Lauer mini vacation part II

Our trip to Croatia began in Trieste, Italy.  We had to take a big tour bus through Slovenia in order to get there.  Sorry- we forgot the take a picture of the bus, but is was comfortable, air conditioned and smoke free.  We got to listen to lovely US 80's music in croatian or maybe russian.  I was not really sure.  It has a population of around 2 million, amazing that a country has the population of Seattle city limits alone.  The area we drove through was mostly forest and what appeared to be abandoned fields.  Wes noticed right away there were quite a bit of sink holes.  Our bus trip was around two hours and we ended up in the town Opatija, Croatia.   It is coastal town on the Adriatic Sea and very beautiful.  History of this town incudes being a resort town in the 1800's for the Astro-Hungarian empire.  In 1920 the town as given to Italy during that time the fascist government started a plan to "italianize" the population.  In 1947 it was given to Yugoslavia, and in 1991 after Yugoslavia was dissolved it became a part of Croatia.

 View from the bus as well approached the town

 

 View of our hotel.  The buildings were beautiful there.  We stayed in the wisteria villa.

View of the shoreline.  We mistakenly thought there would be sandy beaches.  Not so, but the view was still has still spectacular.

 The town gardens were really well kept

 Pretty grainy photo of Wes standing on our balcony after we put the kids to bed.  Decided to get a suite and it was nice to have separate rooms.

 Trying to capture the full moon outside our balcony.

Lauer mini vacation part I

The french school system gives a number of holidays for the kids, so starting this week they have two weeks off which gave us a chance to do a little traveling.  We also had another motive.   If you are in France or I believe any other EU country for more than 90 days you need to apply for resident permit and pay a large sum of money.   When we received our visa via the consulate in San Francisco, the employee there decided to waive the permit for myself and the kids since we were coming about three weeks later than Wes and just gave us long stay visas.   Rumor has it if you leave the EU or schengen area (kind an open borders between various countries) and have your passport stamped your count starts over and you avoid having to get the permit.   So Wes and I racked our brains where were wanted to go- our first choice was Morocco, but unfortunately the air tickets decided to sky rocket right before as we made our plans.  Our alternative was to visit Croatia (I later read that they are joining the EU in July, we were close) via a side trip to Italy.

This is what we have experienced so far:

The kids were really excited to be riding a bullet train, unfortunately we are second guessing whether it really was.  It was pretty fast, but Wes thinks there are special rails and we were not on them.

It was a pretty long day and train ride.  The first stop was in Turin (2006 winter olympics were held here).

  

We had about an hour layover until our next train came so we took a walk and headed to a cafe for drinks.

 

After a really....................  long day we ended up in Trieste, Italy.   It was a part of Austro-Hungarian empire before WWI and later belonged to Italy the end of the war.  It is on the Adriatic Sea and is very beautiful.  It was pretty late when we got there, so we went straight to our hotel to check in and hurried out to dinner before bed.  Next to the pizza shop was a gelato shop that Wes had read was the most popular shop in the city,  It was very good- so much in fact we hit the shop the next day as well.  It was also packed both days.

Thursday morning we walked around the city before we caught our bus to Croatia.

Train/Bus station

Greek orthrodox church

The above is a video of the organ music in the church.  There was a large pipe organ and a lady was playing up in the balcony.  This was nice, since often when you enter these churches, the taped music is piped in via speakers.

 Rumor had it that there was a castle/fort on top of the hill.  Knowing our luck with viewing castles, we started walking!

 The view from the top of the hill.  I was getting nervous- no castle in sight as of yet.

 Finally a castle/fort that was open!

 Notice that the castle here was a much different style than France

 Fresco on the ceiling

 Kids thought the knight was pretty cool

 View from the window overlooking the sea.

Notice that the table is warped from years of probably washing it with water.

Of course with any of our sight seeing trip the kids must check the local playground and make sure it is up to pare.  One things we noticed that there appear to be far less playgrounds compared to France.  I am not sure if this is general rule or something we noticed in the specific cities that we were in, but we only found one.   Wes and I have realized that a playground really keeps the kids going and is a great break for them and us.

 After the castle we needed to catch the bus to Croatia, so we headed back to the city and stopped in a cafe for lunch.  As always you NEED to see what we ate.

Weekend road trips

As most of you know, Wes and I do not have a car here in France.  We get by with either walking or taking the bus/metro.   There is a car share service here and we have seriously thought about signing up, but I admit the roads are little intimidating and I'm not sure how much I would use it.   As easy as the public transportation system is here in Lyon, it limits what we can see, so we decided to rent a car this weekend and explore the countryside.

We decided to drive to Annecey.  It is a city about 1.5 hours from Lyon.  We decided to be a little adventures and take country roads.  Actually there was another reason, we were cheap and didn't want to pay the tolls.  The country side of France is beautiful, but one thing you would never expect is that there are a lot of factories out there.  Villages that we considered to be really in the middle of no where would have these hugh compounds.

The above picture was take on the drive- it is an area called Savoy.  It is a part of France but still separate.  They have their own flag.   France annexed it in the 1860's.

Part of Annecey is on a lake- you can see the Alps - very beautiful.

 

 

Part of the city is a series of canals of the river.  Kind of like Venice- or much smaller I'm assuming.

Steep hill on your way up to a castle in town.  The kids were really excited and didn't complain a bit in anticipation of seeing the castle.

This is the glass observation box you can look into to for viewing of an archeological dig.

Here is the castle and much to our disappointment, it closed 30 minutes prior to our arrival.

We just had to take a picture this-Ava and Johnny were really excited to see a violin and cello shop.

Ava told me this city reminded her of Disney Land.  She was right.

 Of course there have to pictures of food.  The food here is really AMAZING!

The charming little place we ate.   Only held about 8 in this little room.

Yum, Fondue!!!!!!!!!!!!

One last view of the canals before we headed home.  We paid the tolls this time.

With one more day with a car and our lack of being about to go into a castle yesterday, we jumped in the car again and searched out more castles.  We drove to a small city near Lyon called Vienne.   It is another former roman city in the area and has extensive ruins including an intact roman temple and our castle to view near by.  Ava was really into this- she loves this stuff.  We also went to the roman ruin museum.  This place was really interesting. It is really interesting to see the Romans had indoor plumbing, but after they fell, Europe didn't see it for hundreds of years again.  It was such a sophisicated society.

This structure was amazing!  I can't believe it is 2000 years old.  Built by Cesaer.

 

 

Here is a panoramic view

There was also a roman theater as well.

Unfortunately, our poor french got the best of us and we didn't notice in big red letters on the website that the castle is closed to the public until further notice.  We are having no luck with castles right now.

By the afternoon, the kids were practically crawling at the ceiling and were SICK of being in the car.  They were done and had no interest in locating a castle, on the other  hand Wes and I wanted to get out money fully out the car.  The kids won however and we headed home and went to the park.  Spring has finally come to Lyon and it was a nice warm day.

Stay tuned for our next adventure- Venice and Croatia in a week!