The Beginning - December 2011

Bill and Debbie came to St. Louis to attend Brenna and Brandon's wedding reception, which happened to be New Years Eve. We started planning our October, 2013 trip and our first discussion was "where to go". Tom had been bugging us to go to Croatia to visit his grandparents' hometowns. Lisa was finally well-traveled and comfortable enough to consider visiting an Eastern European country, so she agreed as long as Vienna was included. Other cities we wanted to visit were Bratislava, Budapest, Zagreb, Obrovac, Novigrad, Dubrovnik, Split, Zadar, Istrian Peninsula, Trieste, Ljubljana, and Salzberg. Boy were we ambitious at this point in the planning!