Jack R Thompson

Konnie, Isabelle and I left Denver the morning of March 21, 2014 as we headed off to Florence Italy for the fifth spring break trip with Isabelle.  Our first four trips took us to New York City, London, Madrid and Paris. After an uneventful trip over that took us through Chicago and Frankfurt Germany, we’ve…

Thanks to those who followed our 18 days in Europe this month.  This blog is mainly to help us remember where we’ve been and what we’ve done but hopefully it also might benefit anyone else wanting to travel to these places. To recap our stay in London, we stayed at Flemings Mayfair.  Flemings is a…

On Thursday we left Brussels’ Midi train station on the Eurorstar to head under the English Channel to London for the final four days of this trip.  It was a bit depressing zipping across the Belgian and French countrysides at 180 miles per hour, viewing the huge windmills and the many solar panels while reading…

We ventured off for a day trip from Brussels to Brugge (Bruges) Belgium.  Brugge is a lovely medieval town with winding streets and lovely canals.  The city is well preserved with many roughly four centuries year old buildings for several reasons including that the city escaped major damage during both wars to end all wars.…

We headed to Brussels from Strasbourg and, as we did on the trip to Strasbourg, tried to find an interesting location to stop for lunch.  That time it was Hagnau Germany on the shore of Lake Constance.  This time it was Luxembourg City Luxembourg which ups this to a six country trip. Brussels has some…

Strasbourg is the capital and principal city of the Alsace region in Eastern France and sits right on the German border.  It has been the possession of both Germany and France over the centuries, is where Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press and is home to Strasbourg Cathedral on which construction began in the twelfth…

This will be a long post with a lot of pictures. We have a travel book of backroads tours in the various European countries.  We have been in Strasbourg France the past few days and decided to take one of the road trips nearby called the Alsace Wine Route.  There are 16 places to visit…

King Ludwig II of Bavaria is the man who created what has become known as “the fairy tale castle.”  You know what it looks like.  Think Cinderella.  His placement in the Alps high above Schwansee (Swan Lake)  is just up the hill from his boyhood home of Schloss Hohenschwangau, a palace his father purchased when…

There’s nothing like a King Ludwig II palace or castle.  They had to kill him to get him to stop building these puppies.  But I think he was actually an early adopter of the “build it and they will come” theory.  Because he built them and boy do the people come today and dump the…

After concluding our time in Salzburg, we headed for Schwangau Germany, home of King Ludwig II’s Neuschwanstein and Hohenschwangau Castles where we were booked to stay at the das Rubezahl Hotel (http://www.hotelruebezahl.de/en/).  The hotel is quite nice and has unobstructed views of the castles and the Alps.  Breakfast and dinner were included in our room…