The Never Ending Journey

For anyone who is actually following our travels, we are now in Vienna, having spent last nigh in Cesky Krumlov, a small historic town in the southern part of the Czech Republic.   Due to internet speeds approaching dial up on party lines ( that shows how old I am!) I am taking a break for until we get to Budapest later in the week. Uploading photos is near impossible and even trying to save stuff has forced me to re-type things several times.  Of course, just like last time in Sept. 2014 it pissed it down most of the day. In spite of the rain we had an excellent guided tour of the city core and the major palaces. Tomorrow, most of our group is planning to visit the Schonbrunn Palace. Having seen it on our last visit we will focus on the Albertina museum which is featuring some exhibitions of  Picasso and Monet. Time and weather permitting, we will hopefully explore some of the Hofburg exhibits. The Hofburg is also a Palace which includes a variety of museums, some roya...

We left Berlin at 9am by private minibus for a planned 7 hour trip to Krakow in Lower Poland. A series of motor vehicle accidents on the road ahead forced us into a rather slow detour for an hour or so before we were able to rejoin the highway. We arrived at out hotel at approx. 6:30 a full 2 hours behind schedule. The hotel, the GLOBETROTER was a sprawl of room in an older building near the city centre.  After dumping our luggage and grabbing a quick shower we had a group meal at a local restaurant featuring duck, goulash, pirogies etc.’   A massive thunderstorm greeted us as we left the restaurant and we mad dashed through the rain to our hotel, roughly 1km distant. It had been the plan to do a city walk at 9pm bu this was delayed somewhat till the rain subsided. While we were expecting a basic walking tour it turned out not to be. Our guide, named Golden ( he had red hair) was a professional city guide who apparently was in demand my royalty and various bands ( RHCP and Me...

Tonight marks our fourth night in Berlin. If I had the chance I would probably stay here another two weeks at least. We did, in that short time manage to cover quite a lot of ground- roughly 7-10 km of walking per day and probably double or triple that with public transport.   Our first hotel, the Ibis Berlin Mitte at the edge of the Prenzlauer Berg might not have been the best choice for easy access to the downtown tourist sights but the area itself was quite charming with a variety of restaurants and some eclectic architectural styles.  Our arrival into the main station and transfer via tram to our hotel progressed fairly smoothly and we confined our exploration to an area of approx. 1.5 km radius from our hotel. Being a Friday night the local bars and restaurants seemed to be doing a booming business with patrons spilling out onto the sidewalks with beer and wine in hand.  We did explore a number of the suggestions offered by Trip Advisor but found most of them to b...

Sleep does not seem to come too easily tonight for some reason. Partly to blame is my body’s seeming inability to adjust when it finds itself exposed to a new and unfamiliar hotel room. Secondly the lateness of tonight’s meal, a carb monster of a pizza, is probably not helping. And thirdly, here call me nuts, but today’s walk probably took me, both physically and mentally hrough areas that in years past were locations where people struggled under the Communist rule of post war USSR between the years 1961 and 1989. Thousands fled the eastern sector and as many as 600 died in attempts to flee the east.  Walking around the area today, the place has taken on a somewhat gentrified appearance with most buildings renovated and looking like very desirable 4 to 6 story apartment blocks. Bike lanes run adjacent to the sidewalks and bikers fly by in groups, their wheels almost touching. Here, unlike Munich there are few traces of the recent mass influx of refugees and save for the odd restau...

It’s getting on towards 11pm and we are just about packed for the next leg of our journey. Tomorrow we cross almost the entire country by train as we depart Munich and head for Berlin for 4 or 5 days.  Yesterday we focussed on the city centre, starting at the stone gateway known as Karlstor the western entrance to Neuhaser Strasse, the main pedestrian street. Our first stop was St Michaels Church with it’s massive vaulted ceiling and altar. Continuing east we found ourselves in Marienplatz with its world famous clock tower (Glockenspiel) and the Rathaus ( parliament building) We then made a detour into the Viktualienmarkt, essentially an open air food court and produce market where we had a lunch of pork on a bun before making a quick visit to the adjacent St Peters Church. The next holy shrine we visited was the Hofbräuhaus, one of the city’s most famous, or infamous Beer Halls. Needless to say we did not partake of the offerings- nothing like a litre of beer to take the edge off...

 No matter how smoothly I plan out my trips, it seems that external forces,aka travel gremlins seem to have this knack of shredding my plans into tiny little mind fields of disaster. My first mistake was in choosing AerLingus- Ireland’s only 4 ⭐️ shithole of a transport delay system. Initial departure out of Toronto was first delayed due to late arrival of inbound plane then further cleaning required to perhaps clean Guinness puke off the walls, That set things back a half hour before they discovered a broken doorpart- nothing too important! That required another hour to fix. Thus we departed Toronto almost 2 hours behind schedule for a connection with a 90 minute overlap. We arrived in Dublin, promptly on time- yeah right! Roughly 40 minutes after the Munich plane began to enter European air space.  Our best hope for a replacement went from our original 7:10 am flight to a 4:20pm departure. The airline gave us new boarding passes, not commenting on the 9 hour delay or the E...