My First Post ~ Or How Did I Get Here?

Hi all!

This is my first post for Night Writers and I thought I’d introduce myself. My name is Lynn Crain and I’m a multi-published author of all kinds of books. I let the characters talk to me or the story get to me...depends upon how you look at it...LOL!

Now this blog isn’t going to talk much about my writing except to tell you how it fits in with my current life. No, I’m going to be talking about living in Vienna, Austria. Wow...I can just hear the oohs and ahs coming from you all. Well for all the wonderful things there are here, there are a lot that aren’t so wonderful. Some I’ll talk about, some I’ll gloss over.

Here’s a little on how I came to be here in Vienna. For years, my husband tried to get a job elsewhere in the world. We lived in the hot southwest and I was getting really tired of being there. There were a lot of reasons he didn’t get a job overseas or even in a different state. Many of them were political. So I resigned myself to living in the same old boring place I’d grown up in.

Fast forward to late 2010 and the fact that the DH came home from a meeting in Vienna to tell me he’d been invited to apply for a job. At this point, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry as we’d just had our first grandchildren, twin boys, and our youngest was going into college. Being the good wife, I told him it was his decision but left plenty of hints that I didn’t think it was the right thing at this stage in our life.

In February 2012, he invited me to go with him to check out the city. Vienna was cold then as it was still winter. The city was fine and the people different but very friendly in the tourist areas. I told him it would be an okay place to live in and told him it would be his decision. When we got home, we sat down and had a seriously look at the numbers. Our oldest had just been laid off and our youngest wanted to go to a local university. After looking at all the benefits, we decided it was an offer we couldn’t refuse on a financial level with the world economy the way it is.

So in March and April of 2012, we packed our home that we’d lived in for 17 years, rented a storage shed and made sure the youngest had the back part of the house. We also made arrangements for the oldest to have the front part so he and his family would have a place to live while he was out of work. Instead of six months, we had barely six weeks to get everything ready. It was a difficult time.

Our youngest came with us to pick out our new place over here and we were on the hunt that very first week. We saw about 50 apartments in the first two weeks and narrowed it down to three. All had great things, but some had a few more cons than others. Finally, we picked a place that was almost as big as our house in Nevada and it had french doors with very high ceilings. It was what I had expected a place in Europe to be. We look out over the gardens of  Belvedere Palace and are in a building with embassies.

Here are a few pictures looking out our window and what the place is like.

Across The Street

The Outer Door

Our Inner Courtyard

Front Door to Inside the Building

Our Steps to Our Apartment

Our Tunnel to the Inside

Out My Office Window

Schwartenberg Palace

Out the Living Room Window

The Window & French Doors of the Master Bedroom

Can You Believe the Closets?

The 1860s Star Parquet Floor

Next time, I’ll talk about what it’s like living a in different country.

Lynn