Our Tour Groups, in 1970

We bought a one-day American Express tour from Rome to Naples and Pompeii, $84, 4 people. We also spent $8 for an alarm clock to make sure we would be awake early enough to meet the tour bus at the Hotel Panama, near the campsite.

As we drove past one point between Rome and Naples, the bus driver said the building on top of the hill, far in the distance, is the Abbey of Monte Cassino, so badly damaged by bombs during WW II. (We visited here a few years later, an almost unbelievably beautiful cathedral, rebuilt since WWII.)

As we drove around Naples we saw a funeral procession with a huge, heavily decorated, flower bedecked, glass-enclosed hearse, topped with golden wooden angels. It was drawn by horses with harness decorated with silver ornaments and black plumes. We could see Vesuvius from anywhere in the city of Naples, but the volcano has not smoked since the eruption of 1944.

We were driven to Pompeii, had lunch (included), then an hour and a half conducted tour of the excavated ruins of the old city. We stopped for dinner (included in price of tour) at a nice restaurant along the Autostrada, then arrived at Hotel Panama about 11:00 PM, and drove back to the campsite.

On our first visit to the Palace at Versailles, just outside Paris, we hired a private English speaking guide named Albert, to show us around. We highly recommend a private guide. Many times a tour group was in a long hallway, there was a good chance the group couldn’t see their guide, and certainly couldn’t hear him. Albert could tell us many things, and answer our questions. We then walked around in the garden outside, and saw the many large fountains (inactive at that time) at Versailles.

One morning we bought tour bus tickets to East Berlin. When we got to Checkpoint Charlie, the border crossing between East and West Berlin, we had to buy new visas. They confiscated a map we had, that showed the Berlin Wall as a cartoon-like jagged brick divider between East and West. They were apprehensive that a view of our map would contaminate the mind of an unsuspecting, naive East German citizen. The Border Police made a methodical inspection of the bus and the papers of the travelers, and an East German woman tour guide got on the bus and started her spiel.

We went past Hitler’s bunker, past the Brandenburg Gate on the Eastern side of the wall. There were some people walking the sidewalk, but not many cars on the street. We stopped at a monument where there’s an “eternal flame,” and watched the changing of the goose-stepping East German guards. We then visited a park where they had many statues honoring Russia for liberating Berlin from the Germans.

Our tour bus stopped at Hotel Stadt Berlin, which had a nice lobby and clean rest-rooms, but that is just about all of East Berlin we were allowed to see up close.

(In later years we re-visited each location mentioned above, some two or three times. We were always on our own, no tour group or tour leader was needed.)