We woke up in rainy Lienz at another almost abandoned parking lot by a athletic facility only open by appointment, another find from our guidebook (though, having lent the non-Germany volume of the guidebook to our new friends since we only needed it one more night, I was going by my notes – I’d noted down only the GPS coordinates, which turned out to be wrong and led us down a dirt road to nowhere in the rain – I’ll…
OK, that’s stretching the alliteration thing a bit (which I have to admit started quite by accident in Strasbourg), but spelunking in the longest cave in the world is the main reason people, millions upon millions of them (34 million since 1817 as a matter of fact), come to Postojna. Oh, and there’s a castle, but we didn’t go there. I would like to get there when they have their medieval days, with jousting and all, but for this trip…
Leaving Oberaudorf, we took a bit of a detour to avoid a traffic jam, and were treated to another random castle. OK, it probably isn’t random, it probably has good geographical and political reasons for being there, but we didn’t stop to find out: Then back into Austria for the straight shot to Slovenia. The kids fell asleep, tired out by their morning on the mountain, but when Sprockette woke up she wasn’t happy. That is, until we went off…
Many years ago, my parents hitchhiked around Europe with me and my sister, then almost 3 and less than 1. They hadn’t planned on hitchhiking – they bought a car in Amsterdam and planned to drive to visit my grandparents during my grandfather’s sabbatical in Nice. But the car broke down soon after they bought it, and being the early 70s, hitchhiking was the next best thing. At the time, my sister and I shared a passport and my father…
Maybe buying a tent called “Waterfall” wasn’t such a hot idea. Maybe it somehow cursed us. Ridiculous idea maybe, but hard to avoid when Libertario tells you this is the most rain he’s ever seen in May in all of his 60 years. The trip started well. We made it from DutchBoy’s parents’ house to Italy much the way we’d planned, with an overnight in Colmar, France. Around Lugano, Switzerland, DutchBoy remembered that his aunt and uncle had very much…
When people asked where we were going on vacation, we pointed vaguely east and said “that way.” But even though we didn’t know exactly where we were going, we were determined to leave Wednesday night, 20 August. Of course, because it was us, that turned into very, very late on Wednesday. It didn’t matter so much since our first step was Dutch Boy’s parents, from whom we were borrowing a bigger tent. We got there late and only didn’t wake…