I have a feeling that Will’s last birthday is going to be difficult to top.
It’s not often you get to spend your big day in not one, not two, but three different countries in the span of 24 hours, but that’s exactly what happened for Will just shy of 10 months ago.
After a jam-packed itinerary of go, go, go for the previous couple of weeks, it was nice to have a chill night with nothing on the schedule in St. Moritz, Switzerland.
A place our travel guide described as “chic-y mickey” because of its abundance of high-end shopping (think Chanel, Prada and all their high-end friends), St. Moritz, also known as a scenic hub of wintertime sports, was the perfect place to slow things down a little and recoup. The view, as you might expect, was nothing to shake a stick at. While some things in life may be overrated (the Cronut immediately springs to mind), the Swiss Alps totally live up to the hype—and then some.
Our hotel was snug, just the sort of place you’d expect skiers to take shelter after a long day on the slopes. And like many of the places we stayed in Europe so far, our nighttime television options were limited to Law & Order re-runs. Or Castle if we were lucky. Since neither appealed to us, and really, who comes to Europe to watch TV anyway, we went to sleep relatively early. After all, a long day of travel awaited…
After a hearty breakfast in Switzerland the next morning, the birthday boy and I boarded a bus headed for Liechtenstein, a tiny Alpine principality that I’ll confess I wasn’t all that familiar with before our trip. While making a quick stop in Liechtenstein’s capital city of Vaduz (we were in search of coffee, surprise, surprise), we wandered into the cutest little shop that was celebrating a birthday of its own. Now in business for exactly a year, Will and I chatted with the owners while picking out a few souvenirs. Upon learning it was also Will’s birthday, our new friends from Liechtenstein offered Will a piece of their celebratory birthday cake. And in case you hadn’t figured it out from the picture, it was an offer Will couldn’t refuse.
Our time in Liechtenstein was much too short, a few hours at best, but Will and I couldn’t wait to see our third country of the day, Austria. We were destined for Innsbruck, the site of two winter Olympic games. After a tour of the scenic Old Town where we spotted the famed Golden Roof, City Tower and passed by the Hofburg, a former Hapsburg Imperial Palace, we also walked through the Cathedral of St. James which was breathtakingly beautiful.
Of course, a trip to Austria wouldn’t be complete without sampling some of the local cuisine, so we tried the schnitzel and apple strudel in a couple of memorable restaurants I’ll write about in the next post. But as you’ve probably guessed by now, birthdays don’t get much better than enjoying all three meals in different European countries.
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