The Story Of Us

It's spring break.. and I am not excited.  We knew we would not be able to go anywhere on Spring Break this year.. and most likely a few more years due to it being during Ramadan..and we had made our peace with it.  Last weekend we went out with friends for iftar and by Monday M was not feeling good.. Monday night when we woke up for sehri he was really not feeling good, so he moved into the guest room and got a PCR test done the next morning. By Wednesday it was official. He had COVID. We had so far been very lucky and none of us gotten Covid. Well there goes that. Now I had to deal with a husband in quarantine. No fun. Then Thursday D complains of a headache and H has an itchy throat. Friday morning I found D curled up in my bed burning up! Had to unfortunately kick him out and to stay on the safe side kept H in his room too. So now I had three people in quarantine. I mean, come on. Two more PCR tests done and on Saturday we find out that while H was negative D had Covi...

It already seems forever ago but late March we found ourselves in the Outer Banks, North Carolina. We choose this coastal destination mainly because it was off season there.. so less crowds. It was approximately a 7 hour drive.. we set of Saturday morning and we reached Kill Devil Hills late afternoon. We rented this AirBnb . It was a condo, a walk away from the beach and tons of restaurants. And so beautifully decorated. We walked over to place a take out order at Bonzer Shack and walked on the beach till our food was ready.  Day1. We had breakfast at Stack em High and then off to Jockey Ridge State Park. It is a free state park and home to the tallest active sand dunes in the eastern United States. When we walked up the first little dune and entered the main park area it was a wow moment.   They ran around and flew kites. On the other side of the dunes was the Roanoke Sound. They had a small visitor center which was worthy of perusal. Our next stop was the beach near Je...

We are officially beginning month 2 of social distancing. The kids currently have their spring break.. so we have to try harder to keep them occupied with things other than TV and iPads. The social distancing has had no effect to M's work.. he is working from home but his hours remain the same.. so he decided to take a few days off. So what have we been up to?  We are playing a lot of board games.. the kids current favorites are Monopoly Jr., Blokus, Rummikub and of course UNO. In fact given the choice between game night and movie night game night almost always comes out on top. The weather has been either nice or rainy.. so we are trying to spend some time outside whenever a nice day comes around. I have never seen our neighborhood so full of people. Usually its a ghost town, just cars zipping here and there.. but now that everyone is home we see families biking and walking.. it is quite a smile inducing sight.  H's teacher has been encouraging her s...

From Budapest we went to Salzburg. We choose to use the most recommended method of traveling between European cities, trains! Before we jump into the Salzburg I want to take a minute to talk about the trains. While there are many websites selling train tickets, most forums pushed to purchase directly from OBB the Austrian Federal Railway. The website was not too hard to use.. the tickets were not too expensive. It was a 5 hour journey from Budapest to Salzburg and we paid $23 per adult. Both children rode for free. Now here's the tricky part. After reading many forums there was a divided view on seat reservations. It cost $10 to reserve a seat, most said the trains are empty and you can just sit wherever you want until someone with a reservation for your seat shows up.. then just find another spot. This did not seem appealing with children and luggage.. plus what if we got on that particular train that had no empty seats! So we made reservations. But now here's the next tric...