We have arrived

We have arrived in Germany and all is well. We're staying in a very nice house in the hills near the Rhein that we rented from airbnb for a mere $81 per night—for all four of us. We'll be here for two nights, exploring the Rhein valley tomorrow and then taking off for Goslar on Wednesday morning.

More info plus pix tomorrow. Too sleepy now.

Going to Europe!

Sue Anne, Bruce, Aimée, and Steve will be going to Germany, Poland, and the Czech Republic for about three weeks, starting Sunday, September 29th.  We meet in Boston, fly to Frankfurt, and then take off in our rental car.  We’ve traveled together a number of times in the past—UK, Alberta, Quebec—and we’re looking forward to this trip.

Sue Anne and Bruce easily qualify as old Germany hands.  Bruce spent 3 years there in the Army in the late 1960s, we lived together in Berlin in the summer of 1972, Bruce traveled there often on business, we introduced our kids to Germany when we lived in England in the early 80s, and we had a great trip there in 2000, after the Wall came down and we could finally visit places that were previously on the other side.  A good bit of this trip will follow the path of that 2000 trip, so you can read up on it ahead of time if you wish at our Germany 2000 diary.  (The word ‘blog’ hadn’t been invented then.)

Steve’s family background is Polish, and the two of them have been there once, so they’re the experts in charge of that part of the trip.  They’ve also been to Prague (which everybody says is wonderful).  Both of these are uncharted territory for us, so there will be lots of new places to see and learn about for all of us.

Here’s a map of our planned route.  The marked waypoints are places where we are going to be staying along the way for at least a couple of days.  There will be side trips to explore local areas of interest.  Aimée and Steve will be heading home after Nürnberg, while Sue Anne and Bruce will go down into Bavaria for a few more days.

We got some of our accommodations from the great site airbnb.com.  We’ve used it quite satisfactorily at homes, apartments, and the like in the US, but this is our first foray into the international market with them.  Coverage wasn’t too very extensive and locations in the cities tended to already be filled up a few months in advance.  But still, we got some nice places from it, and others from sites like hotels.com, booking.com, and expedia.com.

Stay tuned!