With the plan to head through to Austria, it was another early start to reach Innsbruck. Iz and I got the departure time wrong though, and were sitting in our room while everyone else was on the bus - whoops! Thankfully, the owner came looking for the key, found us, and let us know that the bus was ready to go…we got down those stairs fast! It was good to stop after a couple of hours in Liechtenstein - still part of Switzerland. We didn’t expect there to be that much on - after all it was a Sunday morning and [View Full Entry]

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Incredible is the only word I can think of to describe the day we had today. Yesterday, we were given the optional extras talk, and have decided on doing all bar 5 of the extra activities…there are just too many wonderful things to see and do! Today, we made the most of our two chosen extras, starting with a journey up Mount Pilatus. It’s peak is said to look like the face of Pontus Pilot, from biblical times. The early start was worth it today, as we missed all the traffic, and arrived a bit too early for our train ride [View Full Entry]

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Yes, the wheels on our bus went round and round, all day long. We did some major driving today to get to Lucerne, a fabulous town in Switzerland. Thankfully, we had a few stops along the way to break the trip up. We left our little hotel in Wiesbaden fairly early in the morning - 7:15am…I am afraid these early starts will be fairly commonplace on our tour. No more sleeping in till 9am. Our first stop was a couple of hours later in Heidelberg - still part of Germany - and were able to stretch our legs. The castle here [View Full Entry]

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Today we are back on the road on day three of our European tour. Let’s see now… how about we head away from Amsterdam, Holland, the Netherlands and into Germany. Let’s take a river cruise down the Rhine and spend the night at Wiesbaden…I guess we can do that J We started the day with our complimentary wake up call and buffet breakfast. These early mornings are starting to catch up with us! We then jumped in the bus and headed to our first stop - Koln - pronounced ‘Cologne‘. It was also our first day doing seat rotation for the [View Full Entry]

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After being given the option of going to visit an Amsterdam’s flower market, or sleeping in - we chose the latter, and relished staying in bed past 4:30am! It was nice not having to rush around madly, trying to get organised. The flower market did sound pretty spectacular - it is over 10 soccer fields in size, and thousands of flowers are bought and sold here every morning - then shipped all over the world. You walk along a gangplank high above the flowers, watching all the chaos…we were just too tired. At 9:15am our bus arrived and we found some [View Full Entry]

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At about a sparrow fart o’clock (4:15am) the phone rang. It was our wake up call for day one of our Europe tour… and what a big day it was. The title probably gave it away - we managed to visit four countries in, in just one day! Well, not exactly. We started the day off with an early breakfast and hit the road at 5:40am from our hotel in London - UK. This was our first introduction to the ‘tour part’ of our holiday. The first leg was a short one - we were off to catch a ferry from [View Full Entry]

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Our agenda today was simple - get to London. We were able to have another small sleep in, before catching our cab to Dublin airport, and finding the Aer Lingus desk. If you can organise them, E Tickets are definitely the way to go…the lines are much quicker! Unfortunately, we only have paper tickets, so we have to join the longer queues, but most of the time we’re there early, so it’s not a huge problem. Dublin airport is like a mini-shopping centre, so after one last look upstairs we found a seat and relaxed for 10 minutes before boarding our [View Full Entry]

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With time to sleep in, we made sure we didn’t set the alarm till 8:30am this morning, and headed down to breakie just after nine. I love the little pork sausages here, and will miss them when we head out of the UK for a month and a bit. The full English/Irish/Scottish breakfast definitely sets you up for the day - if you can fit it all in! After breakie, we decided to walk to Trinity College - and were only disorientated for 10 minutes or so - we realised that we needed to cross the river in order to get [View Full Entry]

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With only 1 and a ½ hours drive to get to Dublin, we certainly didn’t rush around in the morning to get out of Kilkenny. Instead, we headed to the Laundromat to do some much needed washing, and took in the city centre, including some more shops. At about 10am we decided to head to the big smoke, and arrived there in good time. Our B and B had been pre-booked (thank goodness) because we soon realised something BIG was happening in Dublin this weekend - the National Gaelic Games were on - Football and Hurling!! People were flocking into the [View Full Entry]

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To make our trip to Kilkenny a little more interesting, Iz and I decided to stop off at a couple of sight-seeing points along the way. It wasn’t too long a drive to our final destination, so we could afford to take some time out from our fairly busy schedule. Our first stop was only 30-40 mins from Cork - the Mitchelstown Caves - one of Europe’s major show caves - according to their brochure. We were a little unsure of this when we rocked up - in a tiny car park in front of a dingy country house - and [View Full Entry]

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