First real day in England...

It has been fun traveling but I need to put a word of thanks and understanding out there to the sisters that helped host us in both our destinations. We came over and invaded their lives and expected them to show us around and we were all far too indecisive.
We all wanted to go out and see the sights but no one wanted to make the decision and instead tried to pass the decision making onto our gracious hosting siblings. That was relatively unfair. Despite this burden they both did a great job helping us to take in as much as we did in a whirl wind tour. So if you ever travel to visit relatives make sure you have in mind what you want to do before you get there. My experience now tells me that making decisions is really stressful on all parties. The larger the group and more closely related the worse it is to make decisions and the greater the likelihood that some body is bound to have at least a little feeling of not doing what they wanted to do.
So thank you sisters for hosting and doing the best job you could to show us around. We all had a great time!
Our first day in England we took a trip from the hotel by car to visit Swanage and from there to Corfe Castle. We had to cross Poole Harbor by chain driven ferry from Bournemouth to Studland and from their we drove to Swanage. In Swanage we took a restored steam train.
We were headed to see Corfe Castle. The train is run by volunteers and basically operates as a tourist opportunity The rail fee is used to keep the trains running along with government assistance. It was a little like a bunch of grown up boys playing with a really big train set. But it was fun and a great way to see the countryside. It was certainly a unique trip.
Corfe is a working medieval village that has only been renovated enough so that people can live and work there. The big attraction are the ruins of the castle. This is really something that can only be seen over in Europe!


I don't know what these guys were doing. This train could not have been transporting anything so important that it had to be transferred while still moving. I just think that the volunteers liked playing with their really big train set.







Here we all are at Corfe castle! There are a whole bunch of pictures of the castle on my picture page but this one tells almost the whole story of our visit.
They were encouraging these snails to live at the castle to keep the lichens from destroying the rocks and hasten further destruction of the castle.

We then ate a delicious lunch at the Greyhound Inn. I took several pictures and then learned it was the most photographed inn/pub in England. I recommend the lobster salad that is served in the shell.
We knew that it would have been great to bring our girls (Coralee and S.A.S.E.) They even would have welcomed them in the restaurant. If you can't read the sign, it says "Open for Dogs!"
The meal we ate was wonderful. Even the meat pies tasted great but three slices of meat pie was a little bit much and didn't measure up to the other dishes we got. This was the first meal we ate that started the trend of eating way too well on this trip. For the most part we ate really great tasting food but the quantity began to get ridiculous at times. I don't know if I would take it back though. Mmmmm! But my waist line is still recovering.
This picture was one of about 25. If you want to see them all they are all on my picture site, but I wanted to get a good picture of the train entering the station and the castle behind. The lighting was good and I set the camera on Rapid-fire. The resulting 25 pictures could almost be used as a time lapse film.

When we got back to Swanage we learned that we had illegally parked and killed the car battery with the SatNav. We waited for a little over an hour to leave but we had a good time taking in the scenery and enjoying the beach views of the English Channel.More of my signature flowers and landscape pictures. I still have not perfected it but I like adding the color to my pictures. I really enjoyed watching the sailboat race going on. I wish I could have gone out sailing on the Channel at some time.

We decided that we had a little bit more in us and went to see Durdle Door on the Jurassic coast. When we got there we learned that it was going to be more than a mile long steep hike over the coastal bluffs to get to see this famous geologic formation. Marika was especially excited to conquer this hike as it seemed easy compared to the hiking we had done in Austria. Marika's sister the dancer did the walk with the stamina of a mountain goat but Marika's parents, still tired from their travels, and not used to the hiking found this to be a very tiring journey. The site was well worth it though. We all made it!
It was a beautiful time of day to arrive there with the sun low in the sky. The only thing that could have been better would have been a blue sky but I gather this is a lot to ask for in England.
This view was amazing from the top of our hike. The sun was shining through the clouds and the lighting was wonderful.
That night we ate heartly at a wonderful Mexican restaurant called Corrianders in Bournemouth. The food was great but the decorations in the bathrooms were questionable, as was the size.
This was basically the end of our day one touring England. There will be more stories to come when I get the time.

In the meantime, Enjoy!

Reality

I have come to the realization that I will not be able to update this blog in real time. There is one big reason for this. Every time anything of note happens it is because I am notably busy. I will have to find time when I am not as busy to update this blog for all 2 or 3 of my loyal readers. I think this is quite evident when it comes to my Europe trip that I am still writing about, No I was not traveling for 3 months. Sorry for all of those people who are anxiously awaiting the next blog but I will do the best I can. Enjoy!

We all make mistakes...

Recently I had an interesting weekend of blunders.
It all started simply. We were picking up the house on a Friday night and M came across the Mazda Zoom-Zoom sticker I had bought her when she got her New Mazda Three about two years ago. I know... it took that long to put the decal in the car. Well it had been misplaced.
Anyways we came across the sticker, and before it could be misplaced again I was going to put it in the car. Here are the results:Well if it is not clear here is a closer look.
Yes my wife's car goes Mooz-mooz-mooz. She had me take the sticker out before she started attracting any cows. In my defense I thought the sticker was written backwards to go on the inside of the car. That was not the case.
Problem two of the weekend came when we decided to solve the moth problem in our cupboards. We had been seeing a few moths in the cupboard and decided that it was time to really solve this problem. It turns out they had gotten into everything, even sealed containers. We had to throw out lots of food from the cabinets to get rid of all of the larva.
I guess these moths are called Indian grain moths. They got into everything. The scary thing is I just found another two larva a week later in the last tissue in the tissue box. They were living in the tissue! I hope that we have sufficiently killed enough to keep the population small. But we learned a valuable lesson we need to be careful when stocking food in the pantry. There was some food in there that was rather old but we didn't think was going to go bad. We probably threw out enough food to feed us for a month.
The last blunder of the weekend had a pleasant end but a painful start.
I had written about our vegetable garden during the summer months well we had not seen a single zucchini from the zucchini plant. It turns out that the vine had produced one zucchini but it had hidden from us behind the planting box. Well it had gotten to be about 2 feet long and 5 inches in diameter. We thought that we would stuff it and bake it. We had made baked stuffed eggplant from our garden before and thought that this would work great with the zucchini too. We quartered the zucchini and carved out the seeds (We didn't eat them but if I had thought of it we could have baked them like pumpkin seeds). We diced up some tomatoes and eggplant from the garden and also got out some spicey Italian sausage. We were opening sausage casings and sauteing them in some olive oil when I accidentaly splashed the oil on my arm.
I am actually glad the picture did not come out any better because it would look a whole lot worse. It still looks pretty bad a week later. There were 5 big blisters on my arm 3 were the size of a dime. Oil Burns really hurt. I have been told that it might take a long time for the wounds to fully heal.
Now to end the story. We blended the sauteed sausage, eggplant and tomatoes with some bread crumbs and Italian seasoning. We also mixed in some soft crumbled goat cheese.
We stuffed it into the quartered zucchini and put spaghetti sauce and mozzarella cheese over it all. This picture is only half of it!
This picture was taken a day later of the left overs. It did taste good but the skin was a little tough.
We all make mistakes but at least this out had a tasty end.

Last morning in Austria... Off to Enlgand.

Austria was wonderful we had a great time. The morning we left we got up and took a Yoga class that My sister's Boyfriend was teaching then I went on a long bike ride looking for a geocache. I never found it. I took this picture on the ride.Now that we knew what to expect flying with Ryan Air we were not as worried about time at the airport or making our flight and to the final destination. We got a ride to the airport with my sister and her boyfriend. Made sure our luggage was going to be safe with the bottles of wine. And then went to wait in the non-air conditioned terminal. I have to say Ryan air is good in the sense that there were no wasted expenses the plane we flew on was in and out of the airport in 15 minutes.
Here is a picture Marika took of the little Klagenfurt airport was the plane was taxing down the runway. We have to go back!
A couple hours later we were back in Stanstead airport waiting for M's sister to pic us up. We didn't even have time to clean up and went right to a wonderful Thai Restaurant with some of M's sisters friends. It was a great night of food and family.
We were greated the next morning by Englands famous rain.
This is a view from M's sisters apartment where we stayed for one night before heading off to Bournemouth. The rain was nice but we expected it everyday that got little old.
We were now in the land of rain, afternoon tea and roundabouts.
More to come. Maybe this weekend since I don't have lots of school work to do I can update some more about our trip. And maybe tell about the visitor we have had for a week.

Last Hike in the Alps.

On our last full day in Austria we went on a hike in the alps in Slovakia. The hike was longer than our first hike but only went slightly higher in elevation. The views were amazing.
This is the view from the parking lot where we started. We did not make it to the tops of any of these mountains but they were an amazing sight. Yes the blur in the top corner of the picture is my finger I don't know how that happened?

We started out and had to cross over a stream that was flowing from the waterfall we would eventually climb to. The water in the stream was very cold and had an impressive frosty blue appearance. The water was also so clean that you could simply scoop it up and drink it. This pictures shows Thomas the guide and Em crossing the stream. This was only ten minutes into the hike.

M was just crossing the bridge on the right. We were hiking with a group from the hotel where Thomas worked. We were most definitely the only Americans. The sun was very bright reflecting off the rocks in the stream bed. The rocks were very bright white probably because they had minerals deposited on them from flooding.

I told you the water was a cool blue color.

There were really cool water falls all along the hike. It was nice to be in the valley because the sun was incredibly bright outside of the valley. This made it hard to get great pictures. There was just too much light contrast.










While I have no pictures of wildlife there was a really cool spider web that was very big and about 15 feet off the ground. I was a little worried about how big the spider was that made that web.










This just shows the grade of the hiking we were doing most of the time on this hike. The forest was very nice. I was interested to see that most of the plant life was very similar if not identical to CT.







We had one final crossing to do before we made it to the end of our hike. Marika is being helped by Thomas and the other guide from the Hotel. There was over a hundred foot drop where the water was flowing to the left in this picture. This is the water fall that we were greeted by at the end top of the hike. We had to climb up a crack that can kind of be seen in the left bottom corner of the picture to get up to the waterfall.
The water fall was far more impressive than Bridalveil Falls in Yosemite. At least here there was water flowing.



Thomas had amazing timing to catch this picture. But afterward he missed me dunking my head in the water.

I love to take pictures of the flowers I find on our travels. There are more of these shots with different focuses on my shared pictures account with shutterfly.Finally the sun was in my favor for these pictures. On the way back down from the waterfall which by the way is written Slop in Slovenian. we stopped at a hut where the people live all year round with no modern utilities. But they had running water provided by a hydrological pump. We filled out water bottles with fresh mountain water and enjoyed some soup made fresh in their outdoor kitchen. The people live here in the moutains and sell food and beverages to the people out hiking. The mushroom soup was made from wild picked mushrooms in the area. It was very good and really neat to see people surviving very well in the mountains with such limited modern equipment. The cows are wearing bells too!
Marika really wanted to do her Julie Andrews "The Hills are Alive" scene from the Sound of Music in this field.

At this point I have said all I really can about this hike. Afterward we went for a swim in Faaker See in Villach where Thomas who still was not tired at all wanted to make the half mile swim across the lake to the Island. I made it Marika and my sister did not and decided to turn back before they reached halfway there. It was a great day and really made me wish I could spend more time hiking in the moutains and taking in nature!