After 5 days in Slovenia, we headed west towards France, where we would spend the remainder of our vacation. We always seem to visit Europe during heat waves and this year was no exception. We’ve become ‘soft’ after living in Seattle’s cool weather so 100 degrees was boiling for us!

We wanted to spend the bulk of our time in France so we planned to drive the entire first day in Italy (a very long drive!). On the highway outside of Venice I recognized the logo/name of my favorite wine – an extremely small vineyard, that produced a wine we often bought when we lived in VA. We stopped at the offices and once we found someone who understood English we tried to explain that we were trying to find out where to buy their wine in Washington state. Unfortunately for now, they don’t have a distributor here but hopefully we can buy their wine again in the future! They gave us a bottle of our favorite wine as a gift for stopping in!

We continued to a hill town in Italy called Apricale. It’s incredibly beautiful in this area and we hope to spend more time in this region some day. Next, we headed to France. We drove the beautiful coast and visited several seaside towns before heading to Monaco. I wasn’t all that excited about seeing the huge boats/fancy cars when Z told me about Monaco, but I’m glad we went. It is incredible! Think Vegas grandeur but not fake.

We met up with our friends from Seattle who were also in the south of France on Vacation one day and headed north to Provence the following day. We spent most of our days driving through wine country and the agricultural regions of France, and stopping to explore the little hill towns in France. I have never seen as many cherries as we did when we drove through the cherry orchards in France!

We also headed to Lyon to meet up with Lucija and Erwin in their new home city. We had a great time touring the city with Lucija on the Velo’v bike rentals. It’s such a cool program and a great way to enjoy the city.

We spent our last day driving from Lyon to Zurich where we spent our last night.

It was a great trip and we saw a lot but covering over 2000 miles in 2 weeks is a little much and I don’t know that I would recommend that for everyone!

View our photos from Part 1 of Vacation 2009.

Posted in Europe, Slovenia & Croatia, Travel 75 Comments »

One positive of the downturn in the economy is cheap airfare to Europe! We found a great deal on tickets to Zurich, Switzerland (which were cheaper than we usually pay to fly to DC!) . We had a direct flight from Seattle to Frankfurt, a short layover, then another flight to Zurich. The direct flight from Seattle goes very far north so it cuts off a lot of travel time. With the direct flight, the Seattle to Frankfurt flight is only 10 hours (DC to Frankfurt is 8 ½ hours but if you fly Seattle-DC the flight is about 5 hours!).

Since we flew so far north it was sunny the entire flight. We completely missed the nighttime. When we arrived in Zurich we were pretty exhausted. We spent our first night at the Hilton in Zurich relaxing. Zurich is about 8 hours from Z’s family in Ljubljana, Slovenia but we had a night in Innsbruck, Austria to break up the drive.

En route to Innsbruck, Austria. On the way we stopped at Neuschwanstein Castle in Germany which was the inspiration for Disneyland and Sleeping Beauty. The castle was very pretty but pretty isolated and you don’t get a great view of the castle (check out wikipedia – the castle is pretty beautiful but you never really see that view from anywhere!) The drive through the Bavarian countryside was incredibly beautiful. We had one of our best meals on the trip in a restaurant where no one spoke any English and we just kind of pointed to the few words Z knew (chicken, asparagus, and potatoes). Outside of Innsbruck, we visited the Swarovski factory which was a little bizarre!

Z’s sister, Lucija, also flew to Slovenia to visit while we were there. We had a great time hiking, walking around the town, and enjoying some of the local cuisine. Check out part 1 of our vacation pictures below.

View our photos from Part 1 of Vacation 2009.

Posted in Europe, Slovenia & Croatia, Travel 85 Comments »

We decided to retire the Saab and find another mountain/activity car. Z doesn’t fit in most cars so we quickly narrowed down what we were looking at!

I fell in love with the X5’s “moon roof” and it is all wheel drive so we don’t need chains for the mountains. Even though Z said we would never own another black car, because they show too much dirt, we found this one and it had everything we were looking for.

View photos of my new ride.

Posted in Miscellaneous 399 Comments »