Zurich=Starbucks

When you think of Zürich, Switzerland I’m guessing that Starbucks coffee is not the first thing that comes to mind. But, if you are married to Andy, who has just a “small” caffeine addiction and giant love of Starbucks the two go hand in hand. Zürich, which is six hours away from home, has the closest Starbucks in Europe.

Zürich is also the destination we chose to spend and celebrate New Year’s Eve. We spent the day touring the city which is full of the kind of European charm you would expect(really hard to walk on cobblestone streets) but also offers modern touches.

Every city we visit I drag Andy into bookstores in search of the Foreign Language section(English). Milan was the first city we visited that actually had an entire English section. Once again Switzerland trumps Italy, because we found an entire bookstore with only English books. It was a day spent in marital bliss. Andy got coffee, and I found books. The Swiss really are all about keeping the peace.

After a full day of walking, shopping, and sightseeing we noticed the time(I couldn’t resist some sort of time related joke) and headed back to our hotel for a bit of a nap so that we would be able to stay up late enough to bring in the new year.

We headed back downtown at about 9:00 p.m. in order to make sure that we could find a good spot to watch the fireworks at midnight that go off over the Limmat River. There were tons of street vendors selling food other than pizza and panini’s. Andy found a falafel stand and was very happy.

Here we are minutes before midnight. This was our 11th New Year’s Eve spent together. Our life is very good, and we are grateful for our good fortune. We can only hope this new year will bring more love, joy, and happiness. Much love and Happy New Year! Sarah and Andy

The List Trip

If you know anything about Sarah, you know she can’t live without a list. She has a list for everything and has no greater joy than to cross an item off the list.

When we moved to Europe, Sarah created one of those lists of places and destinations we must see before leaving.

Well, I had a week off, and the list if fairly daunting, so no better time to start crossing the items off as now. I got my week off without having to take any leave provided I didn’t get on a plane. As long as I was ‘in the local area’ it was a free couple days. So, our task was to knock of as many items without leaving ‘the local area’.

We began driving through the Italian Dolomities on our way to Innsbruck, Austria. We had heard about the must-see Golden Roof and abundance of Schnapps. Well, we got there on Saturday and the city was dead. I mean, we got out of the car and there was nothing happening. We couldn’t find an open bar to get the Schnapps, but we did find the Golden Roof. . . nothing special.

Even though there was hardly a person on the street, there wasn’t a hotel room to be found in the entire city. Instead of staying in a town with some weird roof and tons of people locked in their hotel rooms, we decided to head to destination number 2; the town of Langenfeld.

Langenfeld is east of Innsbruck; only about 1 hours. We thought we’d be fine showing up mid evening. It’s a big ski resort area with all sorts of hotels and inns. We pulled in downtown at 7 PM, and sure enough, there were hotels everywhere. A very cool little town tucked in the valley of the Alps. Only problem, no hotels available. We went to every hotel in the village, and nothing. So we had to start going further down the valley. Finally, as we were getting seriously concerned and after almost spending 200 Euro on a room, we found a small inn with one room available. 100 Euro got us the following room that turned out to be perfect (although it would have been nice if we had found it about 2 hours earlier).

After waking up in the morning we toured the town. We saw the shops and considered skiing, but before we decided to go, we found out about on of the areas major attractions: a massive indoor swimming pool. So, we spent the majority of a snowy winter day swimming inside and out.

Our day and a half was wrapping up and we were excited to get to our next destination: Zürich, Switzerland. Stay tuned for more pictures and stories from the second half of our trip.