Monday, April 1, 2013

Our start to an OZome time

We started of pretty early, but very comfortably. We did our packing without almost any stress the two evenings before.

The morning dawned and - surprise - the sun was out and we had blue sky, pleasent after 3 days of snow and cloudyness. Rebecca prepared the lunchbags and even made hardboiled eggs, which we enjoyed later :) And of we went - an hour time until the train leaves at 9.25, a large and a small suitcase for checked luggage, and two backpacks. Oops only 5 minutes until the the tram leaves,

Ruuuuun...


Needless to say we still had to wait a couple of minutes when we arrived at the stop.

Man, are we tired, more or less leaning next to a pole or each other not to fall down when we close our eyes.

There was just a little hurdle on the way, to find the right Ersatzbus (replacement bus), since they ripped out the tracks to replace them in Herrngasse. But we made it in time.

The train even leaves on platform 1a, what a convenient change to using the underground walkway to platform 3 (is that permanent?).


Now we are in the train sitting in a pretty comfy 4 seat seating area with a table, Becca be in and out of sleeping and me... ah yeah blogging :)


Enjoying coffee and other things ...

Pssssst, don't make a sound. That was kinda nice - it think that's new in the Railsjets - a silent area.

Only that not all the people there realized that, until...

... Rebecca asked the conductor innocently 'Excuse me, what do these signs mean' and he awesomly reacted by loudly teaching the pessangers, that they should be quiet and if they don't like it they could go into another section of the train

'Thank you, sir' :)
Aren't they cute? Rebecca asked for salt and pepper, and that's what we got ... so herzig!

On the way to Vienna we could enjoy Austrias beautiful nature wrapped in a white blanket of snow :)



On the airport we stralled through the duty free area
After a while we got quite tired of running around and killing time



even our feet liked to rest, can you see how they smile?!



The flight was pretty undramatic.

Finally we arrived in Dublin, or Dubhlinn, how we learned later in Dublinia, it was supposedly called looooong time ago by the vikings, who founded the city. It means 'black pool' because that's where they arrived with their ships when the drove up the River Liffey.

But here we are - our lovely room!



Right away we enjoyed a little treat!
And after we couldn't find a quiet pub (man this folk is loud) we returned to the hotel to have a little 'Welcome to Ireland' drink, guess which one (nope it's not coke) :)




Sláinte!

Saturday, February 23, 2013

Sledding at Castle Lustbühel

Well it was a terrific day :) It all started with an idea. The idea was simple. It only needed three main ingredients: snow, mountains and skiers. We wanted to go skiing - today! 

Well unfortunately that didn't take place. However God let it snow like crazy over night. Look at that - we haven't had this much snow in one night for quite a while ...
 







And then we thought, if God does such a good job letting it snow so hard, maybe we should do something about it-Yep we went sledding :) This is the first time we took our sled that we got from Ted & Grete out!



And up we went to the Schloss (which means castle) Lustbühel. It's only 25 minutes away by bus and almost in town :)








We didn't really know were the sledding slope is, but they have a cute little zoo for children and look who greeted us there








That's what it looked like there



Hi hon




















This is how it looked when we got to the bottom of the slope




















And that's the view from the top





















Go becca goooo




















Who is the king of the mountain now?






















































We also had a little walk to go there and afterwards to go home again - enjoy:






























During the couple of hours we were outside, every once in a while we found ourselves stopping and saying to ourselves: Wow! What a great idea! This day has turned out to be so uplifting! :)

Thanks, God, what a great creator you are!