Hi Mrs Z's 1st Grade Class at Sanderlin by Mac

My name is Mac and I am traveling around the world with my family.  This includes my Mom and Dad, plus my two brothers Levi and Wiley.  They are twins age 8 and I am 10.

This is us in front of the Vienna Natural History Museum.  I am wearing the striped gondolier jacket.  

We take trains a lot and sometimes we get to sleep on trains overnight.  These are our beds.  They are triple bunk beds on each side of our room for six total.  I like overnight trains because I like the feeling of the train rocking me in my bed.

 This is me doing the luge.  Instead of going on ice, it had wheels.  The luge is like a sled and it is an event in the Olympics.

Along my travels I like to keep my eye out for old and cool cars.  I took this picture in Vienna of a Camero.  I'll show you my favorite car...

This is a Mercedes Gullwing. I really like this car cause the doors open straight up like wings.

Enough of what I like, what do you like and what do you want me to take pictures of?  We head to Egypt and Africa soon.  What do you want to know and see?  Keep the good work up!  Mac

Wieliczka Salt Mine by Levi

We decided to go to the salt mine just outside of Krakow, Poland. To get down in the salt mine we had to walk down steps that seemed to go down forever.

Once we got to the bottom, our tour guide showed us white stuff on the walls called cauliflower. This was salt coming out of the walls as water leaked out.

The mine is over 700 year old and has many large rooms with salt sculptures.  They used carts on train tracks pulled by horse.  When they are dragged, they sound like dogs barking.  They use wood to support the mine and the salt preserves the wood so it becomes as hard as rock.

This is Pope John Paul II.  He visited this mine. There are also many chapels in the mine.

This chapel is the biggest in the salt mine.  They still have weddings here.

There is even a lake in the salt mine.  You don't want too much water because it will dissolve the salt and destroy the mine.  The lake is man made.

Luckily for us, we got out of the mine in an elevator that took us to the surface very fast.

Dzien Dobry from Zakopane!

Here we are in Zakopane, Poland a town in the Tatra Mountains (part of the Carpathian Mountain range).  What a beautiful place....in spite of the fact that it rained most of the time we were there!

The rain didn't seem to bother anyone!  We jumped on this covered wagon and the horses took us up about 7 km.  We hiked the rest of the way to the lake called Morskie Oko.  

On the only sunny day we had during our time in Zakopane, we headed to the National Park to do some hiking.  

My axe weilding mountain men...

Our hike through the mountains led us to a beautiful laki...which, as we discovered upon our arrival, means meadow in Polish....not lake 

Enjoying the warm fire in our little cabin and a good hot meal in town.

The craftmanship and architecture here are amazing! Here are a couple of pictures from a restaurant that we liked a lot.

Krakow and Auschwitz Blog by Wiley

We got to Krakow on an overnight train from Prague.  We walked to our hotel and went down to the town square and had breakfast.

After breakfast, we walked to the Wawel Castle.  We looked around in the castle, saw the Cathedral, climbed to the top of the bell tower, and then went to the dragons's den.  This is a cave under the castle.  When you get out of the cave there is a dragon that breathes fire.

The Cathedral

Fire breathing dragon

A giant head

The train tracks in the Auschwitz death camp.  We saw a train car were everyone was packed in without seats.  They had little or no food and water.  They had to spend days in there.  Being here made me feel sad to see a place where a million and half people were killed. 

We saw a concert called the Sacrum Profanum Festival. It was cool because they had 20 guitar players playing together.  

This is the town square where we played and we scared pigeons and had lots of fun!

Levi's Prague Blog

Today I am in Prague  looking out our apartment window at the town square at night.  I can see a giant awesome looking cathedral glowing in the night.

Now we have the cathedral outside of our apartment.  Now I'm  looking at it in the daytime.

Now we are at our favorite restaurant in Prague.  It is beautiful and has good food.  Near the restaurant is a statue of  a little man sitting on the river dock.  As you can see, he is looking at the restaurant with a very grumpy face on.  Just to the left there is a big water wheel that has been there for hundreds of years.

Here we are in St. Vitus Cathedral near Prague Castle.  We are in front of one of the many stained glass  windows.  They are the most amazing stained glass windows I have ever seen so far in my life.

On our way across the Charles Bridge we went down some steps and saw  a man blowing giant bubbles .  We stopped and played in the bubbles.  We popped them and we took pictures of us behind the bubbles.

One day we were walking across the Charles Bridge again.  We stopped and went through a little door, up these big steps all the way up to the top of the tower where you could see us looking over the edge of the window looking at the river.

Now I am looking over the edge of the window at town square.   Then I went to a different window and looked at the roof tops of the city apartment houses and big buildings.  

Here are a couple of the pictures I took of the beautiful stained glass in the cathedral.

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Here are my brothers, Mac and Wiley in our apartment.

My Continued Animal Adventures by Mac

In St. Marks square in Venice, Italy we saw a whole bunch of pigeons swarming around all the people in the square.  Some of the people had bird food in their hands and pigeons were jumping all over them.  I thought that was so cool and I wanted to try it but I couldn't because it was lunch time.  But I was excited for lunch because I was hungry and I knew that the waiter was going to bring me bread so I wouldn't have to buy bird food from the people in the square.  So after I ate lunch, while my parents were paying the check, I ran out to the square and held my hand out with the bread in it.  The pigeons started jumping all over me and the bread ran out fast but thankfully I had more bread and crackers in my pocket!  So this time I used them sparingly and broke the bread into little pieces and I threw the pieces around me and held my hand out.  Pigeons swarmed around me and jumped on me.  After I ran out of bread the weirdest thing happened...this one little pigeon flew right onto my shoulder and I didn't even have any food.  He just sat there for a few minutes.  My Dad said it was time to go so I tried to shoo him off me but he wouldn't get off !  After a while I finally got him off me. 

I wanted to go back to the square the next day but we didn't have time.  It's ok though because I know we are off to another adventure where I maybe will get another animal stuck on my shoulder!!

Beautiful Bavaria!

After leaving Venice, we took a 7 hour train ride to Munich arriving late.

  After some much need sleep, we hopped a train in the morning to Hohenschwangau, Germany.  This is the village where King Ludwig had his family hunting retreat.

Hohenschwangau Castle.

Here's the view from the window.

This castle was not good enough for Ludwig so he built another next door.  This one was designed around Wagner operas and was the basis for the castle in Sleeping Beauty.

Neuschwanstein Castle

Back in Munich at the Hofbrauhaus

We ended the long day with some Michael Jackson!