no more europe

It's official now. I just canceled the tickets to our Europe trip. I'm feeling quite sad right now. :(

We had been planning this vacation since January. We would visit Berlin, Vienna, and Prague. I had been scouring travel guides and internet websites for months. I even bought a novel, The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth, to help me learn more about the Hapsburg dynasty and their Austrian-Hungarian Empire, of which I knew zero (now at least I know that the Kaiser who had the longest reign in the nineteenth-century was Kaiser Franz Joseph). I was ready to appreciate Vienna, the seat of the Hapsburg glory.

Now I'm debating whether I should even finish the novel. Honestly, it's rather boring, but I was plowing on so that I could fully soak in the historical experience.

Instead of a two-week European jaunt, we decided to take a one-week drive up the coast of Northern California. That will be nice and relaxing in a different way, I guess. Lots of beautiful scenery and good food. I'm feeling really exhausted from all this last-minute planning; more frantic scouring of internet for available lodging at decent prices. I know that it will all be worth it when we actually go next week, but at the moment I'm still mourning Europe, the Hapsburgs, doner kebabs, sausages and sauerkraut, and those tons of H&M stores that would have been waiting for me on Ku'Damm...