Kallie gets her Mission Call!

 Since Christopher and I were in Croatia when Kallie got her mission call, our awesome neighbor Sarah decided to host a little opening of the call party. A few friends gathered, they enjoyed some yummy pizza and treats, and found out Kallie was called to serve in the San Bernadino, California Spanish speaking mission! She leaves on October 7th, and will train at home for 10 days, then finish off her MTC experience at the Mexico MTC. How crazy that she is going back to my home town!

Baska - Day 2 - The day of NOTHING!

Christopher asked me what I wanted to do today, and I told him the truth. ABSOLUTLY NOTHING! We have this beautiful hotel, balcony, pool, and resort lifestyle. I didn't want to move a muscle! I don't think he believed me, but he was game. We went over and read books at the pool, fell asleep, and swam when we got too warm. It was heaven!

Our View!!!

For some reason the pool here closes at 7pm, but it doesn't get dark till 10pm. We left the pool and headed out to the ocean. Christopher swam, I made a reel, and we contemplated getting dressed for the day and going out to dinner. We headed back to our room to get dressed.

 

We got up to our room, decided getting dressed was too much work, so Christopher put on a collared shirt, I put on a dress over my swimsuit and we headed out to find the perfect place for dinner. We were having so much fun people watching, we decided to just get a pizza to go and eat it on our balcony. We would've eaten it next to the water, but the seagulls were nasty and not afraid of us at all!

Why we ordered the jumbo size, I will never know. We ate about 1/5 of this thing and called it a night. We made it a whole 8 minutes into our movie before we were both out cold.

Baska! A Village in Krk, Croatia

We finally made it to our hotel and were blown away by the beauty of it! This is the atrium. Our room is right on the ocean and has a balcony. We dropped our luggage, grabbed some sandals, and ventured out to put our feet in the sea. There isn't really sand here - more just pebbles and rocks. We walked up and down the promamode and picked a place on the water for dinner. I got a massive pizza and Christopher got the seafood platter with the biggest shrimp I've ever seen!

We closed out the night with cheesecake gelato, then finally got to sleep in the most comfy bed!

 

Graz!

After landing in Vienna, we quickly changed our clothes in an airport bathroom, got our rental car, and embarked on our 6 hour drive to Baska.  To break up the travel, we decided to hit some fun sites along the way. Our first stop was the city of Graz. We parked on a tiny little side street, found a bathroom, then an ATM, then started walking the city. I love the cities in Europe. The narrow side streets, wide main roads (car free) and the excellent people watching.

The Schlossberg is a tree-clad hill and the site of a fortress in the center of the city of Graz, Austria. I made Christopher pay the few dollars to take the elevator up to the top and then we walked back down. They had an option to purchase a "slide" ticket. We didn't know what that was, so we didn't buy one. As we were going up the elevator, we figured it out....

I think it would've been so fun to do, but I'm sure it would have gotten super sick - and then there was the issue of paying to go up once, riding down, then having to pay to go up again...because I really wanted to walk down the stairs on the mountain We were too tired to try to make any real decisions! 

The views from the top of the fortress were absolutely incredible! There wasn't a bad view no matter which way you looked. The amount of pictures and videos I took was excessive - even for me!

This old clock tower was fun too. The top of the hill is just tons of beautiful flowers, views, gardens, and walkways. It's Europe, so of course there was a coffee shop too. They were generous though, and didn't charge us for the potty.

There was a massive fortress on top of the hill with 20 foot thick walls. We walked to the top to see if we could get in, but only found this amazing door to take a picture in front of. I thought it was worth the hike!

We grabbed some yummy sandwiches and snacks - found our car again, and hit the road!

Where we come Vienna!

 Thanks to our amazing older kids, I was able to join Christopher on his latest 2 week "vacation" to Vienna, Croatia, and Austria. I have to admit, I wasn't too thrilled with the idea of leaving the kids alone for so long - and being a country away, but Christopher said everyone would be fine. I hate travel - but I love seeing new things. After a stressful few weeks up to the trip, it was finally time to go! 

Having Christopher travel so much he gets some amazing perks, like lounge access. We were able to munch on yummy food, lounge in cozy chairs, and have front row seats to watching all the airport traffic. We finally got into our airplane seats, settled in for a long 9 hour red eye flight. It was a great flight and we hit the ground running in Vienna!

Hawaii Ready!

Yep, we have tickets and are going to Hawaii. This has been a long drawn out discussion, with very high emotion. Long story short we are going, Christopher bought tickets, and I bought the kids goggles. And they look adorable in them. However, now they both have the favorite color of green. I thought I was safe getting one pair all green and another with green/black. We had a knock out drag out fight over them - which resulted in me hiding them. We will see who wins when we get to hawaii.