We spent a couple of nights in Freiburg as part of our road trip around southern Germany. We stayed at the Black Forest Hostel, which was great. It was kind of industrial feeling and had a really nice, functional kitchen that we used to make dinner one night. It was located just a couple of minutes from the town center, and the room we had the first night was on the side of the building that faced a small river, so we slept to the sound of rushing water. So nice. Freiburg might go down as one of my favorite cities [View Full Entry]

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We stopped for a few hours between the Rhine Valley and the Black Forest in Heidelberg. What we noticed in Heidelberg, other than that the castle was very cool, was how many Americans were there. Between tourists, students studying abroad there, and the nearby American military base, it seemed like one out of every three people were heard talking was speaking English. We spent some time browsing through some shops in town, enjoying some Thai food for lunch (yum), and then we headed up the hill to visit the castle. The castle is in ruins and has only been partially rebuilt, [View Full Entry]

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After checking out of our retrotel in Echternach, Luxembourg, we headed back east into Germany and towards the start of the scenic part of the Rhine River Valley, called the ‘Romantic Rhine’. This area had a fun mix of castles, wine (especially Riesling), and windy roads running along the river. The Rhine River valley was also busy with trains on both sides of the river and barges going up and down. We stayed in St. Goar, one of the first towns we came to (driving north to south). Our hotel, Hotel An Der Fahre, was actually more like a B&B [View Full Entry]

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We picked up a rental car (Peugeot 207) in Cologne and took the Autobahn south-west towards Luxembourg. For the 5 days we were driving around Luxembourg and Germany, we didn’t have any hotel reservations. Not having any reservations gave us some flexibility in this portion of our trip which was good because we were indecisive about exactly where we wanted to go. We drove for a few hours and stopped in Echternach, a town just across the border from Germany. We looked at a couple of hotel rooms and chose the less smoky smelling one, the Hotel des Ardennes. We [View Full Entry]

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From Helsinki we flew to Cologne, Germany. We just had one night there and had found a great deal at the Hilton, so we got off the plane looking forward to a nice quiet night filled with bubble baths, television in English, and high thread-count sheets. That wasn’t exactly what happened, however. As we got off the train from the airport in downtown Cologne we noticed big crowds of people everywhere and lots of commotion. We finally figured out that it was Christopher Street Day, a huge annual gay pride celebration, going on just outside our hotel. We dropped our [View Full Entry]

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We’ve been bad about updating our blog lately - sorry! We've got good internet access again, though, so we'll get all caught up in the next few days. From Tallinn we took an hour and a half ferry ride across the Baltic Sea to Helsinki. The ferry was great and even offered opportunities for those interested to buy cases of vodka and beer at “low Estonian prices.” We didn’t partake, although in retrospect that might have livened up our stay in Helsinki. Helsinki was a much more modern city than most of the places we’ve been this summer. It's surrounded [View Full Entry]

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When Lindsay and I were planning our trip this summer, we were always keeping an eye out for cheap budget flights. One great deal that we found was a flight on Easyjet from Berlin to Tallinn, Estonia. We also found a flight from Helsinki (a short ferry ride across the Baltic Sea from Tallinn) back to Cologne, Germany. It turns out the cost of the two budget flights plus the ferry was comparable to the cost of train tickets from Berlin to Cologne. So, we thought why not, and so we went. Tallinn was a different city than we have [View Full Entry]

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We left Prague and took a five hour train ride to Berlin. The train was nice but had this weird system where some people had seat reservations and some (like us) didn’t, so there weren't two seats together anywhere in our car that were unreserved for the entire trip to Berlin. This meant that we, and lots of other people, had to juggle ourselves around in different seats for different segments of the trip. Kind of annoying. Anyway, we made it to Berlin and found our way to St Christophers Hostel. The hostel was pretty big and corporate, but the [View Full Entry]

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After three days in Český Krumlov, we caught a bus (called Autobusy in Czech) to Prague. The ride was more peaceful than our death defying shuttle from Austria, but it was about 90 degrees on the bus and there were people with standing room tickets in the aisle, so it was a cozy ride. I visited Prague with my grandparents and my cousin when I was 12, and although I didn’t remember much, I did recognize the Old Town center and the Charles Bridge from when I was there. Lindsay and I stayed at the Rosemary Hostel, about a 10 minute [View Full Entry]

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We took an airport shuttle from Linz, Austria to Cesky Krumlov across the border in the Czech Republic. Our shuttle driver may have been a nice man, but he drove like a maniac. He went about 70 mph down small windy back country roads barely wide enough for two cars, and then slammed on the brakes and veered to the right every time another car appeared. To his credit, he did sometimes slow down a little on the turns. We arrived in Cesky Krumlov safe and sound and we caught the tail-end of an annual renaissance style festival with marching [View Full Entry]

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