window on the Wachau

Our final day in Austria, our friends organized a day trip out to the Wachau Valley, famed not just for its wines and picturesque scenery, but also its architectural elegance and rich history.

festival madness

For the concert-going crowd, summer is synonymous with big music festivals. Although we live on the edge of Europe, in a little country that fails to draw the big name bands, we are close enough that each of the last two years D has managed to find a way to attend the Frequency Festival, held in a small Austrian town half an hour outside of Vienna.

dipping a toe into Slovakia

Although the world’s two closest capital cities are located elsewhere in Europe, Vienna and Bratislava are so near each other that an hour-long train ride is all it took for us to leave Austria behind and set foot in Slovakia’s capital, whose outer boroughs abut the Austrian border.

familiar stomping grounds

Though we only visited twice — for Thanksgiving in 2013 and again for a handful of days last summer — we will always associate Vienna with our tour in Eastern Europe. Not only has it served as a gateway city for many of our trips abroad these past two years, but also we have close friends there. Last week we returned to Austria one final time before bidding adieu to the European continent for the immediate future.

westward bound

With our Moldova tour wrapping up next month, we have started looking ahead to our home leave, and the opportunities to explore our own country that it affords us. Two summers ago, we took a three-week road trip around California. This time, we decided to leave Munchkin with his grandparents and do a quick tour of the Southwest.

testing boundaries

18 months, give or take a couple of weeks. We have reached the age of high maintenance.

postcards from Transnistria

The thin strip of Moldovan land on the left bank of the Nistru River holds an undeniable fascination for Western visitors, who long to see its still-venerated Soviet symbols with their own eyes.