Today we opted to sleep in. Yesterday was such a long day and by day’s end we were exhausted. Since we are no longer young a firmly established in our middle agedness, we decided to not kill ourselves with trying to cram everything in. We did have a long day of walking ahead of us so an extra bit of sleep was well in order. The Freedom Trail Our only plan today was to walk the Freedom Trail with stops along the way to see other sights not part of the trail but easy to visit as they were in the area. Many of you may be thinking of the Freedom Trail in Boston which takes you through the streets of Boston by several historical revolutionary sites, ending at Bunker Hill. Portland’s Freedom Trail is about ... read more

Its been awhile since my last entry and there is a very good reason. Upon our return from out last European trip, we were informed by our landlords that we needed to move out of our home of 10 years becasue they were getting divorced and one of them needed to live there. Well, this created quite a big change for us. We made a very big decision and decided to move to New York City. We arrived in the city August 31, 2013 and have been here ever since. While there have been some minor trips we have had no major vacations. This prompted me to start this on going blog about our domestic travels. There have already been two trips, which were not bloged about; Philiadelphia and Providence RI. I am starting with Portland ... read more

This blog was written the day after the events occurred. In addition, I was one third of the way when I lost power and everything I had written, so things may be jumbled. I titled this an introduction to Berlin, because that is basically what we did today. First a comment about the mass transit here, it has to be one of the most comprehensive and perhaps confusing I have ever seen. They have 4 different types of transit: U-bahns (basically subways), S-bahns, similar to the L in Chicago as most elevated but some underground they also server outer lying areas, Trams, which are everywhere and we couldn’t figure them out, and finally busses. The U and S bahns are pretty easy to use, but there is no comprehensive map of the trams, so you would ... read more

We over slept a bit as the alarm didn’t go off, but that was really ok since today was a pretty chill day. We hadn’t really planned to do a lot of things but more just stroll around old down and the Jewish Quarter. We are at the point in the trip were we are pretty tired and our feet can’t take a lot of walking around (well might feet can’t). Jerry slept so hard and long in one position he woke up with a slight ear ache, so we spent a great deal of the day looking for an open pharmacy to buy some hydrogen proxide. In any event we went down to our breakfast, today they had the basic plus two hot items, bratwurst with onions and scrambled eggs with Vienna sausage, both were ... read more

We are now on the train bound for Prague. First class travel on the Hungarian rail system is not quite the same as the OBB of Austria. This is more like Italian first class where you are in cars that seat 6 people with an isle the runs the length of the car. The seats are very comfortable and recline to a flat position, only if no one is sitting across from you. Jerry and I have windows seats so we are sitting across from each other. We are sharing our car with three German (I think) men, who haven’t stopped talking yet. This is a long train ride. We left at 9:25 and will arrive in Prague at 4:30. There is a dining car so we will probably take advantage of that. Before getting on ... read more