Trip Planning Phase 6 - Hotel Booking

On Sunday, July 21, Lisa flew to Dallas.  Debbie and Lisa spent the next 4 days researching and booking the hotels for the trip.  This proved to be harder than expected.  Some of the hotels in Croatia were a little suspect?  We booked hotels in Vienna, Budapest, Zadar, Opatija, Rovinj, Trieste, Ljubljana and one more by the Vienna airport.  It took us quite a bit of time and research, but we were very pleased with our final decisions.  We even had some time to detail and map the sights we would be able to see in Vienna and Budapest.  The trip seems very real now and we are excited.  We can't wait until October gets here.

Lucky was our constant companion

Trip Planning Phase 5 - Move/Party in St. Louis

The next time we got together to work on the trip was the week of June 17-23, 2013.  Debbie and Bill came to St. Louis to help Fran move and to attend Geoff and Andrea's wedding reception/party.  On Friday, June 21 we all went to the Cardinal baseball game.

                On Saturday, June 22, we attended the reception/party at Helen Fitzgeralds.

In between all the moving, family time and partying, we managed to do some trip planning.  Driving distances were checked again and daily destination stops were agreed upon.  A stop near Graz, Slovenia at the Weutz Distillery was added.  Tom had seen a television program about this distillery and as it was on our route back to Vienna, it was agreed to add it to the tour.  This was the first chance Tom had to wow Debbie and Bill with the Croatian he had learned in his Croatian class.  We also went to Grbic's Restaurant for a sampling of Bosnian/Croatian cuisine.

Trip Planning Phase 4 - New Years Eve

One year later, another New Years Eve planning session.  Bill and Debbie came to St. Louis for the holiday.  The four of us went to the Kirkwood Station Brewing Co. to see the Grateful Dead Tribute Band, Jakes Leg.  We had a blast!  The next day we had New Years Day brunch at Dave and Kathy's.  This has become a tradition.  Even with all these happenings, we managed to get in some trip planning time.  At this point, the trip just needed some fine tuning and  tweaking.

Trip Planning Phase 3 - Wedding in St. Louis

The weekend of November 16 - 18, 2012, Debbie and Bill came to St. Louis for Bill's cousin's wedding.  In between wedding festivities, we spent many hours planning on our laptops and enjoying more wine.  Bill and Tom topped the planning sessions off with some fine scotch from our last trip to Scotland.  We mapped the distance between the various cities on our route, and selected our end-of-day destinations.  Now that we knew how long it would take us to get from one place to another, we had to decide which sights to remove.   We knew there wouldn't be time to see everything on our list.  We also discussed the sights that were "must sees" in Vienna and Budapest.  The trip was really taking shape.  Bill was able to book the first leg of our flight this weekend; second leg to be booked later.

Trip Planning Phase 2 - Dallas Opera

Tom and Lisa made a trip to Dallas April 20 - 22, 2012 to attend the Dallas Opera's performance of the "Barber of Seville".  The four of us had a wonderful dinner at The Old Warsaw before seeing the opera.  Many hours were logged in whittling the trip down to a more manageable size.  Bratislava, Dubrovnik, Split and Salzberg were eliminated.  It was agreed that Vienna would be the city to begin and end the tour.  All this deliberating was done with the aid of several bottles of wine.

Preliminary decisions were made on some of the sights we thought we might like to see.  We even had time to squeeze in "Shiner Sunday" at Love and War in Texas to hear Mark David Manders.