Trip to Phoenix

With my wife and kids headed down to Houston for a girls weekend, I decided to hop a flight Friday afternoon to Phoenix to visit my brother and his family.

To get a jump on the mid day heat, we went to the Botanical Gardens on Saturday morning to check out the Dale Chihuly sculpted glass exhibit which was aesthetically interspersed with the unique desert vegetation. Please excuse the poor quality photos from my cell phone cam.

Me and my nephew, Daniel

not glass, real flowers!

Brother and his family

After the gardens, we stopped by In-N-Out Burger for me to get my fill on one of my favorite fast food joints I frequented as a kid in Southern California. Double-Double, fries, vanilla shake. Mmmmm!

It turned out the Atlanta Braves were in town playing the Diamondback, so Todd and I headed over to the stadium and were treated to a great game. The ballpark was very impressive.

Chase Field

Famous Outfield Pool

Made it to Vienna

It is Sunday afternoon, and we've made it to Vienna. We had a nice train ride yesterday morning getting here, then located a bookstore to get our BK Vienna Travel guide, which we couldn't live without after using the Prague version. We had a wonderful dinner last night, then hit the sack early.

Today, we took the metro to the Hofburg Quarter for a day of site seeing, followed by some time in the Stephansdom Qurter. We toured the Habsburg palaces and garden's, saw the Dynasty's crown jewels, then visited the Albertina museum where we saw the works of Dali, Monet, Picasso, Klee, Degase, Kokoschka, and many more, in addition to touring several of the state rooms of the Habsbugs palace. Pretty interesting stuff.

Any how, no time for an elaborate post. We've got a full day tomorrow concluding with a concert in a fabulous concert hall where will hear some Mozart, Strauss, and others.

Cheers!

Prague 5/30/08

Day Three:

After breakfast, we set off to Old Town Square to take in the sites. Old Town Square is where many of the architectural styles of Prague converge. You've got Gothic, Rococo, Baroque, Art Nouveau, Renaissance, Romanesque, etc. We went inside the Tyn Church, which was an ornate gothic church and watched the top of the hour festivities on the Old Town Hall Tower's clock strike 11am.

We hitched on with a free tour for about an hour and listened to many of the other notables regarding the square before breaking off to head over to a cafe for coffee.

I made a mistake in an earlier post. I thought the Scotts were in Prague in droves for a rugby match last Wed, but it turns out they are in town for a soccer match against CR today. They are everywhere. Painted faces, kilt wearing, flag toting, bag pipe playing, bar taking over Scotts EVERYWHERE. It was amazing. The game starts in about an hour, though I'd have to imagine they are underdogs assuming Rosiky and company are playing for CR.

Next, we crossed the river to tour Wallenstien Palace amd the gardens inside the palace walls. This Palace is the current home of the Czech Senate, and the gardens are well maintained and populated with about a dozen peacocks. Pretty interesting.

We took the tram home after lunch, and are getting ready to head to the Opera in about an hour. Then it is off to Vienna first thing tomorrow morning. Hopefully that goes smoothly.

Prague 5/29/08

Day Two:

Day two started off early with another breakfast downstairs. We set off immediately to Wenceslas Square, which is Prague equivalent of Las Ramblas in Barcelona or Champs Elysees in Paris, though possibly more historic. It was here that a protest in Nov of 1989 against Police brutality led to the Velvet Revolution, and the overthrow of Communism. The square is really more of a long double wide street, and is named after St. Wenceslas, the Patron Saint of Bohemia.

From the southeast end ofthe square, we were a short walk from Statni Opera, the Czech Republic's State Opera House. We bought tickets to Puccini's Tosca which we'll see tomorrow on 5/30. The interior looks amazing from some photos we've seen and is fashioned in Neo-Classical style decor. Stay tuned for our thoughts on the Opera.

A couple of blocks from the Opera, we saw a building that looked alot like a train station, and decided we'd go check it out. We didn't have our train tickets for Vienna yet, and thought we might look into locking those down. After a few difficult conversations in broken english and Czech, we have tickets, and think we know the drill for Saturday morning. It should be a scenic 4 hr trip getting us to Vienna (Wien) by noon on Sat.

Next, we headed to the Jewish Quarter called Josefov. When American's think of European Jewish Quarters, we immediately think to the WWII era, but this area dates back long before that. This quarter is a combination of two distinct jewish communities that settled in the area in the Mid 1400s. The West Jews settling around the Old-New Synagogue to the west, and the East Jews of the Byzantine Empire settling around the Old Shul where the current Spanish Synagogue resides on the east. The entire area is about the size of 8-10 city blocks, and isn't that big.

We first toured the Pinkas Synagogue which has been created as a memorial to the 77k+ jews lost during the Holocaust. Of the 100k jews in Prague when Germany invaded, about 80k of them were sent of to a concentration camp called Terezin located about 60 miles NE of Prague. Here many of them stayed before being sent off to Death Camps such as Auschwitz. Only 3k of the jews survivced to return to Prague after the war. In the Pinkas Synagoue on the walls is the inscription of all 77K+ jews lost. Really a shocking and touching memorial.

From there, we went to the Old Jewish Cemetary, which during the period of 1400-1600 was the only place Jews could be buried in Prague. From the photo below, you can see that the tombstones are densely packed, and in most places, the dead are burried 8-12 people deep due to lack of space.

We toured several ornate synagoues marking different periods and times in the quarter, and had a good time exploring save for the fact that things were a bit pricing, and photography was not permitted in any of the sites.

Next we grabbed lunch at Kafka Cafe named after famed Czech writier Franz Kafka sipping beer and enjoying people watching from our street side table.

From here, we decided to hoof it back home but do the Charles Bridge on our way back up the Vltava River. Charles Bridge is Prague most familiar monument connecting the Old Town with the Little Quarter which sits below Prague Castle. Until 1741, the bridge was the only crossing over the river. The bridge was commissioned by Charles IV in 1357. The bridge is pedestrian only, and is lined with statues of various Saints of Bohemia.

For dinner, we went to the raucus establishment next to our hotel called U Fleku which is pretty much a fun beer garten. Accordian players and tuba totting festively dressed guys play sing songy drinking songs and encouraged the folks sitting in the outside tables to get involved. There is only one type of beer available, and they walk around with it on trays for you to flag down when you're ready. They just keep a sheet of paper on your table with your tally that the "guy with the money" totals up for you on you way out. My tally reached 5 last night, mostly because I wanted to see if they would give me another mark at beer number 5, or would use the cross mark in typicaly tally style. They didn't do a cross. We had brats and a greek salad that were outstanding.

More stuff to do tomorrow, but am not sure I'll be able to blog it before we leave early on Sat morning to head to Vienna, and don't know if I'll have access to computers there.

Prague: 5/28/08

Day one:

We got up and had breakfast in our hotel. It was an interesting fair, but there was a bit of fruit, coffee, and pastries.

We took a cab to Prague Castle and started off on a day of touring the inside of the castle. The tall Gothic looking structure in the centre of the Castle is St Vitus Cathedral. Within the Castle Walls also house various Basilicas, Palaces, Convents, Art Museums, and much more. Read about it here

Afterspending roughly $30 on the cab ride to the Cathedral, we were motivated to figure out how the public transit system here works, and we did. I pride myself on being able to figure out Public Transit in foreign countries, and enjoyed learning the ropes here. They have buses, electric trams (Above ground) and subways. Anyhow, we made it back home for about $2 in about the same amount if time.

We were still a bit jetlagged, and both crashed for about an hour and a half. I slept HARD, and felt much better after waking.

We had dinner at Reykjavik in Old Town on a street that is on the East Bank and is a straight shoot off of the St. Charles Bridge. Apparently there was a Rugby match at Sparta Stadium last that evening between CZ Republic and Scottland, because we could hear it from the Castle, and saw lots of Dudes in Kilts wearing Scottland Rugby jersey's that evening.

On our way back home, we were walking down some less traveled streets and were commenting on how every block had 2-3 little pubs that were tiny, and mostly empty. Just then, we spotted one that was showing the USA v England soccer match being held in Wembley Stadium in England and decided to grab a beer and watch the rest of it. The match was a poor showing by the US, and by time we reached the end of the first half, the little bar was packed with Ingrid and I, and about 15 Brits, all swearing like sailors, and not very impressed with the US effort. It was fun none the less.

Three beers later, we were on our way back home calling it a late night.

Itwas a good forst day, amd we've got plans to take in an Opera at the National Opera House in two days. It should be great.

Made it to Prague

We made it. A bit of a long trip, but it couldn't have gone smoother. A quick summary.

We rolled once in Dallas, but made it out to ORD a bit late. Had 30 mins to make it to our flight to LHR (heathrow) and should have been in first, but a screw up by the agent in dallas didn't have us listed, and since we were late showing up, they'd already put some people with lower non rev status in first, so we went to business which was fine. We got to sit together. The seats were our new lie flat fully robotic seats, so we slept a little. The food and drinks were great, and we each took in a movie.

We had a 5 hr layover in LHR, and figuring out how to Nonrev on BA was interesting. They basically have this little room for all nonrevs. You list at a computer terminla bank, then wait until 60 mins prior to your departure, and your flight and ref # appear on a screen saying, yes, no, or maybe. When you get the yes, you have to check your bag, get through security, and to your gate. By the time we found out they had room for us, it was a mad dash through security and to the plane. We did spend all 5 hrs ofthe layover and fly out of the new Terminal 5, which was a $1B project for BA. Very nice terminal. Like a Nordstroms inside. They didn't loose our bags (Term 5 has cost BA hundreds of millions in lost bags fees in the first 4 months its been open).

Our hotel is great. We're on the top floor with a vaulted ceiling, very clean, has internet obviously, we just ate a great breakfast, etc. We ate dinner last night at a micro brewery recommended by a friend called Pavorsky Dum. It was a 10 min walk from here. Outstanding. I had a sampler with 8 flights of beer including a banana, dark cherry, coffee, pale, dark, wheat, pilsner, and something called nettle in the flight. For the meal, I had beef in "Candlesauce" with Czech dumplings for dinner last night. Ingrid had beef goulash. We finished dinner off with an Apple Struddle.

We're off to Prague Castle today, and might see about taking in a symphony or Opera tonight. There is a Spring concert fest going on that we'd like to take advantage of. This place is very amazing. The weather is great, and everything is green and in bloom.

ps. still trying to get twitter working on the international cell phone. Stay tuned.

Back from the Island

Its been a while since I last blogged. As most of you know, I took the family down to Puerto Rico for the week.

We left on Monday morning (10/15), and despite horrible storms in DFW and the threat of cancellations, the flight got out though a bit late.

We were greeted by some real bad traffic as we made our way out of San Juan to Palmas Del Mar, the resort community our hotel was located on.

I had read that Puerto Rico is one of the most densely populated places in the world (more dense than Manhattan NY, and even Bangladesh) so I wasn't sure what to expect. Sitting in the traffic, the stats were confirmed.

Palmas Del Mar is located on the eastern side of the island about 50 miles SE of San Juan. It is a huge developed community with marinas, golf courses, condos, hotels, beach, etc. It was pretty nice. Definitely secluded from the rest of the island.

We laid low on Tuesday hitting up our hotel pool and the hotel beach. Nothing to write home about, so I won't, but the kids had a good time.

On Wednesday, we headed up to El Yunque National Forest, the only Rain Forest in the US National Forest program. The Rain Forest actually consists of 4 different types of forest. The park is on the slopes of a mountain that starts around 300 ft in elevation, and goes up to 3,500 ft, so the forest changes as you reach higher altitudes.

you can drive about 2/3 of the way up the mountain, so you can really see some of the changes in a matter of minutes as you make your way up. We toured the visitor center which was nicely done with some interactive displays. We drove up to La Coca Falls and got out to take some pictures.

Then we headed further up the mtn and got out and did a short hike on the Bano Grande trail.

This park was really well done, and I could have spent the hole day hiking it. I'd highly recommend it.



On Thursday we headed in to Old San Juan to walk the streets and tour the San Cristobal Castle. It was the warmest of the days we were there, so besides getting a little sticky, it was very cool.
We decided to come home a day early, primarily because we had done all that we planned to do, and the hotel pool and beach weren't enough to get us to stay for another day.

We planned to jump on a 9:30am flight on Friday morning, but didn't get on as a flight from San Juan to Tampa was canceled due to a mechanical issue, and all of those passengers got reacomodiated on any flight with empty seats. So we ended up hanging out in the airport until 5:00pm and got on the last flight of the day. We had packed only enough diapers to get us home on our original morning flight, so between rationing water to keep diapers dry, and borrowing diapers from complete strangers in the airport, we made due, but it sucked.

I'll be the first to tell you that flight benefits for airline employees just don't cut it. In this day and age of record high load factors, and an over loaded Air Traffic Control system, traveling stinks, and trying to travel standby just doesn't ever work flawlessly for me. I'd have more patience if I was alone or with Ingrid, but standby with little kids is a disaster wating to happen.

So its nice to be home sleeping in my own bed again. I've got a 10 mile run on the schedule for today, and am searching for motivation to go out and do it. I probably need to start soon or it aint gonna happen.

Have a good week every one.

PS. anyone looking to watch all or parts of the IM World Championships can catch the re-feed here