Moran Family Adventures: musings of a boy mom

Our final weekend adventure in Europe would be.....Salzburg. I wanted to go to different country because...why not? And Austria was the closest one that we hadn't visited yet and driving there would include a trip to Bavaria so it quickly became an obvious destination. We made Munich our home base and ventured out from there. Yes, I know Munich is in Germany and not Austria. I didn't plan out our weekends way before I got to Europe. Between school and student teaching and the kids by myself,  I didn't have the time. It ended up being for the better though because every week Matt and I got to say to ourselves, "what country do you want to go to this weekend?" SAY WHAT??? I mean who does that? That's pretty cool and I'm snickering to myself as I write this because it just seems so silly that we were able to even say that phrase. What country should we visit this weekend?! *Blessed* Our drive down to Austria from Munich started off pretty shady. The snow star...

After Paris, Zurch, Paris again- we were worn out. We decided to spend the next weekend staying put and doing a day trip for this next weekend. Somewhere that still had some appeal to it but ensured we were back in our beds that night. Heidelberg it was! I wanted to see the castle and we were going to see it. This was also the day after I found out I was pregnant with our third boy. While Europe is peppered with castles, Heidelberg was actually the only one I explored. We packed our weekends so tight with adventure that it was hard to see all the castles Europe had to offer. Ok that's a bit of an ambitious goal and I probably could have fit in a few more but this one was pretty good. Oh wait, does Versailles count as a castle? What's the difference between a palace and a castle anyway? The views from Heidelberg were quite stunning and although it was cold and cloudy, we were kind of used to it at this point. In the cellar of the castle there's a food area with beer and wine...

The weekend after Christmas in Switzerland was of course New Years....and where were we going to spend New Years? Well Paris of course! Ok, I was a little apprehensive about this one because it's Paris and I'm a paranoid mom and such but Matt convinced me that hello Amor- it's Paris- we need to go. And so that's what we did. We found a hotel near the catacombs and basically blew all our rewards points on a 4 day weekend over a holiday in the city of love. We got there at night since Matt had to work during the day and it was a 5 hour drive to Paris so we didn't do much but drive around just to see the major attractions from the car. The Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame do not disappoint at night ya'll. Wow. This weekend was going to be hard to top, I could tell already. It would also be full of walking, so much walking. While we were staying near a major attraction (that we didn't' even go into because the kids couldn't navigate the stairs and we couldn...