Salimarkles In Switzerland

So we have found "our" place in Switzerland - Wengen. I decided we needed a trip to the Alps to celebrate David's bday. How had we lived in Switzerland for half a year and not been there yet, right? So we did a frantic search and found a place for September in Wengen. Wengen is a car-free village in the Alps, only accessible by train from Lauterbrunnen (only a mere 15 minute train ride so quite easy). It is part of the Jungfrau Region. Some mountains you may see here are Jungfrau, Eiger, and Mönch. It's a great hiking and skiing area. Just doing some Fall hiking There's a playground on top of the mountain Mooooooo Anyway, we went twice. Once in September and then again in early December, and both times were amazing for different reasons. In September, we were able to really take in the views and the waterfalls. We arrived late-ish on Friday after work (only 2 hour drive from Basel) to Lauterbrunnen and parked our call at the Bahnhof (rail station)....

The elder Salimarkles took a small city break this weekend to meet up with some friends in Munich (München) for Oktoberfest. How could we be so close to Germany and not go, right?! Boom boom was here to watch the little Salimarkles and Munich is less than an hour via plane (we got cheap tickets!) so off we went. I can take no credit for all the plans - we happen to be lucky enough that one of our friends is the master organiser and indeed made everything happen in perfect form. I was very happy to profit from this though! The one thing I did to prepare was buy a Dirndl. These are the traditional costumes for women. If I had known they'd be sold on every corner there, I would've just got one there but I amazon'd it beforehand and I actually quite like it. Dressed appropriately for the festivities in a Dirndl and Lederhosen We arrived very late on Thursday night and while we could have made a run for the tents, we decided it would be better to hit everything fresh on ...

Sladoled! Like Venice, we had heard that Dubrovnik is not exactly toddler friendly (note that this is different than kid friendly! There are a lot of things a 7 year old will enjoy that just don't work for a 1 and 3 year old but somehow everyone lumps kids together into one big bucket...). But we were pleasantly surprised by Venice, so we figured maybe Dubrovnik will be the same! Beautiful water! So clear, so blue! (so cold) We arrived at our hotel, Hotel Mlini, early in the morning (having taken a 4:45AM boat transfer back to Venice airport for a 6:00AM flight). We used Sun Transfers van with 2 car seats to get form the airport to the hotel, and that worked nicely. Even though check-in wasn't until late afternoon, Hotel Mlini checked us right in and fed us breakfast, which was very nice! The staff there were great - super nice to the kids. Unfortunately, they were experiencing cooler-than-average weather for August with some strong trade winds. The net-net was that t...

Part 1 of Salimarkle summer vacation. Venice is only a short 1 hour flight from Basel and I've always wanted to go. If I'm being honest, my ideal trip to Venice was more so a date night with hubby rather than a trip with young kids. But I have recently learned the hard way that everyone in Europe books their vacations well in advance and we had not... so... off to Venice with A & Z in tow! First to get to our place! I had arranged a private transfer because the public one was going to take over an hour and I never know how the kids will be after a flight. In any case, it's fun to have your own water taxi! We had arranged it beforehand with Consorzio Motoscafi. While our trip there and back actually worked out fine, I can't really recommend them because the service operators didn't give us some complete information and even hung up on me (intentionally) when we were trying to figure out where they were at 5AM in the morning. It was the only negative of this p...