Showing posts with label inconveniences. Show all posts
Showing posts with label inconveniences. Show all posts

29 June 2012

Road Trip!

We discovered Bled, Slovenia 12 years ago when attending an annual meeting.  
Bled Vacation 7

On Tuesday of last week, we hopped in the car for a road trip with our friend Kristi & her son, Eli following behind in their car.

Many Americans may not know about this little European treasure! Slovenia is a part of former Yugoslavia.  Our first visit to Bled was for an annual meeting we attended 12 years ago in 2000.  We'd been in Russia for 8 months and the trip was our first visit outside of the country.  It was a refreshing escape from the heaviness of living in Russia.  Bled is located in northern Slovenia, close to the Austrian border.

A town with a lake, 15th cenutry church on a small island in the middle, cliff with a castle surrounded by mountains.  Breathtaking!!


However, getting to Bled this day turned into a little bit of a nightmare.

Here's how it went.

*Stopped for lunch.  Reegan had a poo accident.  Then learned Eli had an accident  This did not set a good tone for the rest of our trip.  Kristi was already feeling ready to turn around and head home!! 

*On the road after lunch and our gps had us veer off the highway onto a different highway taking us through several small towns and adding time.  Grr!  Remember to update the gps before a road trip!

*Jerry was pulled over going way over the speed limit.  Oops!  This did not help my already grumpy mood for this trip!  Luckily, here you pay on the spot and the fee, in this instance, was minimal.

*Made our way back to the highway and almost to Slovenia when we got to the Austrian/Slovenia border crossing and wouldn't ya know......it was blocked.   The tunnel going through the mountains from Austria to Slovenia was closed for the day.  Great!!!


*Two cars and a motorcycle pack stopped to ask us what we knew about an alternate route (all were also foreigners from varying European countries and couldn't read the signs in German.  Way to go Austria!!!)  We explained and researched as best we could. Hopefully we didn't lead them too far astray.

*Our alternate route?  A steep and winding mountain road.  Luckily it was good and clear.
  
This little mountain excursion added over an hour to our trip, with a few extra minutes here and there trying to avoid the highways since we didn't have a vignette (highway permit) for Slovenia, bringing our total hours traveled to 9 hours!!!  We should have made it in 4 hours!!

Several times I had to remind myself that, at least, the view on this lengthened road trip was nice!




We made a quick stop to pick up of the keys to our holiday home at a gas station, made our way to the lake in Bled, oooh and ahhhed over the view......


....and went straight to find food and found ourselves at a nice little pizzeria with some tasty pizza!!

I must say that our kiddos all traveled quite well and got to bed late!!  But we all survived!!

31 May 2011

Fraud

I was doing some picking up and sorting this morning when I had this nudging that I needed to check our bank account.  I had just checked it at the end of last week and we hadn't made that many transactions over the weekend, but I couldn't ignore the urge I had.

This is one of those times that I truly believe it was the Lord giving me that little nudge.  Wouldn't you know, there were 13 fraudulent transaction from Illinois that had popped up today!
I immediately called and reported the charges and got the visa debit card cancelled.  I forget sometimes that Jerry and I have 2 different cards.  When it was cancelled, I was worried that we wouldn't be able to get cash out.  It's not like we could head to our bank or a store with the check book and get cash.

I then had to call our credit union to work out the details of a new card.  The lady I talked to was so nice and was so apologetic that this had happened to us.  I asked how this could have happened.  She went on to explain that some ATMs had been hit in Spain.  I have no idea how it works, but somehow they are able to get your information and create a new card.  She said it can take up to a year from the time they steal the info to the time they use the fraudulent card.  Interestingly enough, right after we moved to Spain, in July our cards got cancelled because they discovered this.  Sounds as if it was still happening once we got our new cards.

She then verified that it was only my card, so we are able to continue using Jerry's.  Phew!  She suggested we watch our account closely to see if fraudulent charges begin popping up on his card.

Even in this unfortunate event and feeling violated, the Lord sure has worked out some of the details.  I leave for the US in 3 weeks.  It is perfect timing so that I don't have to worry about having the new card mailed internationally.  It's a blessing that it isn't Jerry's card as well and if it had been Jerry's card instead of mine, we would have to have it mailed internationally.  Not a huge deal, but I'd much rather that card stay in the mail system in the US and I can pick it up as soon as I get to Texas.

The other blessing.  We completed an expense report just last week and the reimbursement came through TODAY!  Thankfully we have funds to draw from instead of sitting with an empty account until the charges are reimbursed to us.  We were stressing with a vacation planned for next week, but God is working out the details!

Thank you, Lord!

Deeper

  Deeper - adj. 1. extending or situated relatively far down from a surface: a deep pool. It's been a long time since I've ...