If you’ve been traveling with us for a good long while you know I am madly in love with Julia Child and I’m mildly obsessed with Marie Antoinette.  Now, it’s time to come clean and tell you I also have a slight obsession with the true story of those who actually lived The Sound of Music.  Not the Hollywood version, although I can sing along with pretty much the entire movie, but the people who lived the story.  The von Trapp family.  Fraulein Maria.

When you stroll through the public park in Zagreb, Croatia on a summer’s evening after the heat of the day has cooled, and you realize you can hear Elvis singing in the distance, you know you’re in for an interesting experience.

Hello from Ljubljana, Slovenia.  We left home six weeks ago, June 29.  It took us nearly a month to get back into our travel groove. It’s a very different lifestyle, and mindset, traveling long term. It most assuredly takes time to adjust from home to being on the road and don’t get me started on the challenge of the re-entry mindset once we return to the US.  Now that takes some adjusting!

There were days in Budapest that I swore the rubber soles of my shoes were melting into the pavement as each step became more and more challenging; as if I had wads of gum stuck to the bottom of my shoes.  A global heatwave named Lucifer enveloped Europe and it caught up with us the day we arrived in Budapest.  We could feel it as soon as we stepped out of the Keleti Train Station.

You know the scene in the classic story The Wizard of Oz when the wicked witch of the west cries out, “I’m melting, I’m melting?”  I couldn’t help but think of that melting green-skinned witch as a couple of hundred people sat in overwhelmingly hot train cars, at a random train station, in rural Croatia.

As the train rumbled in to Vienna I stared out the window to catch my first glimpse of what I thought Vienna should look like.  What I saw did not fit the image in my mind’s eye; skyscrapers!  Wait, there are skyscrapers in Vienna?  I suppose in my wild imagination I thought everyone should have been waltzing along the River Danube.

I’m starting this post with a photo.  It’s a photo that depicts one of the best aspects of travel.  Anytime you can learn from an experience and meet good people, such as this group we met in Dresden, it’s a win.

Just shy of one mile in length, The Berlin Wall East Side Gallery with 100 murals, is an open air gallery of art and history.  I don’t think a visit to Berlin is complete without seeing this section of the Berlin Wall.

We took a free walking tour while in Berlin.  It was comical on a few levels, but it was all good.  Our guide, who was Brazilian and German, was adorable and highly personable.  She was also a nervous Nellie as ours was her first tour as a guide in Berlin after only living in the city for two months.  She was a bit tongue tied and probably forgot most of her own tour notes but she could not have been any sweeter.

Lagos, Portugal.  A beautiful seaside destination where all things summer come to life.  It’s been the ideal respite as we start this next chapter – the expat experiment.  And, while our visas took longer to get our hands on than we anticipated, it all worked out for the best.  I always say, life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.  Actually, it was Allen Saunders who coined the phrase, but I borrow it a lot.  I hope he doesn’t mind.