This will be my last short post about the trip to Africa.  It was such an amazing trip that writing about it has been tough. It’s too hard to describe everything that happened, so I’ve been putting it off.  However, I just wanted to write one final note about our last stop, Cape Town.  It’s such […]

Continuing my long overdue blogs about our trip to Africa…  After more than a week on safari, we thought it would be nice to have some “down time” and go see Victoria Falls since it wasn’t too far away.  It was near the end of the dry season which meant that the volume of water was […]

This is Chobe.  That’s a phrase that the guides used whenever something really special was happening.  And they used it a lot.  So did we.  It’s been a while since we got back from Africa, but I’m still writing about it because I think about it a lot and it deserves some space here.  The entire […]

To reach our next stop in Botswana, we headed out to an airstrip and were picked up by one of many Cessna 4-seaters that ferry passengers back and forth between the remote safari camps.  This one made a few stops enroute dropping off and picking up guests, staff, and supplies as it went along.  Our destination […]

The Okavango River in Botswana flows into an inland delta where it eventually ends, not in an ocean or lake like most rivers.  The marshy area it creates is home to a huge variety of wildlife and was our first destination on safari. There are two main types of safari camps:  National Parks and Reserves, and […]

Since I finally got caught up on our summer activities, it’s time for us to go on vacation again so I have something new to blog about.  We’ve been talking about going to Africa on safari for years and finally decided it was time to it.  It’s also much easier to get there from Europe than […]

For the last post on our summer travels I have to mention a long weekend that we spent in Budapest.  It’s about a 5 1/2 hour drive from our house.  The city is really lovely, reminding us of both Vienna and Prague, but unique as well. We saw most of the “usual” sites – the castle […]

This is the second part of my attempt to quickly catch up on what we did in the last 2 months.  Just across the border in Italy there is a region called Süd Tirol (South Tyrol).  It used to be part of Austria and they still speak a lot of German there.  However, the big attraction […]

I can believe it’s the middle of October already!  After Kirchtag we had a realization that summer was going to be over soon. We quickly made plans to fill up just about every weekend for the last 2 months with things that we thought we would have done earlier.  Of course that also means that I […]

I wrote quite a few blogs last year about Kirchtag, the large festival that takes place in our town every August.  I won’t repeat the descriptions, but since we spent a lot of time eating, drinking, listening to music, and even riding the rollercoaster this year, I thought I should post a few words about it.  […]

We recently had some visitors from California to our little corner of the world.  Two different groups of friends from So Cal happened to be visiting the same week, so we took off and did a little sightseeing with them both.  It was great to get together and catch up on what’s been happening in all […]

We’ve been enjoying the summer and I’m once again behind on blogging.  Eric spent a month in Korea on a trip for work, but as soon as he got back we hit the road and spent a long weekend in Tuscany.  The region had everything we’ve heard about – lovely villas, great food and wine, and […]

In my last blog I mentioned that I’d write about Copenhagen.  Even though a lot of time and other activities have passed, it was a cool trip that deserves at least a few lines. I thought Copenhagen had an interesting and very different feel from other central European cities.  The first thing you notice are the […]

We’re back from a long weekend in Copenhagen that I’ll write about later.  We also made a side trip to Malmo and Helsingborg in Sweden.  It was just a day trip, so we didn’t have a lot of time to stop for a long lunch.  Instead, we just popped into a fastfood place for a quick […]

Der Chef is actually “the boss.”  Der Koch is “the cook.”  Thus ends the language lesson for today. If you asked my new friends in Austria how well I speak German, they will probably say it’s getting much better.  If you ask me, it’s still pretty awful.  I constantly forget words mid-sentence, and my grammar degrades […]

As I mentioned in my last blog, Spring is now upon us.   There has been plenty of rain and just enough sun to make the flowers start blooming.  Since ski season is over, we’ve turned out attention to other activities. Over the Winter we had a tragic loss… Eric’s bike was stolen.  Nearly every building here […]

We took one last ski trip to finish out the season, so I’ll do one more blog about my favorite winter sport.  We spent a great long weekend in Kitzbuhel and got in a few final days of skiing.  We learned the lesson quickly that the best snow conditions were first thing in the morning before […]

The photo below could be a graph of anything – maybe seasonal unit sales data or a cardiogram.  It is, however, a graph of a good day on the ski slopes.  We recently spent 2 of the last 4 weekends on overnight ski trips, the first at Zell am See and the second to Obertauern.  Nearly […]

As the “Forest Gump” saying goes, you never know what you’re gonna get.  Living here in Austria is a bit like that.  Our town organizes all sorts of events and really brings in the tourists.  If you read the local papers (which is still pretty difficult for me) or stop by the tourist office, you can […]

I can’t believe it’s the end of January already.  I guess I owe you all a belated Happy New Year (of both the Western and Chinese varieties).  I keep saying that I’m going to write a blog, but every time I try to do it there seems to be something else I need to do. No […]