USA here we come August 3, 2017
Yesterday evening Helen, Chloe and I left for the US.  We are going over to celebrate the wedding of one of my nieces. This will be the 2nd wedding of that generation. The trip didn't start brilliantly. The previous night American Airlines called and left a message on my work phone to say they were oversold on the flight across the Atlantic and they wanted us to re-route via Chicago but unfortunately they only had two...
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Berlin to London July 10, 2017
This morning we met Daniel (my nephew) at a coffee shop in his neighbourhood for brunch. It is an Australian coffee shop (underlines the multi-nationalism of Berlin) and they served a very nice breakfast (and the coffee was good to). It was raining when we left and we were waiting outside for our taxi to come when a lightning strike hit the telephone/electricity pole about 15 meters away from us. The thunder struck almost immediately afterwards...
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Berlin Day 2 July 9, 2017
After all the walking of the last week, we opted for a more chilled day with a little less walking. The plan was to have breakfast at a coffee shop at 9:15am and then take a Berlin city hop-on-hop-off bus tour to get a better overview of the city. The tour we chose was a 2-hour round trip and we hopped on Gendarmenmarkt (in front of the Conzerthalle). We stayed on the bus until the stop...
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Lutherstadt Wittenberg & Berlin July 8, 2017
Given it is the 500th year of Martin Luther nailing his 95 theses to the door in Wittenberg, we had always planned to make that a stop on our European tour. Originally we thought we would take the train from Prague to Wittenberg (as it is south of Berlin) and then on to Berlin but I discovered when I tried to book the train tickets that the train to Wittenberg from Prague actually went through Berlin...
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Berlin July 7, 2017
We left Prague (photo view from our hotel room this am) today on the 10:28 train to Berlin that actually left at 10:58. Prague station seems totally disorganized. About 75% of the trains were reflected as arriving or leaving late.  Ours wasn't but left 30 minutes late anyway. At one stage the platform number of one train went up 1 minute before its due departure time and everyone had to run to get to the train....
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Prague Day 2 July 6, 2017
Breakfast was included in our room rate at the hotel and it was a pretty good spread including fruit (a lot of varieties), eggs (scrambled, boiled and fried) and usual extensive selection (for Europe) of breads, rolls, meat & cheese. We headed for the Museum of Communism after breakfast. Ironically it is situated in one of the Palaces which it shares with a swish casino and downstairs is MacDonald's. It is a street with shops both...
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Prague July 5, 2017
This morning we headed to Prague by train. We had originally wanted to drive but you cannot rent a car in Austria and drop it off in Czech Republic. You would have thought that would be possible since they are all part of the EU but after trying at least 6 rental car companies and getting the same story I gave up and we decided to do it by train instead. The train trip takes just...
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Vienna Day 2 July 4, 2017
The weather remains very pleasant in Europe. Today got up to around 28 degrees in Vienna and even when we went out late afternoon it was still around 26 degrees C. H and O went for an early morning run and by all accounts enjoyed the experience of running next to the Danube, through parks filled with statues of composers and past other historical sites and impressive buildings. We had breakfast at one of the nearby...
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Vienna July 3, 2017
We left at 7:30am from the flat for Heathrow to get our BA flight to Vienna. We had some breakfast in the BA lounge and by the time we were finished it was almost ready to board the plane. I used air miles for the flights and could only get 3 business class and 3 economy class seats and so O, M & S were in economy where you get no food on the flight at...
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Vilamoura & London July 2, 2017
I can't believe it has been a week already in Portugal. We arrived last Saturday and the week had simply flown by. Feeling like we should have had 2 weeks instead of only 1 week. Nothing to be done about that now though. Saturday was our last full day in Portugal. Every Saturday there is a market at a nearby town called Loule. Helen had planned to run in the morning before we left for the...
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