(Early) 20th Anniversary Trip Adventure

Pete and I will (rather shockingly) be celebrating our 20th anniversary this year, so we decided to seize the opportunity to do a real VACATION -- not a "trip" -- and go for a whole week, which is the longest we've been without kids since.... we've had kids.

After much deliberation, we decided to go to Italy.

And then we changed our minds and decided to go to Slovenia.

And then we realized part of Italy is VERY close to Slovenia so maybe we could do both.

And then we got an amazing deal on my plane ticket (Pete's was free because he had to be in Europe for a conference anyway) if we flew to Munich.  So we decided to rent a car and drive from Munich, down through Austria (my favorite), into Slovenia.

We thought it would be a good mix of revisiting places we knew we loved (Bavaria and Austria) and seeing some new places (Slovenia and Trieste, Italy).  And  -- spoiler alert -- IT WAS.

But before we could get to all the beauty and fun, we had to cover some logistics.  We flew Aunt Sue in from Minneapolis; she did such a great job taking care of our kids when we went to get Jinna, we knew she could handle it.

Once she arrived and had things well in hand, we said goodbye to our favorites and set off for the airport (chauffeured by Strider and Sidney)

 We were on our way, and excited to hopefully view the 4th of July fireworks from the air!

Alas, we had to view them from the airport terminal because we sat and sat and sat.... Our first flight was delayed 2 hours for no apparent reason whatsoever... which meant we landed in London too late to catch our connection to Munich.

We tried to make the best of our several hours of waiting in Heathrow.

Then, just before we were finally getting on the later flight, we got a call from the pension owner of the place we were supposed to be staying at in Germany that night.  He told us that a pipe had burst in our room and the place was flooded.  He had no other rooms to offer us.

So, we quickly had to scramble -- thank goodness for Booking.com -- and find an alternative place to stay in Bavaria that night.  It turned out to be an even better deal and a pretty cute place!

It was raining when I took these pictures the next morning, but despite the few little bumbs in the travel plans and the gray weather, we were excited to set out on our drive south.