Taste of Christmas Walking Tour (am) , Schonbrunn Palace(pm) and Klosterneuburg Abbey Concert (evening) Today was going to be a massive day. We had decided to go on a morning walk (3 hours) of the center of Vienna and take in some 4 of the Christmas markets with samples of food and gluvein at three of them. Back to the boat for a quick 1 hour lunch before a coach to Schonbrunn Palace then back for a light dinner and 1.5 hour break before another coach to th...

Friday night Ches struggled to stay awake again but finally surrendered at 10.00pm and slept till 5.00am. I made it from midnight till 5.00 am. Adding on the 2.5 hour nap from yesterday afternoon, I figured we would do OK. I pottered till around 6.00 when I became desperate for a coffee. Peering out into the gloom, I realized it was snowing. I checked on line for a coffee shop open near by and discovered it was at the central railway station a couple of ...

Sunday 21st July - Vienna As you might have gathered, this Blog has gotten away from me. Too much to do and see and too little time to stop and reflect. In part this has been due to the fact that our crew did such a great job in avoiding the lock strikes, which closed every lock in Germany from Tuesday to Friday, that we made it through the final lock into Austria before it began. In doing so, we had longer bus trips to make to visit the various towns in our iti...

It's actually Thursday and we arrived in Carrickfergus late yesterday afternoon after being up at 5.00am for an 8.00am flight out of Prague to Koln/Bonn for a two hour connection to Dublin, the hassles of picking up our rental car and the two hour drive north. We were sound asleep by 9.30pm and it is now 6.00am. Carrickfergus is a little north Belfast and is where my GG Grandfather was born and where my GGG Grandfather settled when he left Scotland in the 1820's....