@Longer Version: 1989 Trip

(March 10 to July 2)

We used the return portion of the Lufthansa Airline tickets we bought in late 1988 to return to Germany now, and we must return to the US before the tickets we bought in July 1988 expire in July this year.

The Renault RV, parked in the farmer’s barn, started just fine, and we visited cousins for a few days. We spent several days going to and from Paris, a week later drove to Switzerland, then to Italy for our third visit to the still under-renovation, “The Last Supper” in Milan. Not much of the original remains, but most likely they will re-do and touch-up so it looks much like the original might have.

After a couple of days in Venice we again stopped in the Republic of San Marino, visited the exceptional towns of St. Leo, Gubbio, Urbino, Assisi, Spoleto, and dozens more, then to Rome for our fourth visit. At the Sistine Chapel we saw the almost completed, magnificent renovation of the ceiling. We drove down the west coast of Italy with stops in Naples, Pompeii, the Greek Temples at Paestrum, then on a ferry to Sicily for a stay in Taormina and a visit to the Roman artifacts and the ancient Greek ruins in Siracusa.

We returned to the mainland and toured from the “toe” to the “heel” of Italy. Our overnight boat trip from Brandisi to Pátra, Greece was spent in the RV parked on the top deck of the SS Valentino, a magnificent campsite. On the Greek Easter Sunday, in several small towns we watched dozens of lambs being turned on spits over open fires in the middle of the street. As we stopped to watch, the friendly Greeks came to the RV with food and bottles of wine. We drove through Delfi (closed for Easter), and on to Athens.

We bought cruise ship tickets to visit the Greek Islands and the Black Sea a couple of weeks from now, so in the meantime we visited Korinth, Gíthio and Olympia on the Peloponnese in the south of Greece, and Métsovo and the cenobitic monasteries, known as Metéora, northwest of Athens. This time the ruin at Delfi was open.

Our first cruise ship, SS City of Rhodes, stopped for a few hours at the Island of Míkonos, a half-day on the Isle of Patmos, at Kusadasi, Turkey for a visit to the remnants of the marvelous city of Ephesus and a few minutes at the final home of The Virgin Mary (according to local legend). The SS City of Rhodes did not amount to much, but the walled City of Rhodes on the Island of the same name is remarkable. A couple of hours was spent at the Palace of Knossós, built in 2,000 BC with 1,300 rooms and a pressure water system, on the Island of Crete at Herakleion. Later that day we rode the funicular railroad (rather than a donkey) to the city of Thíra on the Island of Santoríni, then walked down hundreds of steps, stepping in millions of donkey donuts, on our return to the ship.

We spent a couple more days in and around Athens, then boarded SS Odysseus which stopped in Míkonos, then over-night plus a half-day in Istanbul. Of all the ports we have visited by ship, Istanbul is the most breathtaking. The Golden Horn, Süleyman (Blue) Mosque, the Grand Bazaar (4,000 shops), St. Sofia Mosque (now a museum), the Palace of Topkapi, and Istanbul’s teeming street scenes, are incredible!

Our ship continued into the Black Sea, to Odessa in the Ukraine, and Yalta in the Crimea. What little we saw was interesting, such as Odessa’s Potemkin Steps and the Livadiya Palace where the Yalta Conference was held near the end of WW II, but we didn’t see much and were required to endure tours chaperoned by the Soviet Tourist Office.

We sailed past Istanbul, through the Bosporus, the Sea of Marmara, the Dardanelles and back to Athens for a few days. On one of those days, out the window of the Marriott Hotel restaurant we could see the Acropolis and the Parthenon, while we celebrated our 38th Anniversary. In response to a question, our waiter laughed and said as a school child he was bussed to the Acropolis one day, the one and only time he has been there! We drove to Thessaloniki, then to Kavala, and visited captivating old Philippi.

We entered Yugoslavia, and since there were already war-like happenings in the Kosovo Province, we kept moving through Skopje and Pristina, and spent the night in Ivangrad. Scenery across this part of Yugoslavia is varied and really unusual. We visited a dozen towns along the southern Adriatic coast, including the still earthquake-crumbled ancient town of Stari Bar, the earthquake-repaired, brand new 1,000 year old town of Budva, and Sveti Stefan, a renovated island town with all its buildings now used as a hotel.

Kotor, Dubrovnik, and Mostar were just as fantastic as can be imagined. After a stop at the Island and City of Hvar, we entered the harbor of Split on a ferry boat that seemed to be playing “chicken” with two others, as all three jockeyed, dangerously, for the only two docking spaces!

At the Plitvica National Park there are sixteen lakes that are connected by thousands of little, hundreds of medium, and dozens of large waterfalls, but the heavy rain, without which this spectacle wouldn’t exist, kept us from seeing more than a portion of this natural treasure. We crossed Austria to visit again in Hallstatt, and on to rainy Salzburg where we saw the red and gray McDonald’s that Emmy remembered from last year as yellow and red, and I remembered as blue and white. Anyone need a couple of meticulous eyewitnesses?

We crossed a speck of Germany to western Austria, looking for and finding a bunch of ancestors named Mungenast, Emmy’s maiden name. Now across Germany to the French Alsace, where, right in front of the church in our favorite town of Eguisheim, our RV was broken into, and a few not-too-important things were stolen — our only crime problem ever, in Europe!

The next day I went to the American Express office in Luxembourg City. They asked, “How many,” and replaced the stolen Traveler's Checks with no fuss, just like the TV ad says! A couple of days later we sold the RV for $9,300. It cost nearly $10 per day of use (two trips), about the cost to rent a bicycle! The Pan Am flight from Frankfurt to Los Angeles was as pleasant as sitting in a stuffy metal tube for 11 hours can be, and at the Los Angeles airport, customs officers waved us through without checking our luggage. It sure pays to look innocent, or perhaps we look too dim-witted to be dangerous!

On this trip we visited such exceptional places, it must be considered about the best possible way to spend 115 days!