Ich bin ein Texaner

I had so much fun -- and took so many photos -- in Croatia that I'm splitting it into three posts. You can find the first post, devoted to Zagreb,  here . After spending two nights in Zagreb, and soaking up some amazing food and sights, we spent Monday driving to Split. Google Maps initially told me it'd take four hours, but it was more like five and a half. For the first I-don't-know-how-long (but-it-seemed-like-forever), we were in a 40km speed limit zone. That's 25mph. As Becky said, it was the land of school zones. Now Sammy Hagar is singing "I can't drive 25" in my head... We arrived in Split and were able to make our way to the neighborhood of our AirBnB, but it was impossible to tell from the street which house was the right one. Fortunately our host was super responsive and said that his dad would come out to meet us. Sure enough, we found dad straightaway, and he coached us into the tiny parking spot meant for our car. Then he took my giant su

If you follow me on Facebook, you probably know that I spent a week in Croatia recently, in celebration of my friend Becky's significant birthday. She wanted to go somewhere awesome and inexpensive, which makes for a short list. She settled on Croatia and asked if I'd like to go along. I'm closer than most, so it's easier for me to get there. After poking around a bit, I got really excited about the trip and ended up doing a fair bit of the planning for it. Becky had set aside a week for the trip, plus a couple of days on either end for traveling and recovery. She really wanted to go to Zagreb,  Plitviče  Lakes National Park, Split, and Dubrovnik. We decided to rent a car rather than take trains so we could keep our own schedule. Then it was just a matter of deciding what to do. I found a day-long tour of the national park, including pickup from and dropoff to Zagreb. That consolidated things a bit and made travel easier by one stop. Still, three cities in a week is

Last Tuesday was Bradley's last day in town, so we headed into Munich to check out Schloss Nymphenburg - which I discuss in  this post . Near the palace is something we didn't get to check out on our previous trip, the Munich Botanical Gardens. This sounded like a good idea to all of us, so we headed over. The first place we headed in the gardens was the roses section. Unfortunately, we had come too late in the year to see the roses at their best. We did, however, get to see this little guy puttering around the center of the area, keeping the grass nice and manicured. *beepbeepbloopbeepitybeep* Lisa found one of her happy places: a see of purple flowers. But ... but ... PURPLE! The gardens have a huge area that is pretty much all dahlia hybrids. Despite the fact that they are all listed this way, the variety of flower shapes was truly impressive. Really, it is hard to make humorous captions about flowers The perfection of the petal shapes on these guys amaz