New trip plans

Our plans for our summer vacation have come together in the last week or so. We're pretty excited about this one. We're going to a bunch of places neither of us has been before, so it will be a new adventure for both of us. Here's a quick rundown of the itinerary:

Day 1-2: Fly from St. Louis (we're leaving Fang and Errol with their grandparents) to Zurich, Switzerland. Pick up rental car, and hit the road. Meander our way to Innsbruck, Austria and see the city. Spend the night outside Innsbruck in the quaint town of Hall in Tirol.

Day 3: See Hall in Tirol, then move on to the Swarovski Crystal factory and museum. After that, we continue on to our hotel in Schoenau am Konigsee. We'll spend 6 nights there, using it as our base of operations for seeing Salzburg.

Days 4-8 (except Day 5, see below): See Salzburg and the surrounding region. We'll tour some castles, an ice cave, a salt mine, and wander through the gorgeous countryside during these days. We'll also be see ALL of the sights from the Sound of Music, and we will re-enact many of the scenes. LOL

Day 5: Drive to Munich, ditch the rental car, and pick up our new car! Yes, we're taking European delivery of a car. It's silly, but it's cheaper than buying it here, plus we don't have to pay for a rental car for the rest of our trip. How cool is that? Anyway, we'll get the new car, and tour the car museum and factory. We're hoping to find time to see the Englischer Garten as well, since it was a bit cold there for that last time we were in Munich. Then we will race down the autobahn and back to our hotel. Or perhaps we'll just take it easy since we'll be in the car's break in period. Sad, but true.

Days 9-10: Leave Austria and go back to Switzerland. We'll spend two days in Luzern. I have already located a Mexican restaurant there so I can get my salsa fix. I could care less about the rest of the city. Just kidding. :)

Days 11-17: We leave Luzern and drive to the Lauterbrunnen Valley, where we have rented an apartment for 7 nights. We plan to spend the nice days hiking in the mountains and taking lots of pretty pictures. We hope to be able to go to the top of the Jungfraujoch and the Schilthorn as well. We'll take side trips to Gruyere (for the cheese, the chocolate, and the castle), to Bern, to Thun, to Interlaken, and to Fribourg on days when the weather doesn't cooperate for hiking (or when we need to speed down some curvy roads in the new car for a while!).

Day 18: We head back to Zurich. We'll have to give up our car there, and they'll ship it back to the US for us. We have a fancy dinner planned that night, then it's off to the hotel at the airport for the last night of our trip.

Day 19: Back home - sort of. We'll fly back in to St. Louis, and reunite with our furkids.

So, what's the somewhat amusing twist to this little story? We found out earlier this week that our company is going to shut down for two weeks this summer. Which two weeks? Why, the two right after we get back from our three week trip, of course! So, we now have a full FIVE weeks off work this summer. Naturally, we don't have enough vacation time saved up to cover the full five weeks, so we'll get to take a little bit of that as unpaid leave. Oh well. We semi-expected this to happen, and we were prepared to deal with the consequences of our decision, so we're not upset or anything. We're just wondering what to do with all that time off!