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!

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!

First snow :)

We just had our first snow. Rebecca saw it first. She came into the room with a really excited face: Look outside, quick! And then we saw the snow already on our roof-window :) I said immideately, that we should go for a walk. That's what we did:


The big white blob is one huge snowflake flashed by my phones flash :)



These are the first footprints on this snowy bridge.


Our first snowballs :)


Some random flowers on the side of the road.

It was such a lovely walk. So beautiful to see the snow falling in the lights of the streetlamps....
The next day the snow was almost gone. There is some left on the hills nearby and on our rooftops. Hmmmmm. We are already in a little bit of a Christmas mood :)

To the states via Singapore

Here we go, this is the second attempt to write this post. In the first one I accidentally deleted the 'offline' post using my mobile client named 'Blob'. I finally figured out to press offline draft to actually save the thing on my Nokia N8 (btw most pictures here were taken with it :))

Anyway - the trip!
It started delayed. The official statement: Thunderstorms and lightning disabled the landing guide system on one of the runways. Thus planes had to circle and be queued in order to land and therefore the plane came an hour late to Graz. So we landed in Frankfurt and ran. We were told our new gate, supposedly B22, but not if they would wait. We were still running , passing several info screens, but - what the heck - the plane was not there and can you believe it- no personale to see. We ran 15minutes, arrived at B22... no plane. Darn.

We ran back to find - someone, anyone! Over there an Infodesk, great! Well as it turns out (feel then showdown?), every plane in Frankfurt was late today, except, you guessed right, ours - it left right on time, hmmm, at least we knew now. So we calmed down and after the stressful part we strolled slowly hand-in-hand :) to the Lufthansa ticket office. (On the way there we thought we earned ourselves a Frankfurt Starbucks mug :))

We picked number 636, waited 15 minutes and got ourselves the 8.30 morning flight operated by Singapore airlines (sweet!) from a pretty frustrated Lufthansa lady and strolled over 3 minutes to Sheraton Hotel.



People there were really nice, huge building, great room on the seventh floor



with a little bit of a view,



which turned out to be great sunrise view :)



That was quite an adventure, we finally are on our way on the Airbus A380-800



(yes the new jumbo - supersweet!) 11887m high above the Atlantic at 887km/h at freezing -44°C in comfy emergency exit seats and amazing service and 3 hours until touchdown :)

Henderson - where do you/they come from

Since I am in the hospital right now (nothing too serious so far, but still painful) I find myself with a lot of time. I now use much more time to talk with our God, what a blessing :) I am also so thankful for Rebecca spending so much time in between her teaching duties with me!

However I just googled a bit and found a quite thorough little article about that the name 'Henderson.' As some of you might not know, that's my wife's maiden name. When we visited the States a while ago, we had the opportunity to go to a pretty cool Scottish festival. Rebecca knew that 'Henderson' does have scottish roots. So, she was excited and even got to walk with 'her' clan during the parade. Man, she liked that.

Anyhow, can you guess what Henderson stands for? Think it over a little bit and carry on reading :)

This is an ancient Scottish name, the patronymic (meaning "son of") form of Hendry, a mainly Scottish variant of the personal name "Henry". Some bearers of the name Henderson are descended from Henrysons, the "d" being a common intrusive element in many languages between "n" and "r". Henry is from a Germanic personal name composed of the elements "haim" or "heim", home, and "ric", power. It was introduced into England by the Normans after the Conquest of 1066 as "Henri". In Scotland the Hendersons of Fordell in Fifeshire are the chief Lowland family of the name, and are believed to be descended from an old Dumfriesshire family of Henrysons. A branch of the Clan Gunn bears the name Henderson, and there is another Clan Henderson of Glencoe. An interesting namebearer, recorded in the "Dictionary of National Biography", was John Henderson (1747 - 1785), who was a notable actor of his day, considered second only to David Garrick. The first recorded spelling of the family name is shown to be that of William Henrisone, which was dated 1374, in Scottish Papers, in the Public Records Office, during the reign of King Robert 11 of Scotland, 1371 - 1390. Surnames became necessary when governments introduced personal taxation. In England this was known as Poll Tax. Throughout the centuries, surnames in every country have continued to "develop" often leading to astonishing variants of the original spelling.
(quoted from http://www.surnamedb.com/Surname/henderson)

Pretty cool stuff! There is a lot of history hidden behind that name, isn't there?

There is also a lot of interesting stuff on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clan_Henderson.

First day

Our night in the train was reasonably good :) a little uncomfortable, since 5 people tried to squeeze into a 2m by 2m "bed". Nevertheless we slept...

Arriving in Rome we first walked to our B&B - blue rose. Basically a cute little appartment rented out for tourists. We got free breakfast, a three beds room and our own bathroom, what more can you wish for? Oh well the traffic could be quieter, but that makes Rome just more genuine :)

As we made our way into the city, we stopped by a cute family run cafe were we enjoyed cappuccini (or cappucci) and cornetti - amazingly yummy vanille cream filled pasteries. We were off to a great start!


After passing by the Colosseum we split up - Thomas took a tour of the Foro Romano while Lisa and I explored a later part of Roman history. Did you know that Italy as we know it today wasn't united until 1870? We learned that along with other facts in the Monumento Vittorio Emanuele II -the big white building also nicknamed the 'typewriter' or 'wedding cake.'

We also enjoyed ice cream, pizza and coffee. And of course we enjoyed visiting a few churches, people watching and crossing the streets Italian style - the main thing is to be confident, make eye contact with any oncoming drivers and to stick with a large group of pedestrians. There IS power in numbers while crossing any street!

Check out our web album for more pics: https://picasaweb.google.com/thomas.zillinger/RomeI?authkey=Gv1sRgCJfZstjhsMu7eQ