Rabbit Mountain and September Misc.

Audrey and Clive are starting to get to know each other a little bit better. Audrey is fascinated by Clive eating and recommends we feed Clive food when he is fussy. She is also impressed by the mess he can make when he eats. In addition to eating some pureed foods, Clive is also make swift progress toward being a proficient crawler and he has even been observed pulling up to standing once or twice. Quite a strong little boy, I'd say!

This past weekend we did a short hike up Rabbit Mountain near our house. I am impressed by how well Audrey hikes trails holding dad's hand.

Here are a couple of pictures:

Krakow

After our week in Switzerland, we spent two weeks in Krakow. Once again, I went to work every day while Erica enjoyed the culture and cuisine. She even learned to speak some polish and made some friends.

We visited Wawel Castle. It is more than 1000 years old, but it has received constant renovations so some of it is quite nice and modern. We took a tour of some of the castle's rooms, climbed to the top of the bell tower, took a tour of the Cathedral which is full of tombs of various kings and other famous figures. We also got to walk through the caves beneath the castle.


We spent a lot of our time walking around the old town. It is full of basilicas, cathedrals, churches and all kinds of old religious structures. Not surprisingly there are also lots of nuns and monks roving the streets like gangs (they all had their own distinct gang colors). Of course, the old town was also full of tourists, gypsies, prostitutes and euro trash. The sidewalks were often too narrow to handle the number of people walking around. The food was good and cheap.
We spent a lot of time in the old Jewish quarter. It had as high a density of Synagogues as the rest of the city had churches. We ate several meals there since the restaurants were quite good. One place was exactly like eating dinner at my grandparents house.


We spent one day at the Wieliczka salt mine. It had an amazing network of underground tunnels and caverns with intricate artwork carved into the walls. They were charging $10 to allow people to take photographs so you'll have to enjoy the Wikipedia photos instead of one of my awesome slideshows.

We visited the Auschwitz and Birkenau concentration camps. The scale of Birkenau was really shocking.

Switzerland

In June, I spent a week working at the Google office in Zurich. Erica couldn't pass up the opportunity to tag along and do some exploring so she and Clive got to spend some time bumming around Switzerland while I slaved away at the office. At least I got some weekends off to take all these nice photos. -Adam

We spent a day in Luzern. We took a boat ride on lake Luzern followed by a cog railway ride up to the top of Mt. Pilatus. Then a cable car ride back down to Luzern.


We took a train to the town of Konstanz where we walked across the border into Germany. The German food we had was incredible.


Of course, we spent lots of time walking around Zurich. We enjoyed seeing the fancy shops on Banhofstrasse.


We got to spend some time with Mike and Alisa in Lausanne


We spent a day in Lauterbrunnen and Grindelwald with Mike and Alisa. Sadly the weather was kind of lousy, but the scenery was awesome anyway. We saw a couple (hundreds) of waterfalls, some base jumpers, some glaciers... and then there was the food. I hate to say it, but it kind of made Colorado seem like a dump.

Been busy lately

Its been a busy summer. We have a huge backlog of photos to post starting in June when we went to Europe. Lots of blog posts will be coming in the near future.