29JAN09 – EuroTrip Part Duo

Austria here we come. The highlights from Austria was the Sound of Music Tour, we lucked out and basically got our own private tour guide. She was originally from England, so the accent made all the more fun. We literally just caught this trip…came off the train went to the Info desk and they had a trip leaving in 5 minutes, so we hopped aboard. That evening we went to musical dinner event featuring works by Mozart, after all the Mozart School of Music is located in Salzburg, as well as Mozart’s birth place.

We also took a tour of the castle; it is the one you see in the Sound of Music movie. We met a guy named Christian from Germany who was there for a business meeting and he let us crash their party and have all the free Hot wine we could drink. The castle will always hold a special place in my heart for a number of reasons.

Salzburg had a beautiful Christmas Market too, which Vern took advantage of and bought herself some nice pink boots! From Salzburg, we left for Wien (Vienna).

Wien is a gorgeous city too, they have an awesome Cathedral and the biggest Christmas Market in Europe, well at least of all that I visited. Again by chance we were in the right place at the right time and Verna snagged us a great deal on a pair of tickets to the Wien Symphony Orchestra featuring music by none other than the one and only Mozart. From Wien to Venice; we thought we had it all figured out so that we could catch the fast train to Venice leaving at 0630 and arriving at 1330. We were all set to go, made it to the train station bright and early only come to find out we were at the wrong station, there is a West Hauptbahnhof and a South Hauptbahnhof. We arrived to Wien via the West, but I failed to see that we needed to leave from the South. We did a little train hopping back and forth, but we were not lucky enough to catch the early train; instead of arriving in Venice by 1330, we arrived at 1800.

We went out for dinner, then ff exploring the nightlife of Venice…needless to say; it was an early night as Venice has no nightlife. We were up early the next morning to explore Venice in the daylight, we did the famous Gondola ride down the Canal Grande, then made our way to San Marco Square and Cathedral – beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, and you’ll have to take my word on it, because of our whole trip, those are the only pictures we lost. There is soooo much more to these stories; you will just have to ask. Florence, look out here we come.
I think of all the cities I visited in Italy, Florence is my favorite. It has the right amount of action, shopping, and scenery. On our way to Rome, we took a pit-stop in Pisa to go see the famous Leaning Tower.

Rome is amazing; definitely need more than 2 days here. We arrived Saturday evening, settled into our hotel then went out for a nice dinner. The only disappointment in Rome was that we planned our main sight-seeing day there was a Sunday and Vatican City is closed, that means we did not get to see the Sistine Chapel. We took one of those hop-on hop-off bus tours with the audio tour. I really enjoyed it, there were 12 historic stops on the route and you can stop at whatever one you want and stay as long as you want, the ticket is good for 24 hours, but we only had 12 hours to see all of Rome. We were going to try and make it back to Milan by 1800 for a Christmas part of all Vern’s relatives…we rolled into Milan about 2100, met up with Ryan, Verna’s cousin and went out for dinner…next day back to reality.

Hope you enjoyed, I know I cut things short because I am so behind in my blog, but if there is anything of interest you want to hear about, leave me a comment or send me an email.

Next entry will be more escapades from Iraq!