It's still raining today. We got our free breakfast. I called the US Consulate in Vienna, Austria as soon as they opened. They made an appointment for us tomorrow at 9:30am. Bring our paperwork too. OK. Now we have a plan. I called the Hotel Stephanplatz and asked if they had a room available Monday night. We were already booked on Tuesday but we needed to get to Austria right away. They had a room but, unfortunately it was a suite. We had to miss our ...

This morning we had our free breakfast and caught a bus at 8:30am to get to the Neuschwanstein and Hohenschwangau castles. Let's just call them N and H for short. H is the castle of the parents and N is the one that the son built later. It's also the castle Disney used to help create "Sleeping Beauty Castle". Mom liked the fact that I had reserved our tickets online and so we walked right to the front and got our tickets, first to H, then N.. Mom pick...

So we left Lucerne in the morning for a 4 hour train ride. The first leg to Zurich was uneventful. We had quite a walk to get to the next train taking us from Zurich to Buchloe, Germany. We boarded the first class car and Mom went to get settled into our assigned seats while I strapped our luggage in the storage area.  This discourages people from easily taking luggage from this unattended area. I finished and met her in the car and she was telling me about s...

Today we slept in a bit, had our free breakfast at the hotel (most hotels in Europe offer it) and took the city bus to Hergiswil to the glass factory. One of the original glass manufacturers in Europe, we watched them make things out of glass the old fashioned way. Mom tried glass blowing herself and she's carrying around the glass globe she made. She wants to get it home. We took the bus back into town. The train would have done this in 10 minutes but the...

We left Interlaken at 7am on the train to Lucerne. Nice ride with beautiful scenery. Got to Lucerne at 9am and went straight to the hotel, only a block away. We were too early to check in but we left our luggage there and started out the day on Mom's favorite, a boat on Lake Lucerne. We bought tickets for the Mt. Pilatus tour which consists of an hour boat ride to Alpnachstad where we board the cogwheel train and climb 5500' in 40 minutes. Had to wait 2...