don't know if it's because the connection here is slow, or it just takes that long.  I had purchased them, but the All Europe is only loaded in sections, and our previous section did not include Hungary.  So I had to remove the "Southern Europe" from the GPS to the computer, then download "Eastern Europe" from TomTom to the computer, then only download it to the GPS.  The files are over 1 GB.  If I had done this before, we would have saved 5 hours of driving around in the dark.  : (

I have another riding session today.  I'm so out of shape.  I hope I don't get the same lazy horse I rode the last time.

All is lost

I haven't written for so long, because we have been hoping to get Manfred's bag back. We assumed that it had been turned into lost & found, but we had to wait out a long weekend and then 3 more days to find out that it had not been turned in. Then we had to start the process of replacing passport and credit cards. Eurail Pass is not replaceable, we had used only 20% of the $2000 ticket (for 3 people).

We went on to Budapest, and had a very nice stay there, at least for me. Manfred was not feeling very good about anything. We had to stay extra days because the Canadian Embassy was putting up lots of hoops to jump thru for getting a temp passport.

Part of our arrangement was to stay in a time-share condo in the Hungarian countryside. We had it booked for a week, had planned to use 6 days, but 3 of those days were already gone. We rented a car, assuming that our GPS maps for "all Europe" would work, only to find that Hungary was blank. It took us 8 hours to make a 3-hr drive to this remote place, but it's very nice. Manfred wants to stay here longer and skip Prague, and even Dresden. There's nothing to do or see here, but eat and swim, which suits him fine. I hope he'll be bored with it in time for us to go to Dresden.

Sitting on the verandah in front of our apartment, I took a photo on my iPod, here it is.

Mundane

So far today, Manfred & Bill went to wash clothes at a Laundromat, which is a bus ride and a walk away.

Note: when going for a trip, try to get mundane things done before the trip, like making sure credit cards work (we did it for Manfred's, but not mine, which we now need to use since his are gone), cell phones work, batteries/chargers/adaptors all good, have soap, towels, extra bags -- stuff like that.

We did get to ride the Ferris Wheel.

Wonderful Wein

That's Vienna, in English.
We arrive here Friday, after a fast train ride from Salzburg (less than 3 hours). However, Manfred left his fanny pack on the train, and it was probably turned in to some bureau. Unfortunately, this is the beginning of a major long weekend, and all offices are closed until Tuesday. Hopefully, we can get it back then. It just had everything that was important in it, Passport, train & plane tickets, credit cards, iPod & cell phone, you name it.

However, we are ignoring that and doing our Vienna things. We saw a performance of the famous Spanish Riding School this morning. It was soooo beautiful. And we bought tickets for a concert tomorrow night. We will go on the big ferris wheel tomorrow (Monday), also.

Tuesday we are supposed to head for Budapest, but we will first have to find the fanny pack with the train tickets.

Sankt Gilgen am Wolfgangsee

That is, Saint Gilgen on Lake Wolfgang. The cute old tourist town on a beautiful lake in the Hills of "Sound of Music" near Saltzberg, Austria .

Our dear friend, Runi, lives here. Every time we come here, she takes us around to see different sights and experience different culinary delights. Yesterday, we toured a salt mine. Bill liked the mine and the underground lake, but he didn't appreciate how much fun it is sliding down the long slides to the lower levels.

We are staying in a beautiful apartment on a farm, complete with cows, chickens, and cats. We get milk fresh from a cow for breakfast. The apartment has 2 large bedrooms, 2 baths, and a sitting room/kitchen. And a front porch. It is very new and beautifully finished, as things always are here. The views are all beautiful, with mountains all around, but you can't see the lake from here. The place we stayed before was just a large room w/bath (and another same for Bill), but there was a big balcony with a spectacular view of the lake.

I wrote this on Manfred's new iPad, and didn't know how to add photos, so now I used the computer to put this one on. Here we are, on one of the high pastures where the cows stay in the summer. Click the photo to see it bigger. (It's me, taking a photo  of Bill.)

Bad, bad Blogger

I wish Google would not change. Every time they, or anybody else does that, they make it worse. Now the pictures won't float and I've wasted a lot of time trying to get them to move, but they won't. I added a 2nd photo to Roma but I did the same thing for Innsbruck but the new one never showed up. I'll have to wait until I get back and have time to write my own HTML. I guess I'll have to change to a different host. :-(

I'm at present having breakfast in the hostel, which is an official government & HI (Hostels International) hostel. It's quite nice, and the breakfast is good, but we got 2 double rooms with baths, so it's expensive (for us). Costs about $100 per day. The shower in our room needs work, they wanted to give us another room, but Manfred didn't want to move all his stuff which he has scattered all around (marking his territory?).

In Innsbruck

It was a long train ride, but we made it. Then we wanted to go to Fussen to see King Ludwig's famous Neuschwanstein Castle. It wasn't quite as snowy as this photo, in fact, it was shrouded in scaffolding because it's being painted outside. This happens only every 10 years. We did go through a real snowstorm on the way back. We had to rent a car because the public transportation is rather difficult and quite expensive.

Since today was a holiday, we didn't have to return the car, so we visited the Sworovsky crystal place. They have a fantastic exhibition there.

Roaming Roma

We came to Rome on an overnight ferry, a huge boat. it took about 18 hours, from Barcelona.

We hadn't been here before, so we took 2 tours. It's the hight of the tourist season, and lines at the attractions are very long. We saw the Colosseum and environs yesterday, today the Vatican. But we lost our tour after the Sistine Chapel so didn't see the Basilica. This trip is becoming a comedy of errors.

Anyway, it was great to see the paintings all cleaned up... they are even more marvelous, now.

We will be here one more day, then take a train to Innsbruck.

Gone to Barcelona

Manfred thought we could just go to the Lisbon airport and get a flight to Barcelona. Well, it was very difficult and we had to pay about 4 times what we would have if we had bought online at least a month ahead. Note: never go to an airport without a ticket.

Barcelona was great, as usual. We didn't get our favorite hostel, and the substitute left a lot to be desired, but a good time was had by all. Note: always book hostel in Barcelona at least 2 months ahead.

Addition to May 3

Well I was not able to add to the previous post (edit), so I'm trying this new post called "Addition to May 3" What I wanted to say was that the tow truck driver came in a half an hour and jumped the car, it started right away. I I drove around for about 30 minutes and the battery was up to snuff again. We had a great time, saw a lot of the country side north of Sintra with the realtors car.

Property hunting in Portugal

May 3.  2012   Sintra, our third day here at the hostel,  Nice Way Sintra Palace.  Today was the day to view some specific properties with the realtor north of Sintra.  We got to the car and the battery was dead!  I think I left the light on last night.  Anyway, the realtor picked us up and we had an interesting land viewing day.  We saw 3 parcels of empty land and 1 house. They all had around 2 Acres.  One of the Parcels was pretty much what we were looking for.  It cost about $110k.  Now we have to get the money.

Then we had a really nice lunch, thanks to our good friend, Bill Jones.  

When we got back, the realtor tried to jump-start the car, but it would not work so we had to get someone from the rental agency to come and start it.  

Here in Sintra

We survived the ordeal of the non-stop flight to London (9 hours + 4 hours pre flight taxi, bus and check-in), 3 hours bussing and walking around Heathrow, 3 hours flight to Lison, renting car and driving to hostel, dragging suitcases up 3 flights of stairs, going out to dinner, and falling into bed. The time here is 8 hours later than in WA, which is why we could get all that into 2 days.

Today is Labor Day in all the world except US, so everything except tourist traps was closed. We drove to the beach towns and around the country a bit.

The hostel is very nice, a big really old house/mansion with a big garden.

Got the tickets

We have finally bought the tickets for our trip to Europe. Bill Jones is going with us. We leave from Seattle SeaTac Airport on Sunday, April 29. We will arrive in Lisbon, Portugal, the next day, April 30. We return to Washington 7 weeks later, on June 22, flying from Frankfurt to Seattle.

This time we are going to a new country (for us) -- Hungary, and other E European places. [Photo is Budapest]

Here's our plan:
Lisboa/Sintra - Barcelona - Roma - Innsbruck - Salzburg - Vienna - Budapest - Prague - Dresden - Berlin - Frankfurt

We want to stay a week in the Budapest / Vienna area, but accommodations are not easy to get, at least not from here.

Greetings from Mexico

Just finished my 3rd, and hopefully last, session with our friendly neighborhood dentist -- if your neighborhood is Tijuana, Baja

I have gotten a whole new set of much-needed chompers, and now I can chomp anything and everything.

We are enjoying Port Orchard. A small town, but nearer civilization. We can go to Seattle to go to the iMax theater, or whatever. It's just a ferry ride or two away.

Re. pic:
OK - it's been shopped, but not the teeth. Couldn't stand seeing the under-eye bags.

Happy Year of the Dragon 2012

I was born in a Year of the Dragon, 1940, so this is special for me.