The flight is booked!

Booking our roundtrip tickets to Europe was a lot more complicated than I thought it would be.  After months of procrastinating, eventually we just had to go into work on a Sunday, put our laptops side by side in the largest conference room, use a whiteboard to figure out time zones and flight length, both looking at the same shared Google doc, and spend a couple hours running different flight options til we were satisfied.  Only, when I tried to actually buy the tickets, both my cards were declined. The frustration took over, we gave up for the night and went to Breakside Brewery for sustenance.  Amazingly when I called my bank to get help, they called me later that night, and explained the cost of the tickets were slightly above my daily limit.  Also a couple days later my credit card company decided on their own to raise my monthly limit.  Score.  So thanks Umpqua and Discover for increasing my buying power.  Anyways the next day I finally did buy the tickets.

We are leaving mid-afternoon Saturday July 20 to fly to Krakow with a stopover in Frankfurt, which I read is Germany's business and transportation capital city.  It didn't seem like a city I'd want to visit, so I guess we'll just have a bier in one of their fine airport bars.  We will stay at some youth hostel in the heart of Krakow, and check out the whole chunk, including the Kazimierz old Jewish quarter, which is rich in history and is now more bohemian and artsy.  The have a big market there that I want to check out.  I'm hoping it's the opposite of a Generica strip mall, and I'll want to buy everything instead of being disgusted at everything.  I'm just excited to be going to a really old city where there's very few new buildings, and still feels authentic and cultural. After four days there and thereabouts we're taking off for Spain.  We thought it would be good to hang out in a Spanish city on our way to Muros.  We chose Barcelona over Madrid, lots of our friends and family said it's better.  I haven't done any research on Barcelona yet.  I do know that there's huge unemployment especially in younger people.  It will be very interesting to go from a large chaotic city where they speak Spanish and Catalan, on the Mediterranean Sea, to the tiny town of Muros, in a bay of the Atlantic, where they speak Galician (and hopefully English).

In this satellite image of the town of Muros, you can see there's only a few noteworthy places.. One of them is the vacation house the Browns and kin will be staying in, and one of them is a hotel on the waterfront that I want to book for Matt and me, and Rachel and Gabe.  (Rachel is Matt's big sister, she's a lot of fun.)  We are going to have such a great view!