Friday 16th - Friday 23rd January 2009 Our arrival at Bad Gastein was welcomed after a fairly hectic day. My bags were absolutely back breakingly heavy and we hadn’t left ourselves much fat time wise. The train arrived at Westbahnhof in Vienna while Jane, Phil and I were off buying lunch and other goodies and so poor Sean had to move four backpacks and four daypacks from one end of the platform to the other by himself (he found a luggage trolley when he’d finished). Fortunately, none of us missed the train and the rest of the journey was rather uneventful, [View Full Entry]

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Saturday 10th - Thursday 15th January 2009 Although I was excited about the Australian Summer waiting for us, our last week in Vienna was a little sad. We said goodbye to Jamie (for the last time) on no less than four occasions and met Malachy for lunch and Emmanuelle and Hans Peter for dinner. Gathering our belongings and cleaning up the apartment I’d fallen in love with and teaching my last lessons were harder than expected. Fortunately, Jane and Phil arrived on Saturday and kept us entertained and busy for the final few days. We showed them around our favourite sites [View Full Entry]

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Sunday 21st - Friday 9th January 2008 We'd planned to spend Christmas in England with Alex and so arrived on her doorstep late on the 21st, after a mammoth journey from Vienna via Bratislava, which involved three buses, two trains, a plane and (worst of all) the loss of two bottles of Chrissie booze. Fortunately, we arrived to good old English teacakes, cups of tea and a festive (warm!) lounge room. On Monday morning we were straight into it with a trip with Jamie and Adriana to Brighton (they had arrived from Vienna a couple of days before us). We checked [View Full Entry]

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Friday 5th - Tuesday 8th December 2008 Our motto for this trip has been ‘When in Rome’, so our journey really wouldn’t feel complete without a visit to this ancient, historical city. With our travels rapidly coming to an end, we squeezed in a quick long weekend between visits to Northern Ireland and England. The scene was set with an overnight train journey from Vienna to Rome. We had the top bunks in a little cabin that we shared with three other people and it felt like we were on a school camp (the other cabins were filled with children on [View Full Entry]

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Wednesday 19th - Saturday 29th November 2008 Just as a foreword, this is a 2nd draft, as my first contained too much info on expenses. Megan pointed out to me that it is a travel blog - not a column in the economics section. So I have reworded it all as best as I could. And I also want to point out now that Terravision is the worst bus company in the world. Pass the word. Earlier in the year we accepted an invitation to Hilary’s and David’s Wedding in Ireland, so we used this as an opportunity to visit Catriona [View Full Entry]

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Saturday 1st - Tuesday 4th November 2008 Sean’s Ma (who’d been in the UK since August) organised a trip to visit Jamie and Sean in Vienna, but flew in and out of Prague. Of course we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to check out the famous city so went up to meet her for a four day mini-break. We are a little behind with the blog, so here is a wee account (I’m just back from Ireland). Getting There - Prague is just four hours north of Vienna, so we caught a train there early on the Saturday morning and late [View Full Entry]

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October and November 2008 Well, we’ve been flat out lately with travel, job searching and English teaching, so this will be a quick account (I’ll try) of our time in Vienna in October and November. Note that we also went to Budapest in October (blog published 25 days ago!) and in November we went to Prague and Ireland (blogs to follow soon, we promise). Firstly, we moved into our own apartment and it was so, so good to unpack our bags after five and a bit months of travelling..... my socks are actually in the sock drawer. We also think we [View Full Entry]

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Friday 17th - Monday 20th October 2008 PestBuda - Being the amalgamation of the city of Pest and Budain in the 19th Century it could have easily been named that, but I agree it sounds better the other way round too. So Hungary has a very impressive history, and it’s easy to see the proud history with the large bronze statue at the corner of every street. In fact, they had so many statues they have taken some away and made a tourist park out of them. Memento Park is a collection of Soviet statues installed during their period of occupation [View Full Entry]

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September 2008 September was a fairly quiet month for us; with no travel plans we were able to slow down and enjoy the end of Summer in Vienna. Without a doubt, the biggest surprise was the severe change in weather. We went from wearing singlets, shorts and sandals to scarves, jackets and even gloves within a couple of short days. We’ve since been told that Vienna seems to skip Spring and Autumn, but I am happy to report that the really cold weather only lasted a couple of weeks and it has been quite mild ever since. On the plus side, [View Full Entry]

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Saturday 23 - Wednesday 27 August 2008 We both had a tops night sleep in the ‘Romantika’ (something about ships perhaps....) and, because we had forgotten to set our watches to the new time zone, only woke up when an announcement was made saying we were an hour from Tallinn. The port we arrived at was very well set up and clearly catered for large numbers of tourists arriving by passenger ferry. There were already three large ships berthed in the port and later we discovered a second port just around the bay. A city sightseeing bus was waiting out the [View Full Entry]

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