Day 1-Off We Go

On Thursday afternoon, we left our house with the Shahas and Jepsens for the SLC airport. When we arrived our flight had been delayed another hour. We had already changed our connecting flight in Paris, so that was good. We had a two hour layover instead of a three.

We boarded the plane and got ourselves situated and a voice behind Mark started in. A loud chowder mouth guy was hardly breathing, he was talking so much. Now I can compete with the best of them, but this guy was truly amazing. We put our earphones on and it seemed to concentrate his voice more. Ugh--a 9 hour flight with him. The guy next to him could barely get a word in and he had a younger more pleasant voice. They did not know each other. If I read, I could block the voice out but Mark had trouble.

About 3 hours into the flight, the younger guy got a turn to talk and to my utter surprise, he started to tell the chower mouth about Snogression, Kevin's company. It was hilarious. He went on and on about how wonderful the place was and how he thought the owner was a genius. He talked about how this guy (Kevin) must of spent at least $200 thousand dollars to build the place. He kept talking about it until the "chowder" couldn't take it and started talking about franchising and that the owner would soon be a gazillonaire and that he wants to buy stock in the company etc, ect.......he went on and on. I was laughing so hard, but he didn't even know I existed. At the end of the flight I talked the younger guy and told him we were Kevin's parents. He said he loved Kevin and had been there 3 times. He said, "What are the chances?" Mark said, "Actually, pretty good".





We enjoyed our 2-hour layover in Paris with some good yogurt and a croissant. We had a quiet flight to Vienna and then a 45 minute taxi ride to Bratislava. Our hotel, the Hotel Arcadia is truly amazing, built in the 13th century.  We got the nicest room for some reason.  It had an upstairs loft bedroom with a view of the Bratislava Castle and a downstairs sitting room and a very nice big marble bathroom.

We ate dinner at a nice steak place.  We were all so hungry.  Everyone tries to accommodate us English speakers which is truly amazing but a lot gets lost in the translation.  The menus do their best but you never know quite what you are going to get.