minimal travelblog

21 August 2005, 10:21 pm

Oh right, the blog. Completely forgot about it yesterday. We are on vacation in Bad Dreikirchen with our friends, H and J Zedelmaier, and G Murrer - Robert occasionally refers to them as the Zedelmurrers.

We left around noon, got stuck in traffic at Rosenheim (not really stuck, we just had to stop for a few red lights and go really slowly once or twice), and waited 45 minutes at the Austria-Italy border for the Zedelmurrers to catch up with us. Robert maintains that this is why the drive took 6 hours, instead of the two and a half he'd predicted. I'm, uh, skeptical.

Anyway. No crises, no throwing up, one tiny spat about ice cream, one very nice picnic = a Pretty Good Trip. We got to the hotel more or less in time for dinner, which is quite late here, and Robert got settled into his hotel. Dinner is over around 10pm, so then I had to put the kids to bed. I brought my computer here with the intention of getting some work done, but yesterday once the kids were settled in I was so tired I just crashed. No work, no blog, nothing.

So today was our first full day here, and I must say, it's a bit draining, this vacation thing. Robert's hotel room has only one very small window and is not nearly as nice as here, plus it's quite a hike from here, so I am wracked with guilt. And Kilian is miraculously self-sufficient, but Gus requires a lot of attention - first because he has fewer ways to entertain himself, since he can't read and there's a heap of kids Kilian's age here but no 4-year-olds, and second because Gus is not the best-behaved child ever, and needs to be corrected (ahem: make that restrained) frequently. And since I can't ask Robert to do any of it, I am "on duty" all the time. And the duty is entertaining a preschooler, which has never been one of my talents. He is being pretty good, but it's still a lot of mom-work for me.

Which means I'm exhausted at the end of the day. Which means not a lot of work will get done. But I do have to blog every day, because Kilian does. It's only fair.

Tuesday, 23 August, 10:09 pm

Ooops, forgot all about this, even though I made Kilian do it last night. He and Robert had some kind of Foozball Death Match against Helmut and his son, and Gus wanted to play too, and it got really late, neither of my kids got to bed before 11. Bad idea, that. Staying up late, I mean, not foozball.

Bad morning, lots of fighting, but the weather got acceptable around 2pm and suddenly the kids were outside, having fun, being happy, for hours at a time! Wow. This is a very nice hotel, but what it's really good for is being quiet so you can read, which doesn't appeal to Gus, and hiking, which is also not really his strong suit. But there are a lot of kids around, so if they're not trapped inside by bad weather, they can entertain eachother quite nicely.

Actually, reading and hiking are Robert's thing (okay, I also read, but I can do that anywhere), which makes it doubly bad that I kicked him out of this hotel, because he could have enjoyed it so much more than I do, not to mention two grouchy, TV-addicted kids.

Oh well, at least I'm learning a lot. The reason we don't go on holiday much is not money, but time: specifically, Robert doesn't have any. I've considered taking the kids somewhere by myself, and this trip is a sort of trial run, since Robert comes around 2 or 3 and then leaves after dinner. So I'm on my own for half a day, and I'm learning that that's quite enough. So any trip with just the kids will have to be a lot shorter, that's one thing. Will also probably contain only one child per trip, and be very centered on his interests: science museums for Kilian, Playmobil fun-park and Legoland type stuff for Gus. Or train trips.