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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We left Salzburg and took the scenic route to Innsbruck, about a 3 hour drive to the west. The drive was fun (the drives were some of our favorites parts of the Austria trip) and for lunch we ate at a salad bar at a mall along the way. Our hotel in Innsbruck was literally above the train and bus stations. Although it wasn’t the most scenic spot in town, the location turned out to be great because there was a supermarket nearby that we took advantage of for breakfast and a few lunches and we were only about a [View Full Entry]

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Lindsay and I took our time making our way back to Austria from Northern Italy. We stopped off at a scenic lake for a sausage lunch (of course!) and got off the highway a few times to take the smaller roads. We arrived in Salzburg after about 4 hours of driving and checked into our hostel, the Institute St. Sebastian, which is a women’s religious student dorm during the school year, but rents out some of the rooms during the summer. They had lost our reservation because another person with the exact same name had checked into the hotel the [View Full Entry]

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On Sunday morning we picked up a rental car in Vienna and started our road trip. Our first stop was just over the border in Gemona del Friuli, Italy, where my friend Monica from Monterey lives. The drive took about four and a half hours and included some incredible scenery (as well as more than a few tunnels as we drove through the Alps). Gemona is a small city near the Austrian and Slovenian borders, and is actually very close to where we were in Slovenia last summer. It is technically in what is called the pre-Alps, and the scenery [View Full Entry]

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Okay, maybe that title was just a cheap excuse to use the word "Wiener." We arrived in Vienna on Friday after a short one hour train ride from Bratislava and found our way to Hostel Ruthensteiner. The hostel was great - really clean and bright and well-run, and best of all, they had washers and dryers. We spent our first morning/early afternoon in Vienna just doing laundry (first time we've had a dryer since we went home for Christmas!) and catching up on email. Later in the afternoon we ventured into the city and headed to the Kunsthistoriches Museum, which [View Full Entry]

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On our way between Budapest and Vienna, we stopped for a night in Bratislava, Slovakia. Bratislava was not necessarily at the top of our list of must-see destinations, but we figured since it was so convenient (on the way from Budapest and only an hour from Vienna), we’d stop and take a look around. We had read in the guidebook that outside of the small old town area the city was kind of grim, and we were kind of bracing ourselves for an unpleasant trip from the train station to the hostel. It wasn't really at all like we were [View Full Entry]

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We left Istanbul at 6am on Monday morning with a whopping two hours of sleep under our belts (and a few beers the night before), flew all the way back to Milan, and then caught our flight to Budapest. Despite being pretty exhausted by the time we arrived, we both really liked Budapest from the beginning. Driving in from the airport was kind of strange as it looked like we could have been anywhere in the Midwest - it's really flat with huge corn fields and hot, muggy weather. This geographic confusion continued as we arrived in the city, because [View Full Entry]

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