Slovakia, Vienna, and Eagle's Nest -

We had our meeting with the president of Germany, but since there were about a thousand people at the event, we did not get to talk with him personally. We were in the fourth row of people, so we did see him up close. I think he is scheduled to leave office shortly, so he is a lame duck president anyway. They had a nice river cruise for us on the Spree in Berlin, but we had to wait an hour to get on the kid friendly boat. This was actually good, as the boat was fairly empty and we had more room to roam with the kids.

We drove the next day to my conference in Slovakia with a quick stop in Prague to see the Prague castle. It was an impressive sight, so I am glad we added a couple of hours on a long day to see this thing.

We had some trouble getting to our hotel later that night. You should always check to see if your GPS knows where you are going before you leave the comfort of decent networks. Just like when we showed up in Greece and didn’t even have a Greece map in the GPS, assuming we had all of Europe. We made it to our hotel, but it was tiring after a long 15 hour day wandering around the little ski resort in the dark.

The conference went well and Slovakia was pretty nice. The best part of Slovakia were the prices for food. We had a giant pork knuckle for less than four Euros, a steal. All the food and drinks were finally reasonable. For me, it made eating much more enjoyable when you are not too worried about the tab and you can eat some decent somewhat healthy stuff.

Friday after the conference, we drove from Slovakia to Vienna. We stopped briefly in Bratislavia, then we tried to go into Hungary just to say we were there. However, the Slovakian border patrol stopped us and fined us for not having highway vignettes!! We really never saw any signs. Our problem was that we entered Slovakia on a backwoods road then got on the highway inside the country. The guy was pleasant enough and we only had to pay 50 Euros, so it was not too bad. Note: it looks like Hungary has vignettes on their highways too.

So Saturday was Vienna. We started out at Schonbron Palace near our hotel. I had been there twenty years ago on a band trip. The gardens were amazing in scale and quality, but Drew was acting up so we did not see as much as we had hoped to. We did not do the tour, it was long and expensive and the kids would not have handled it well. We went on to the Treasury, which was probably the most amazing we have seen so far (we never saw the British jewels). The Wein Dom, Mozart's house and Mozart's grave then off to Germany.

Update: Sunday was Eagle's Nest near Salzburg then back home. We stopped in at Lego Land for a few hours in the afternoon and closed the park down. I still love walking around the park drinking a beer. Autenrieder Hefe Weizen. Very good with Lego Land Pizza.

Fransikaner Weiss Dunkel - Good and tasty, but not my favorite Weiss Dunkel