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Traversing What Was Then Yugoslavia, Europe 1970, Part 2

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  In 1970, the US and Russia were still in the throes of the Cold War.   Americans were fighting and dying in Vietnam ostensibly to prevent the spread of Communism in Southeast Asia.   Travel to the Eastern Bloc (Communist) countries was generally ill-advised if not prohibited.   Traveling across East Germany we had witnessed the barbed wire fences, the guards with machine guns at the ready, and the dogs sniffing under trains and around compartments.   But we had heard that Yugoslavia’s leader, General Tito, was more tolerant and that tourists would not be bothered.   We decided to try our luck at hitchhiking through that country in order to reach Greece.   It was much harder than we had imagined it would be, but we were rewarded with a unique view of life behind the Iron Curtain where time seemed to have stopped decades earlier. Traversing the country that dreary, rainy November took us seven days.   According to my travel journal, we spent the night of November 12 in a youth hostel
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Our Excellent European Adventure, 1970 Style

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  I love to travel.   Perhaps the itch to be on the move is something I was born with (my mother wrote in my baby book that I wanted to go with anyone who was “going bye-bye”), or perhaps it developed through childhood experiences.   My family moved every few years when I was growing up, and Dad always took two-weeks off for an annual family vacation.   We went to national parks, camped in the mountains, or visited relatives who lived across the country (from California to Connecticut).   The most memorable of those family vacations was a road trip from Texas, across the southern states, through the Smoky Mountains, to Washington, D.C., and then on to New York City for the 1964 World’s Fair.   We returned via a more northerly route.   By the time we got back to Texas, we had traveled through at least sixteen states. An even grander adventure was the three month excursion around Europe that I undertook in the fall of 1970.   I was only twenty but had graduated early from Baylor Univer
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CROSSING THE PACIFIC OCEAN, TAKE TWO

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Scott and I recently returned (3/6/24) from a sea voyage across the Pacific Ocean from San Francisco to Sydney, with ports in Hawaii, Samoa, Fiji, and New Zealand along the way.  This was my second Pacific crossing but Scott’s first.  As readers may recall, my first voyage across the Pacific took place in January and February of 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic was just beginning.  (In an unwelcome serendipity, I contracted covid on this voyage and was confined to our stateroom for four days.  It is hard to fathom that we have been impacted by this virus for four years with no sign of its ending.)  We had planned a cruise from Seward, Alaska to Tokyo in 2022 when we thought the pandemic had ended, but it was cancelled when a second wave closed Japan to cruise ships.  The trip we were able to take was on Cunard’s Queen Victoria .   It was a part of that ship’s 2024 World Cruise:   a 107-day voyage that began in Southampton, England, crossed the Atlantic Ocean to Ft. Lauderdale, saile
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Cruising the Norwegian Coast to the Arctic

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Me in 1970 standing outside the train at a Norwegian train station              I first visited Norway in the fall of 1970 when, like many young people of the time, my friend Cecelia and I went to Europe on a three-month post-college-graduation adventure.   We visited fourteen countries, sleeping in youth hostels, eating lots of bread and cheese, drinking wine, riding trains or hitchhiking, and marveling at the scenery, the people, and the cultures we experienced.   When asked what my favorite part of that trip was, Norway tops the list.   Cecelia and I enjoyed Oslo, but the real highlight of our time in Norway was riding the train from Oslo to Bergen and back to Oslo—a sixteen-hour roundtrip.   We spent nearly all of those hours (at least as long as daylight lasted) glued to the windows of the train, awed by the magnificent mountains, interlaced with fjords (fingers of water), and by the small villages scattered on mountainsides. When I retired and started traveling again, I knew th
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