We are home, we made it, the trip is over and I, for one, count it as a raging success, one of the best vacations we’ve ever had. I loved the time spent in the water, I loved all the sights we saw, and I felt like I got my head cleared out and my body a bit, too, although I must admit there was many a moment when I was feeling stiff and old man-ish, and some of those moments came just getting in and out of the car.
Today was a marathon drive broken up only by a trip to Mini-Mundus in Klagenfurt, Austria. It is a very interesting concept, scale models of lots of world monuments and great buildings, but there were a lot of ways I thought it could have been better (more shade, for one thing, but you can hardly blame the park designers for the fact that the real world world is heating up to a dangerous degree). I thought it would have been better if the exhibits were aligned geographically, so you could actually feel like you were walking around the word, and I definitely thought it was too Austria-centric. Lots of countries had one thing, the Czech Republic had Prague Town Hall, Denmark had their stock-exchange building, India, of course, had the Taj Mahal. Some countries had two or three things, like France and England and Italy, but Austria had castles all over the place, train stations, even an airport.
Toward the end, back indoors in the air-conditioned area, there was an exhibit where you sat in a mock up of a train car and there was a film in the window, but it was just a loop of an Austrian train winding down a mountainside, maybe 45 seconds of action, over and over again. I think it would have been cool to have that, but a film of a voyage around the world.
Tomorrow, back to real life.
