I think we might need to slow down a touch.  We have been approaching this trip like it is a week long junket and it clearly is not.  We are like a runner that has become skilled at 10km races who then decides to run a marathon.  If she goes out at her 10km pace, she will implode before the race is over.

We had a full day yesterday and a travel day today.

I have learned a few important travel tips I would like to share with you.

• Just because a site says “Vienna apartment”, it is not necessarily IN Vienna.  It might, for example, be 12 miles out of town.  This is a bigger problem when
• Certain addresses show up many times.  There is a Funkhgasse 3 in Vienna AND Pressbaum.
• If your landlord is Romanian with poor English skills, all of this is made even more interesting.

We have taken it easy tonight.  We have sent Virginia to bed early and the big kids have written in their journals and are now playing 3-way chess.  Susie is reading and I am knocking out a short blog before an early bedtime.

We are doing all of Vienna in a day tomorrow, so we will start early and end late.  It will be a lot like Berlin – train into the city and do it all in a whirlwind.

Before I wrap up, I wanted to share one of our favorite aspects of Budapest.  Budapest has several thermal pools that have been made into huge communal pools.  These “baths” feature a grand variety of patrons: tourists, young Hungarians with dates, older natives playing chess in waist deep water and several pregnant people.  Oddly, it seems that roughly half of the pregnant people are 50-60 year-old men.  There is an unusual body type that you see a lot in Hungary – men who gain almost all of their weight in their midsection.  When someone has this body type and overachieves calorically, they literally look like a woman who is 9.5 months pregnant.  It is worth noting that this does not discourage the wearing of Speedos.

The bath we went to had three huge pools.  The one in the middle is just a lap pool, but the ones on either end have water jets, fountains, and cascades.  The feature that our kids liked the most was the “Spin Cycle” (as they dubbed it).  It was an area with two concentric walls in the middle of a large pool.  The water is 4 feet deep.  In the middle circle is a relaxing sitting area.  In the next circle out there is a lane in which powerful jets send everyone around in a circle.  When it was running, roughly 25-30 bathers would be sent around rapidly while laughing happily.

I felt like a camper!

Looking forward to giving you a good update from Vienna.

Be sure to keep your Funkhgasse’s straight!

Steve Sir