@Longer Version, Introduction to the Trips
If we have no schedule we aren’t late!
If we don’t care where we are, we aren’t lost!
If we have no itinerary, we’re exactly where we ought to be!
If we can’t see IT this trip, we’ll see IT the next time.
We had originally planned to visit Alaska in 1970, but when Emmy mentioned that she had never met any of her uncles, aunts, cousins, or grandparents, and only one of her father’s sisters was still alive, we decided to visit Europe and meet her family. This seemed like a good time to go, and it would very likely be the last time we could meet her aunt, and some of her cousins.
Emmy has lost all contact with relatives from either her natural mother’s, or her stepmother’s family. Once we visited Heiligenhafen trying to locate the only address we had, but found that lady had died, and we could find none of her family.
We don’t even look for my ancestors. Over the years I have heard a number of stories about them, but mainly it seems no two arrived here on the same boat!
We have savored nine fantastic trips (the latest in 1995) to Europe, ranging in length from one month in 1970, to nearly six months in 1980, and we still haven’t seen Alaska!
In addition to cousins by the dozens, by now we have become friends with people in several countries. About a dozen of Emmy’s German cousins have visited us, some of them multiple times! We have visited nine homes in Poland, and three of the Polish families have visited in our home in California. The Polish family we met in a campsite in Vienna, Austria in 1980, with our help are now citizens of the US. The greatest outcome of any of our travel days.
In Europe, most countries have distinct and interesting cultural communities, but Yugoslavia is carrying cultural rivalries to the extreme, with the crazy war in the 1990s. We have visited Yugoslavia, from Greece to the Adriatic to Austria, in four different years and found the country to be an exceptional vacation destination, and the Yugoslavs to be just delightful people.
The Welsh and Scots do not much like the English. The Scots claim to have their own monarchical tradition, and have no need for the government of England! While we were in Wales a new TV station was being built and they were insisting that the Welsh language be used on that station, or else.
The Bretons in the north, and the Basques in the south of France, are often unhappy with the way they are treated, and the Basques in northern Spain and the Catalonians who live in and around Barcelona are in constant disagreement with the government in Madrid. That Barcelona was permitted to present the Olympic Games was considered a break in the punishment cycle enforced by Madrid, ever since Barcelona was on the losing side in the 1930’s Civil War. The problem was heightened by that War, but is a carry-over from years past.
Belgium has the Walloons and the Flemish, and is being pressured to split into two countries. Just about every city and street in Belgium has two names, one in French, and one in Flemish. There is no Czechoslovakia anymore. There are now two countries (peacefully, thank goodness) called the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
Even though the East and West Germans are working together rather well, there are problems that may multiply and grow. When we visited there in 1991 and 1995, after the Berlin Wall was down, it was obvious that as a result of the 50 years of WW II and the separate East/West governments, the people in the East just do not live like the people in the West. (We also visited East Germany, behind the Iron Curtain, in 1970, 1980, and 1985.)
One portion of Switzerland is almost French, another German, and the southeast is Italian. Not only are three languages spoken, the homes and the towns and cities look different from each other. Government paperwork must be produced in three versions, and we were told, during our visit at the Capitol in Bern, that (minor) problems arise in their “Congress” as a result of these differences.
Hundreds of years ago, in the area around Siena, Italy, it was decided that a festival, Palio delle Contrade, was a good surrogate for war -- so why haven’t others been just as clever! The festival includes the Corsa del Palio (a horse race), with “former enemies” participating, held in the fabulous Piazza del Campo, the shell-shaped town “square.”
When cultural groups are living the way they wish to live and are not bothered by, or fighting with others, these background enrichments can make a trip interesting and stimulating.
We have visited a thousand cities and towns in a host of European countries and found that whole towns, and considerable parts of others, have not only been preserved; many have been freshened and revitalized, and thousands of ancient buildings, bridges, and streets are in everyday use. In many places records have been kept of the exact detail (and we mean really exact, such as the number and size of stones and bricks originally used), so that when the results of a war or of the aging process are removed, the resulting building or town is at least equal to the beauty and the design of the original.
We often wonder what the original plans of some very distinctive buildings (such as those in downtown Dinan, France) might have looked like. We can’t imagine that 500 or 1,000 years ago these buildings were designed and built to lean and bend and hang over here and there, but they do, and there is no indication they will not continue to lean and bend and hang over, and do it in a delightful manner.
The engineer says that a bumble-bee can’t fly, and the architect says that the St. Sophia Mosque in Istanbul and Pantheon in Rome can’t be built, but they have existed for one and two thousand years! The famous tower of Pisa is said to have leaned after it was built, but we have seen other towers in Italy (Bologna, for example) that were intended to lean. It was considered a point of honor that a family could afford to pay for, and the builder could build, a tower on a slant.
Still wonder about that tower in Pisa — did it lean on purpose, or by accident. In the early 1990s they closed the tower for foundation repair, and when we visited in 1995 we could see the scaffolding and construction equipment. After 11 years, 11 months of repairs, as of December 2001, the tower was reopened to the Public.
That’s not to say that the magnificent old ruins are not exceptional in their own way. Would the Parthenon in Athens, the Castle in Heidelberg, the Coliseum in Rome, the city of Ephesus in Turkey, and Hadrian’s wall in England be more interesting if they were restored to their original beauty?
The city of Nürnberg, Germany was flattened during WW II, but to visit Nürnberg today, is to visit (much of) the Nürnberg of old, at least when compared to pictures we have seen of the old city.
The Frauenkirche, Church of our Lady, in Dresden, Germany, has lain in rubble (a mound of stones, with portions of a wall and an arch soaring into the sky) since the horrendous bombing of February 1945, awaiting the money to rebuild, precisely. In 1995 we saw the beginnings of that renovation. Most of the original stones were damaged or melted by the fire-storm following the bombing, but ten thousand are in good enough condition to be reused. Using photos taken in the 1920s they have been carefully identified, numbered, and organized on a city-block of shelves and bins. With the help of a computer they will be placed in their original location in the building’s walls, intermixed with tons of new stones obtained from the same Elbe River stone quarry where the original stones were selected. The reconstruction is expected to cost $100,000,000, and is planned to be completed by the year 2006.
In 1991 when we visited Gdansk, Poland (known as Danzig, Germany, where the first shot was fired in WW II), buildings in the downtown area and along the wharf were being rebuilt to painstaking specifications.
In 1979, a large earthquake flattened many towns on the Adriatic coast of Yugoslavia, but in 1989 we visited the brand-new, one-thousand-year-old city of Budva, Yugoslavia! Budva was rebuilt, using ancient stones and plans, and now transcends the original, as one resident told us. (What’s even more noteworthy, Budva’s library contains a copy of our book, “Invitation to France.”)
Before WW II, Potsdamer Platz, the highlight of old Berlin, was congested with the clutter of auto traffic, the clatter of street cars, and the scramble of pedestrians. It was severely damaged during WW II, flattened during the East German uprising in 1953, then designated as a no-man’s-land and a killing zone, with the Berlin Wall running down its middle for 28 years. There are grandiose plans to rebuild this area, but you can be sure that Potsdamer Platz reincarnate will look not one iota like the old!
In Paris, they have redeveloped the old market area, known as les Halles. The extremely modern replacement buildings do not look nearly so nice as the old buildings looked when they were in their prime. In pleasant contrast, Covent Gardens, the old marketplace in London, has been refurbished and is an interesting shopping/ entertainment center. No one would dare suggest replacing it with a modern cityscape.
Prince Charles has said that British architects, with their modern architecture, have accomplished more devastation in London since WW II than Hitler’s Air Force did during the Blitz!
Sometimes the amount of renovation and rebuilding that has been needed to keep these places beautiful over the centuries, reminds us of the 100-year-old hammer that has had ten new handles and five new heads!
While it would be nice to travel to all parts of the world, the cost to do so is out of our reach. There are thousands of places to (re)visit throughout Europe, and we will never see enough to satiate our appetite. After 968 nights in 452 different places in 32 countries (including 605 nights in 406 different campsites in 25 countries), with visits or drive-throughs of thousands of towns and cities, we are happy to say there is not one place we have visited, or spent the night, that we would not happily re-visit tomorrow!
We enjoy seeing our favorites year after year, for a few hours or an overnight or two, rather than spend a week or more to “thoroughly” see a place, then have no “need” to return. We have been in Paris, 24 nights, 9 trips; Heidelberg, Germany and the French Alsace, 12 or 15 nights and a dozen days each, 9 trips. Venice, 20 nights, 7 trips; Rome, 12 nights, 4 trips; Mont St. Michel, Dinan and others in that area, many nights, 4 trips; Berlin, Vienna and London, each 9 nights, 3 trips; and on and on. Whoops, almost forgot our most favorite, Emmy’s many Cousins — 307 nights, during 9 trips at 10 different homes (291 nights in someone’s bedroom; 16 nights in someone’s driveway, in the camper)! Poor Cousins!
In addition to clothes, money, and a passport, the most important thing to take with you is a positive attitude. It’s amazing how many stupid, ignorant, inefficient people we meet when (if?) we are in a bad mood!
Although our travels have been made in an RV or camper, a private automobile, the bus, or a train could take you to most places we have visited, but the time and effort to duplicate our trip in some other travel mode is hard to envision.
Some people ask about our trips as if they must be a chore, difficult, and at times perhaps unpleasant. One of my tennis partners said that while we have certainly seen more of Europe than most people, he just can’t imagine a visit to Paris without a night at the Ritz Hotel! Another man commented that while we have a lot of fun traveling our way, when he and his wife decide to “rough it” they stay at a Holiday Inn instead of a more luxurious hotel! To each his own! We certainly don’t feel like we “rough it” in our RV, we couldn’t be more comfortable!
The RV and a campsite make a functional, peaceful, comfortable place to spend the night so we are rested and ready to sightsee again in the morning. Even though we rarely spend consecutive nights in the same place, the over 86,300 RV miles (plus 10 to 15 thousand miles in rental cars), we have driven in Europe, means we average about 89 RV miles per day! Almost every problem we have had, or imagined, was solved or forgotten within the hour. Reservations for nightly accommodations are never made, and often when we leave a campsite, we have no idea which country we will be in by evening.
Is it worth it, you ask? Can you imagine camping at Chamonix, France at the foot of Mt. Blanc; in Fiesole, Italy, high over the Arno River Valley with the domes and towers of Florence spread out below; on an island in the Rhône River with the floodlit le Pont d’Avignon and the Popes’ Palace on the far riverbank; with le Mont St. Michel (northern France) out our window one night, the Rock of Gibraltar (southern Spain), or the Parthenon (in Athens) on another; next to the wall of the Crusades city of Aigues-Mortes, and the double wall of Carcassonne, France; on the bank of the River Seine in Paris, the Neckar at Heidelberg, the Vltava in Prague, the Rhein and the Mosel at Koblenz, and the Danube in Budapest; high above the Mediterranean Sea on the French or the Italian Riviera; across the lagoon from Venice; along the Adriatic near Dubrovnik; and hundreds more. The excitement of visiting these spectacular destinations seems almost a dream.
If someone says, “Let’s play a game,” first thing we must do is determine which game; chess, baseball, football, or monopoly for example. Once we know the game, we know the rules. Same thing applies to driving in Europe. Once we determine that we will be driving on a German Autobahn, or around the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, or through the heart of Rome, or in the mountains of Yugoslavia, on the “wrong” side of the road in England, or on Route 1 in Greece, we now know the “game,” and since each is so different, we must drive according to the proper set of rules. When we near the top of a mountain in Yugoslavia, we know that just around the next curve there will be a little old lady in the middle of the road herding two goats. If we drive as if we expect that, neither of us will be surprised.
The complete “Jim & Emmy Humberd’s European Travel Journal” consists of over a half-million words, and fills more than 1150 printed pages, just like these. It must be obvious that these pages contain only a little of what we did on a day to day basis, but it is also very possible (certain?) that those pages will tell all that, or even more than, you really want to know about our European adventures! Enjoy!
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