...and we're off.

Today we leave for a few weeks of much needed holiday...

For the next two weeks we will be touring through the western world of Europe, beginning in Austria, then up through the Czech Republic and ending up in Germany. The first part of the trip is with some of Tina's friends, two of whom are celebrating a birthday and felt that not only did they want a nice party, they deserved to have it in a nice location. Fair enough, these are some of the friends that I was allowed to tag along with when Tina and I were first married and we went down to Argentina. It was nice that they let me join their trip then, and I suppose that I'm glad they liked me enough to invite me along again.

The second half of the trip we will be in Germany, where Tina's mother was raised, visiting her aunts and cousins. As an added bonus, Tina's father is flying over from Canada to meet us.

So, that all said, we aren't sure how much posting we will be doing in the next few weeks. We know that we will have internet connection the first week as we are staying in nice hotels, but the second week we are crashing with family - so most likely no computer access. On top of that, as much as we love posting stories for everyone, we will most likely rather be wandering the streets of Prague then writing about them. We can save those posts for when we return.

And for this holiday, we leave you with a post of the construction still going on outside of our apartment here in Xiamen. It'll be nice to be able to sleep in without having to listen to this.

The noise is near constant now, they've stepped it up to a new level. This is pretty much always in the background from 06:00 until 22:00, other than the 90 minutes they take of for lunch in the middle of the day. We can only hope that this extra effort they are putting in will help them to finish before we return.