Away we go

Well, the itinerary for next month's trip is set. We'll lovingly pack our kids on a plane on Thursday, July 2, in the tender care of Stacie's parents. After a brief period of mourning, Stace and I will do our best to pull ourselves to together and start touring Europe without children. Our friends the Bundersons will be joining us for part of the trip, which will be fun. They'll be coming from Amsterdam, where Stuart will be teaching at a university or college or day care center or something for a couple of weeks.

On Thursday, we'll drive to Neuschwanstein, Germany, to visit Mad King Ludwig's castle. (It's the castle that was the inspiration for Sleeping Beauty's castle at the Disney parks.) We'll then continue on to Munich. On Friday, we'll visit the Dachau concentration camp. Depending on how much time we spend there, we may also visit some other sites around Munich.

Later on Friday, we'll drive to Salzburg, Austria. As everyone knows, I'm absolutely crazy about the movie The Sounds of Music, so we'll see some of the sites made famous in the movie. Actually, we may let Maren and the Bunderson girls cover the movie sites for us while Stace and I visit Hitler's former hangout, the Eagle's Next, which is just across the border back in Germany. We'll figure out what else there is to do in Salzburg.

On Sunday, the Woods and the Bundersons will part ways, with the Bundersons heading back to Amsterdam for their flight home and the Woods heading to Vienna for a couple of days. I want to tour the factory where they make those Vienna sausages. (How can you not love them? Six short, fat sticks of mystery meat, surrounded by some unknown gelatinous substance, crammed into a tin can.) Beyond that, I don't much care what we do, but I'm sure we can find an interesting place or two.

We'll spend Wednesday driving from Vienna back home. Stace will spend Thursday in her usual pre-flight stressed mode, and then she'll head to Utah on Friday to be reunited with our children, who may or may not recognize her at that point. I'll head to Utah a few days after that, and then somewhere in there we'll drive from Utah to Minnesota, and I'll fly somewhere in the U.S. for some customer research, and then we'll drive back to Utah, and then we'll fly back to Switzerland.

Hmmmm. That sounds like an awful lot of flying and driving, doesn't it?