New places

Apart from being a year crammed full of huge changes for me, this year I will be visiting a few new places.

I like to visit new places.

Additionally, I will be re-tracing footsteps in places that will look totally different due to seasonal changes. eg Vienna, Budapest and Salzburg sans black ice!!! woot woot

This trip , we will be seeing the following new cities:

Melk - to the Abbey of Melk, where I will hopefully be finding a wicked souvenir or two for Monica

Berlin -cripes, where do I start? Hitler's bunker, Unter den Linden, Checkpoint Charlie, Brandenburg Gate, Nazi walks, Reichstag... better bone up on the WWII history. TWSS

Sans Souci/Potsdam -Charlottenburg Castle

Dresden -to visit the scene of Slaughterhouse 5, and to dash though the medical museum so that I may claim my trip on tax.... oooh, and to see the most heavily bombed city of WWII

Leipzig - to visit Samuel Hahnemann's statue - he founded homoeopathy, thus another tax dodge, God love him

Bled -the most beautiful place on earth

Celje -Dad's birthplace

Vitenje -Tischler town - meeting my Slovenian relatives

Ljubljana -including day trips to the coast line and to wicked castles

Potoroz

Piran -Jeff would like to retire here

Predjama

Harburg

Liverpool - BEATLES pilgrimage

But what I'm really excited about is meeting some of my Slovenian relatives. Just yesterday I received an answer from Matja, who is married to my Oma's brother's grandson...what's that, second cousin?

Anyway, I have discovered that she is a teacher and he is a scuba diver....WTF. They both trundle around the world scuba diving.

Don't you just love having cool relos?

Her manner of speaking is kinda familiar to me in that she was very friendly and offered me plenty of virtual hugs already. LOL Even I kept it reasonably unemotional for the first email, so I think from now on, anything goes. And most of you reading this will know how bad that might prove to be.

So, I have booked and paid for all the flights, and a couple of the tours. I'm fine tuning the Berlin leg and then I can book all that, although most of it will be independent anyway.

Then all I need to do is compile a list of the stuff we're planning to do as a group and cough up the cash.

Luggage is bought, got the North Face jacket this week, still have thermals and could pack the rest tomorrow if I had to.
Only thing I need is a new pair of boots, but as I want exactly the ones I already have, I'm resigned to giving in to the Gods of shoes, who hate me so very much.

Next week, I'll dump thew entire itinerary on here, more for my peace of mind than yours.

I'm writing this on my new laptop, which I bought for my new clinic, but it'll be coming along on the trip do that I don't have to be arsed finding God awful, smokey internet cafes all over Europe.

So, strap in for long winded blogs this time rather than 2 paragraphs of garbled nonsense on Facebook.

woot woot