Then flew on to Prague.

Our first Prague day was actually spent doing the travel between Rome and Prague and it turned out to be a loooong day. Long story short…Lufthansa was delayed out of Rome and then our short transfer in Frankfurt became even shorter- yes, running through the terminal, then when we finally got the bus to the plane on the tarmac it was delayed so sat there a good while then delayed in a holding pattern into Prague and then you guessed it the transfer got stuck in traffic so we sat for 30 minutes literally around the corner from our hotel .

We finally arrived close to 8 pm to find a very smiley Michelle waiting in the hotel lobby for us. The next two days in Prague gave us some snow which the kids LOVED and we got to enjoy the very beautiful city. We explored and did a walking tour and took ourselves up to the castle to see all of Prague laid out before us under a mantle of snow. Poor Liam had a fall on the icy Charles bridge so he was fairly stiff and sore the next few days and moving very gingerly with a sore back. Maddie was lucky enough to find her new viola in a lovely little instrument store at the Castle end of the Charles bridge and so her Christmas gift was all sorted, she just had to manage handling the case through the rest of our journey.

We had pre-booked tickets to La Traviata for the last evening and were disappointed to learn that day they had cancelled the performance in favour of the ballet Cinderella due to strike action by the Opera company. We attended the ballet instead and enjoyed our box in the very beautiful old Opera Hall. We all loved having Mark’s cousin Michelle along as part of our group and we managed to convince her to join us as we set out for Vienna by train.