Salimarkles In Switzerland

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...

Adventures never stop for the Salimarkles. Grandma made her first ever visit to Europe last weekend to see both of her grandkids in Switzerland. We sent her back to California with a lot of great memories. The Saturday before she left we went to Montreux to visit the Chillon Castle. Although our littles weren't very interested in the Castle they had a great time going to the beach. After eating some lunch by the shore, we went into town and let the adults have a meal followed by ice cream! On the car ride back Zavi decided to get very upset and threw up all over him. We had to pull over at a gas station to clean everything up. I'll be very happy when car rides are less eventful. :) On Sunday, we finally lassoed Amaya's unicorn. After 4.5 months, we finally caught the purple train/tram! I took Daji out for his morning walk and saw the purple train passing our local tram stop. After some quick calculations we estimated when it wo...