As mentioned in my previous post, Mic's dad lives in Nice.  He hadn't seen him in a while so off we went. Mic wanted to show me Marseilles, so we stopped there first.   He lived in this area for almost 2 years and absolutely loved it.  I did like Marseilles, but since we were only there for one day, we didn't have time for much.  Our hotel was near the waterfront, so we headed down there for dinner.   It was pretty much what you would expect, a bunch of boats, lots of people, nice restaurants and bars.  What I didn't expect was the giant Ferris wheel, which of course we had to go on.  The view was excellent; from the top you could see the entire waterfront in front of you, and the city behind you. After the ride, we found a nice outdoor restaurant that had mussels.  To be fair, every place had mussels.  I rarely eat them, but every single place we passed, people had these big pots ...

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 ...