Skip to main content

Vienna: the final fortnight, with daddy

After a very tense time of will-he or won't-he make it, thank Covid, he made it. At 2am he was with us, at last - after a catalogue of fun adventures:

  • having to take yet another test at the airport (to the tune of £85) even though he already had a PCR test done within the required time limit, and having to wait two hours for a result (when the plane was literally scheduled to leave - fortunately it was delayed); 
  • having to prove to a sceptical border guard at Vienna airport that he was actually allowed to enter the country because he normally lives with me, an Austrian citizen (he produced marriage certificate, copy of my passport, and a utility bill to satisfy them!);
  • finding the regular train from the airport into the city wasn't running due to Covid;
  • and after boarding an alternative train, hearing an announcement that the half of the train he was on would not continue, so by the time he and the others on that half had alighted, the front half had already pulled away leaving them behind to wait another half an hour.
But he made it. He's here. We're together! More adventures, happy ones this time.

The first thing we did was take him to the Danube...


Then we visited some old family friends...


Went to an ice cream parlour...


And, the kids' particular highlight I think, we visited the (little, Bohemian) Prater...











Of course, we keep finding new parks and playgrounds to explore.









Hard to believe it but only four sleeps to travel home day! We are all starting to really look forward to home now. It's been the most amazing time, six weeks of full on summer, but it's time to go home and settle down again, see our friends and resume our regular lives. Which are full of wonder and fun as well. We have loved Vienna this year - planning to do the same again next year!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Back to meat after 20 years vegan - 4 years on

Back in 2020, I briefly mentioned in another blog post that we were no longer vegan. I said that shift deserved its own blog post, but here we are at the end of 2024 and I never wrote that. Not that I intended to leave it this long, but it really did take me this long to truly digest the change (pardon the pun) and get enough distance from my previous world view that I could write about it. Paradigm shifts like that don't come quickly, or easily. I've had a few major paradigm shifts in my life - from atheist to Christian , and later to Catholicism - and it's a disorienting thing every time. It starts with the proverbial 'pebble in the shoe' (something niggling that gets harder and harder to ignore) and takes time to even go from subconscious to conscious mind, to a time of discovery and 'why didn't I see this before??', and finally a bewildering sense how I could possibly have thought the old way because I'm now wearing all-new lenses on life. The ...

Thrown into to a new reality, then back to the old

Towards the end of August this year, Mr. and I suddenly faced a very different future to the one we had envisioned: at 42 years old - and he's 55 - I found myself pregnant again. Camping after our summer trip - and I've just found out I'm pregnant As it's been seven years since D(7) was born, we really didn't expect that. We would have loved more kids soon after D, but I just never got pregnant. Seven years on, we were pretty convinced that this was our lot. Two beautiful children, we really can't complain! So we needed a bit of time to digest that. A new baby, with siblings 8 and nearly 10 years older! And Mr. would be 75 when that child was 20... the maths was mind boggling. But hey - if that was our new reality, we were going to run with it! The kids certainly were excited about it, they're old enough to understand and yes, we told them; this is a family matter. I knew there was a chance this pregnancy wouldn't work out, but we felt they had a right t...

Home Ed Questions: what about socialisation?

Last week, a reporter and cameraman from the BBC visited our house to do a feature about home education. It was great fun, a real adventure for the kids to be interviewed! The team spent 90 minutes at our house, but of course they had to condense that down to a couple of minutes for the feature, and sadly the kids' interviews didn't make the cut. (A transcript article of the feature is here ) I had put my hand up for doing this because the reporter had every intention to make this a positive piece on home education, and so it was; the premise was to try and answer why there had been such an uptick in home education in the past few years. They interviewed two mothers, probably strategically chosen: me as the one who always wanted to home educate, and the other mum as someone who felt she had to due to her son's needs.  They interviewed me at length, and of course only a few seconds of that made it to the screen, but inevitably it was the part to do with social skills that th...