To celebrate Mic's 50th birthday, we decided to go to Sicily.  In part I admit, because we were suffering through a horrible heat wave and a hotel would have AC.  How funny that it's only about 60 miles from us, but we had never been together.  We would fly into Catania late at night, take a train to Palermo the next morning, then rent a car.  For some reason, it was much cheaper to do it that way then to fly into Palermo or rent a car in Catania.  I booked a hotel room, but noticed too late that the office closed at 8 PM and we wouldn't arrive till midnight.  Of course it was nonrefundable.  After several phone calls and emails, she spoke no English and I spoke no Italian, I wasn't at all sure we wouldn't be sleeping in the street.  Luck was with us and the lady was waiting up.  It was a nice enough hotel, close to the train station and in an OK neighborhood.  The hotel was old, with creaky stairs, b...

Krakow was a 10 hour bus or train ride from Prague, so I decided it was worth flying; so much faster!  In each country I had to change money and it was confusing to keep up with the different exchange rates.  And should I think in dollars or euro?  In Budapest (Hungarian Forint) it was 283 HUF to $1.  Prague (Czech Koruna) was 24.42 CZK to $1.  In Krakaw, 3.99 PLN to $1 (Polish Zloty).  I didn't even try to figure it out when I changed from HUF to CZK to PLN.  In the Prague airport I had quite a bit of coin left, which you can't usually change, so I bought some kid lunch.  The guys working in the restaurant had a really hard time understanding what I was trying to do. The understood English just fine, it was the concept they had a hard time with.  The young man was trying to buy lunch but he only had a credit card, which kept rejecting.  He went to find an ATM machine and I told th...

On Friday, the 2nd leg of my Eastern European trip took me to from Budapest to Prague.  I had heard about two travel apps called Busradar and GoEuro.  Both compare methods of travel; is it cheaper/faster to go by train, plane, car or bus?  It tells you the company, the timetables and exactly which bus/train to take.  They were both so easy to use, I couldn't believe I had never heard of them before.  Surprisingly, the bus and train were basically the same time and price, about €20 for a 7 hour journey.  I picked Flexbus, for no particular reason and set out.  The bus had WIFI and pretty comfortable seats.  I chose the very back, thinking I would have more room.  Well, I would have, had the seat belt holder not bitten into my backside the whole way.  I was fine if I sat straight up, but leaning into the window to sleep just wouldn't work.   Oh well, it was only 3 hours to ...