We took most of today off so that we could watch travel videos that we found on YouTube. We found some new travel vloggers that we were checking out, As We Travel, and ended up watching their entire section on their rail challenge around Europe where they took seventy-five days and went to thirty countries. It was really cool. They did a good job on the videos too. We enjoyed watching them quite a bit, especially as their adventure was so similar to ours – we did twelve countries in about forty days but with two little kids with us, so the pacing was very similar but ours was a ton more work. They also had the advantage of one of them being from one of the countries that they visited so for them it was more like traveling around the United States would be for us – doing thirty states in seventy five days would be pretty trivial, especially without kids.
Liesl started doing Litebright today. She got one for Christmas. It is mostly the same as when we were little. Only when I was young it was stamped metal and now it is plastic, of course. So the modern one is much nicer and easier to care for. It also has a flip drawer on the bottom to hold the little plastic pegs so it is not the mess that the old one was. It is smaller but that works better. And instead of having to plug it in and have a light bulb inside of it, it is powered by a few little batteries, has a power button that switches between on, off and blinking, and is lit by an LED. She had a lot of fun doing that. That was a very good Christmas present for her. Now I wonder how old I was when I used to do that. Watching her do that really brought back the memories.
So on “As We Travel” we learned that the largest Orthodox church in west Europe is in Finland. But I already knew that the largest Orthodox church in eastern Europe was in Belgrade. This didn’t seem right to me. It really made me question my geography. So I looked it up. And I was right. The largest church of the west is three hundred miles east of the largest church of the east. That is messed up.
That is like how West, Texas is far east of East, Texas.
I got paged out this evening and had to work for a few hours. Same issue as last weekend.