Finally, more planning!

• We finally got a chance to talk travel this week. Wed. night Rob had his "mother of all Easter rehearsals" with both orchestra and choir. I had a booster meeting, so we were both running late. While waiting in the parking lot of Opal's I got the chance to do a bit more research by looking at my Rick Steve's "Eastern Europe". So here's what we talked about over a crisp, well-needed  justification 512 IPA:

• After leaving Passau, maybe head over to Bratislava, which was reduced to nothing during the Cold War, but is in the process of becoming a place to visit now. It's directly between Vienna and Budapest THere's not much to see yet excpet the Old Town, a pedestrian area in....well....the old part of town. It's really revitalized, all the old buildings have been restored and cleaned up.  The rest is communist-era wasteland, evidently. So get there about dusk. Next day head for Krackow, see Auschwitz, night in Krackow. Head then to a town called Levoca, which is in Slovakia . This is a link to the Spiss Castle; http://www.spisskyhrad.sk/en.html. Quite a spectacular castle I think I mentioned earlier in the blog. See that, head to Budapest for the evening. Budapest for maybe two nights, then west to Slovenia, over to Venice, back up to Zurich.  Turn in the car, night in Zurich, early train to Paris the next day. Half day in Paris to do whatever, then next morning home. We looked at our calendars as we were planning, and this whole loop seemed to appeal to us the most of anything so far. All the driving is broken up into chunks of 3-4 hours, really doable. More later.