Prague

Question: What do you do when you're traveling and one of your kids gets the flu?

Answer: You...just keep sight-seeing...? <insert nervous, self-conscious laugh>

Gulp.

I will win no mother-of-the-year awards for this one.

Let me defend my decision to drag a feverish, sick kid across Europe:
Firstly I get to blame my own parents who, when I was in grammar school and suffering from the chicken pox, hauled me around on our family vacation through Yosemite.  My protests of "I don't feel good" were met with firm commands to get over it because I was ruining everyone's holiday jocularity with my complaining. So there's that to consider.

Also, I'm a nurse.  It's difficult not to perform an assessment on an otherwise perfectly healthy teenager who happens to have a flu and conclude "eh, I've seen worse" (reminds me of that scene from The Princess Bride when Miracle Max looks at dead Wesley and delivers the same line).

Also in my defense is the fact that we were somewhere in Germany with a couple of days' drive just to get back to Obedin so why not let him hole up in a hotel (a really awesome hotel) in Prague and sleep some of it off in the comfort of a bed instead of in the van?

Poor kid.  He tried his best.  If you ask him, I think Mircea would say that his favorite part of travel is the food. When sight-seeing we can generally coerce many miles from his feet with the promise of a good meal at the end. But that first night in Prague he just stared at his plate with the glassy-eyed look people get when they feel like crap.  And although his dinner contained two of his favorite items: crepes and meat, (honestly, I had no idea Czech cuisine was so good) he merely licked his spoon once and then spent the remainder of the meal slumped in his chair.

So instead of exploring the city at night we took him back to the hotel and let him sleep.  As I said, the hotel was awesome (yes, I realize I overuse that word).  It was like something out of a communist-era film set in East Germany during the height of the Cold War with wire tapping and fedoras.  It even had one of those old-fashioned cage elevators which I managed to ride in twice without hyperventilating. (And it came with a rather steep price tag so we consoled ourselves that we were at least getting our money's worth by spending a lot of time there that evening).

The next day there wasn't enough of an improvement to justify forcing him out into the cold but there we were, smack dab in the middle of the city I had heard so many people rave about and praise.  What to do?
Sure I could claim we spent the day bathing his forehead with cool damp cloths but we've got the photos to prove we set forth from the hotel at least once.

The fact is, we left him behind.  My yard stick for measuring the level of a kid's illness is whether or not they are able to play their DSI in bed.  The previous night the answer was no but that morning he announced his improvement by asking permission to use the laptop.  Ok.  Not well enough to consume more than a sip of orange juice at breakfast but well enough to find a song he wanted to download means not well enough to explore but well enough to leave behind while we did so. And we didn't leave him alone, his ten year old brother was there.  And we gave them strict instructions not to get in the bathtub and assured them the hotel staff all spoke English...

Question: Was Prague worth it?

Answer: I don't know, I was so busy worrying about my kids that I really didn't pay any attention

Marius, this one is for you.

Okay, I was actually paying a little bit of attention but just so you know, my knowledge of the political and cultural history of Prague is embarrassingly scant.  I do know that a few years ago the city began a project to restore much of the historic Old Town which included re-cobblestoning many of the roads and installing gas lights on the streets. Something went well because it's absolutely lovely.  

Included among the places we went was the famous Prague Castle but we had heard it takes at least a day to do it justice so we skirted the perimeter and that was it.  (I'm sure it will be there next time.)  We also crossed the much-celebrated St. Charles Bridge but at this point I'm overly-saturated with statues of the crucified Christ, popes and saints.  So we skipped across that rather dismissively.

An unexpected delight was the statue of Winston Churchill placed seemingly at random on an obscure corner street, unconnected (from what we could tell) to anything close by that would provide a clue as to why there was a bust of the British statesman stuck against a building.  I love those moments.  It's what makes touring a city by foot such a delight.

Germany

You know how people go on vacation and suddenly stop wearing their seat belts and taking their medications and generally start behaving as if they are living in an alternate utopian universe where things like car accidents and diabetic comas do not happen?

We aren't quite that bad.  But we have been known to forget about things like the need for sleep, hours of daylight available and the global reality of traffic.
We had this great plan to leave Bad Hofgastein and drive to Munich where we would spend the day exploring before heading off to Prague. If not for the two-hour traffic delay outside of Munich it would have been merely an overly ambitious plan but there was traffic and that pushed it into the "stupidly unrealistic" category of plans.

Fortuantely our trusty GPS warned us of the traffic jam ahead and we chose an alternate route to by-pass the congestion.  It turned out to be a really alternate route.  Like not taking us any where near Munich alternate.  Like two lane-roads winding through village after village in southern Germany alternate.  Like so in the middle of nowhere that we found ourselves looking at each other and saying things like "Where are we?"
"I don't know, it seems like we're in the middle of nowhere."

So you can get a mental picture of where we went, we took E53 through Essenbach and Wallersdorf, Plattling and Biscofsmais.
Er, yeah...

No offense intended to the residents of the aforementioned towns.  I don't mean to imply that they don't live anywhere.  I have a hunch they might be the German equivalent to Obedin which isn't so bad except when you're trying to get to Munich.
 
We could have stopped and explored and probably found something very cool.  We could have had lunch in one of the restaurants we passed, we could have pulled over and taken more photos.  But we kept thinking we were going to arrive some where specific at any moment.  And then we got to dithering about who was still full from breakfast and who just wanted to eat the left over candy in the car and who didn't need to pee yet.  And we kept driving until suddenly we were across the border and in Prague.

So much for Germany. And for that I'm sorry because I would like to have seen more, particularly Munich.

There were photo opportunities but I didn't take advantage of them very well.  Seems I kept shooting through trees, I don't know why.  And I couldn't consistently focus and have no explanation for that either.  So this is all you get. Sorry.

Considering the fact that it's one of the largest and most populated countries in Europe, I think a return trip to Germany is in order.  Suggestions on places to go and things to see are welcome.  Just don't suggest a route that includes E53.

Bad Hofgastein

Sometimes we go places and I know exactly what the itinerary will be including route, hotel name, how many days we'll stay and some of the basic sights I'd like to see.
Sometimes I just get in the car and hope I've packed enough socks and underwear for the boys.

This trip was one of the latter kind.
The whole thing was a bit like putting together a jigsaw puzzle without ever bothering to look at the picture on the box.  Would have been pretty easy to just, oh I don't know, ask, but I didn't and I don't know why except that I have a sneaking suspicion I'm burning out on traveling.  (oh wah, wah, wah you say and you're perfectly justified in your eye-rolling disgust).  In any case, I knew we were meeting the Deaconus some place in Austria.  And that felt like enough information to keep me from losing sleep the night before departure.

I wasn't even aware, until after we'd been in Bad Hofgastein for five days, that this was where Danut used to live.

Danut wasn't with us in Bad Hofgastein, though.  We left him in Vienna with Gabi and Anca which meant we had no one to translate German for us at the hotel.  It wasn't really a problem except for the eggs.
Every morning we asked for eight and got either one or three.  Mihai's German is rusty but he knows enough to say "eight eggs please."  Sure sounded German to me but maybe he was confused and was really saying "another pitcher of hot, frothy milk please."  And I was pretty okay with that, because what beats hot, steamed milk in your morning coffee as you watch the snow fall outside the window?  Not much, let me tell you.
But after a while we just kind of wanted eggs.

Prior to this trip I had believed that when all else fails in attempts at verbal translation, holding up the appropriate number of fingers would always get you through. Apparently that's not the case but I suppose these are the lessons one learns from traveling.
Anyway, the woman serving us was so gregarious and jovial that it made getting upset over something as trivial as the correct number of eggs seem really silly.
In her defense I will tell you that one egg, when it's hard boiled, can be sliced into eight pieces and distributed to eight breakfasters.  When the waitress returned to the dining room and glanced at our table, well, from her vantage point it would seem we all had eggs on our plates.
And it's possible she thought we actually preferred small portions since Americans are notoriously obsessed about cholesterol.  We weren't really a group of Americans but we were speaking English a lot and she can't be blamed for that bit of confusion which was entirely our doing.  It's that ubiquitous English again.  Now you can add not getting enough eggs to the list of ways it will screw you over.

In any case, I realize I've already posted about this trip but there were so many lovely photos I didn't get to share the first time around that it felt wrong not to do another one.  How could I pass up the opportunity to show you more of the beauty in Bad Hofgastein, particularly since I understand California is experiencing a dearth of snowfall this winter.
We got snow and lots of it, sandwiched right between the drive in and the drive out which was perfect.

Bad Hofgastein is a lovely little town.  Shockingly underpopulated considering it was the week between Christmas and New Year.  My kind of place: no crowds, no lines, no waits.
But no eggs either.