We left Stockholm to travel to Helsinki by boat. Our journey took us overnight around countless Swedish Islands before finally finding some open water, stopping off in Aland, and continuing on to Helsinki. The boat was fairly modern and contained a few different bars and restaurants, a casino, a duty-free store, and an outdoor observation deck. It was by far the largest boat I have ever been on but I guess it is nothing compared to some of the massive cruise liners regularly sailing the Caribbean. While on the boat we passed the first few hours watching the scenery go by [View Full Entry]

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I arrived in Stockholm the day following the summer solstice to spend a week with my parents seeing Scandinavia. I was more than a little tired when I arrived in Stockholm after flying from Milwaukee to Detroit to Amsterdam to Stockholm, but I was not too tired to somehow find humor in the giant murals of Annika Sorenstam and Bjorn Borg painted on the walls of the airport just outside the baggage claim. I don't really know why this is funny; I only know that it is. My first impression of Sweden as we were riding from the Stockholm airport to [View Full Entry]

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In April I took a three-day trip to Palm Springs, which was a number of firsts for me. In getting there it was my first time flying from Milwaukee to Chicago to make a connection and it was the first time I have flown on a propeller plane (from LA to Palm Springs). The Milwaukee to Chicago flight is a pretty ridiculous. The two airports are 55 miles apart and the plane covers that distance at 7,000 feet in about 13 minutes. Our flight was actually late arriving in from Chicago but that was kind of funny. The gate agent made [View Full Entry]

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Exactly one week following my quick trip to Kansas City I decided to make a trip to the other end of Missouri and visit St. Louis again. I haven't counted but I think this was probably my fifth or sixth trip to St. Louis and somehow I have managed to take most of these trips during the winter months. In this case I could have done much better in timing my visit as I missed all the Mardi Gras parties by one week. Either way, it was good to see Josh again, and this time around Kate came along too. The [View Full Entry]

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Having grown up in the Midwest and lived there for almost all of my life it is kind of surprising that there are still places like Kansas City, that I had never visited. So, when the chance came along for me to take a weekend trip to Kansas City I jumped at the chance. While I was in Kansas City I stayed at my friend Brad's house, which was currently undergoing renovations. This meant one working bathroom for 6 people. It was all good anyway as we really didn't spend that much time sitting around the house. Instead we visited the [View Full Entry]

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In January I was lucky enough to attend a sales meeting in Santa Fe. In the past I had driven across New Mexico when en route from Phoenix to Milwaukee but I didn't have much of a chance to see anything apart from gas stations and rest stops along Interstate 40. This time around I was able to take in some of the sights of the capital city of Santa Fe as well as the surrounding Sangre de Cristo Mountains. In arriving in Santa Fe I first flew into Albuquerque where I boarded a bus for the two hour or so [View Full Entry]

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In the afternoon we drove out of Salzburg through the southern part of the Czech Republic to the town of Cesky Krumlov. Having not learned our lesson when we drove into Salzburg a few days earlier we again tended to rely too greatly on the GPS sytem in our car. This caused us to find our way onto another aptly named "unnamed road" which we followed for probably 45 minutes. While doing this the afternoon gave way to darkness and snow began to fall. We continued through forests on a road barely wide enough for one car through the darkness and [View Full Entry]

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We returned to Munich from Malta and then made the three-hour journey from Munich to Salzburg as part of our journey back to Prague. On this trip it seemed to me that we began to rely a bit too much on the accuracy of the GPS system in our car. On the way to Salzburg we follow our GPS onto a road aptly named "unnamed road" for about a half an hour while making our way to Salzburg. In doing this we were afforded a chance to see some of the scenic Austrian countryside as well as more than a handful [View Full Entry]

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For Christmas 2007 we journeyed from Munich to Malta. We flew for pretty cheap on Air Malta as winter is far and away the off-season for tourism in Malta. As our flight touched down at the Malta airport everyone on our plane broke into spontaneous applause. At first this seemed kind of funny to me, but then seemed a bit off-putting. Was there a reason we should be so happy that we landed safely? Maybe they had made some kind of announcement on the flight in Maltese that I didn't understand. Whatever, we were in Malta and it was a comfortable [View Full Entry]

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Following a few days spent in Prague we made the roughly four hour drive to Munich two days in advance of a flight to Malta. As always we arranged for our accomodation in advance without full knowledge of what exactly we had awaiting us and, as we usually do, we avoided the larger chain hotels in hopes of finding something a bit more "authentic." What we actually had awaiting us in Munich was a bit different than we had expected. The hotel itself wasn't at all bad; it was actually pretty comfortable. What we didn't expect was that our hotel, though [View Full Entry]

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