Visiting Vienna's many Christmas markets

Over Christmas we spent eight nights visiting Vienna and the Czech Republic. I'm a bit late in posting our trip reports because we took so many photos, and I've spent the last couple of weeks editing them.

We had an early flight out of Gatwick Airport on the Saturday before Christmas. We were taking two flights to get to Vienna, one from Gatwick to Dusseldorf and then from Dusseldorf to Vienna. We don't usually break up such short flights, but the flights over Christmas were so expensive, that we saved at least a hundred pounds each way by flying Lufthansa and stopping in Dusseldorf. 

It says a lot for the efficiency of Lufthansa and Dusseldorf that we were off the first plane and on the next plane ready for take-off within half an hour of landing.

Our main reason for visiting Vienna were the Christmas Markets. Vienna is extremely famous for their Christmas Markets, there are about 16 different markets spread over the city.

A Winter Wonderland in Hyde Park

Well it looks like Winter has finally arrived in London. All through December the temperatures were very warm, not dropping below about 8 degrees the whole month.

The past two years in London have brought a snowfall before Christmas, and with none last year we thought we wouldn't get any snow this Winter. However over the last few weeks,the temperatures have been steadily dropping, and since the start of January have hovered around -4 to 3 degrees.

We got out first official peek of snow last Friday, when it lightly snowed on and off the whole day, but not enough to really settle. Just enough to disrupt transport because the UK can't handle more than an inch of snow on the ground at any given time.

The proper snow came on Sunday morning, when we woke up to find a thick layer of snow on the ground outside, and still steadily falling. 

One of my hopes for this year was to get some photo's of London in the snow, as the past few years we haven't left Chiswick when the snow was on the ground, so when we saw the snow outside we were up and out the door to spend the day as tourists!

Visiting the Bath Christmas Markets

At the beginning of December, we took a day trip to the Bath Christmas markets. We first visited Bath about a month after we first arrived in London in 2010, and have been wanting to go back ever since.

We caught an early train out of London Paddington, and finally got to see the Paddington Bear statue that we kept forgetting to look for every time we went there!

Paddington Bear!

The Trials of Nuremberg

We left Rothenburg ob der Tauber after breakfast and headed straight to Nuremberg, where we would be flying back to London later in the afternoon.

The City of Nuremberg is located about an hour and a half by train from Rothenburg, and is most widely known for the Nuremberg Trials from November 1945 to October 1946, where 23 of the most important Nazi military leaders were tried for their crimes during the Holocaust and World War II.

Nuremberg was chosen as the location for the trials because it had the Palace of Justice, which had a large jail facility and had been largely untouched by the war, one of only a few buildings in Germany that wasn't damaged.

Nuremberg was also considered the birthplace of the Nazi Party and had hosted a series of Nazi propaganda rallies.

Walking the walls of Rothenburg ob der Tauber

We woke up pretty early on our second day in Rothenburg, not surprising since we had an early night the night before since there is very little to do in the town after about 8.30 p.m.

After a delicious breakfast in our hotel, we headed out to explore Rothenburg in the daytime. Once again we seemed to have the entire town to ourselves, with the day trippers having not yet arrived.

Rothenburg ob der Tauber - the town that inspired Walt Disney

Well, we're back after a month long hiatus from blogging, during which we travelled to Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic and spent some time planning our travels for next year.

On the last weekend in November, we spent a long weekend in Germany for the fourth time this year. This is probably our last trip to Germany, or at least we don't have any more planned, so it was both exciting and sad since it is one of our favourite countries.