Oh the Places I'll Go

Our recently completed Rhine River cruise ended in Basel, Switzerland, a city sitting at the junction of three countries:  Germany, France, and Switzerland.  If you have traveled in Switzerland, you will be aware that there are three official languages in the country—French, German, and Italian.  In addition, many people also speak English which has become the common denominator across the country, the European continent, and, in fact, most of the world.  We Americans benefit greatly from this fact.  While many people around the world speak two or three or even four languages, we Americans tend to speak just one.  Whether we are lazy or lucky or both is open to debate. But I digress.   Basel is a charming, cultured city.   With our friends Monica and Loren, we toured the old town, visited a couple of Christmas markets, and felt quite proficient at getting about on the city’s tram system.   The narrow, cobbled streets of town are lined with ...

In Before Covid (BC) times, Scott and I had planned to sail the Rhine River in December of 2020 in order to experience the magic of Europe’s Christmas Markets.  As everyone knows, travel in 2020 was cancelled, and we were forced to postpone our planned trip for a year.   Unfortunately, Covid times are still with us; in fact, they are making a strong resurgence in many European nations.  We are happy to report that we have been able to visit many Christmas markets in the past ten days (and have continued to test negative on our nearly-daily covid tests). We traveled the Rhine with our very good friends, Monica and Loren Kersting.   Monica and I first met nearly forty years ago when she was a student of mine in the school psychology graduate program at what is now called Minnesota State University—Moorhead.   She and Loren married about the same time that I married Scott.   The men had nearly as much in common as Monica and I did, and during our years ...

Europe, of course, is know for its many magnificent cathedrals.  The Cologne Cathedral is among the biggest, tallest, and most grand of them.  During World War II over ninety percent of the buildings in Cologne were bombed, but fortunately the cathedral was left largely unharmed. We visited the cathedral during the day, and Scott went on a tour of the cathedral at night.   The first photo is of the cathedral during the day and the interior photo is one that Scott took from above. We were interested to learn that Speyer, Germany is more the home of the Protestant Reformation than Wittenberg, which is where Luther posted his 95 theses on the Roman Catholic cathedral door.    It was in Speyer in 1529 that twenty Lutheran princes and representatives of free cities banded together to refuse to bend to the mandate that Catholicism was the only legitimate way to worship.   This action is what gave the new movement its protestant name. We visited both the ca...

Fifty-one years ago, my friend Cecelia and I traveled around Europe for more than three months collecting long-lasting memories from our assorted adventures.  One of those enduring memories was of Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum, the national museum of the Netherlands.  What I remembered over all those years was stumbling on paintings by the Dutch grand masters—Rembrandt, Van Gogh, and others.  I did not remember the gorgeous building which houses the museum nor the historical story told in its many gallery rooms.   The museum was largely remodeled a few years ago, according to our boutique hotel host.  In these times of Covid, advance ticket purchases were required, and luckily were available.  (We were not so lucky with purchasing tickets to either the Van Gogh Museum or the Anne Frank House—both of which were sold out for the weekend we were in town.)  Proof of vaccination is required to enter any museum, restaurant, or store in Amsterda...

We have now completed our cruise around the Aegean Sea on the Viking Venus, and I thought I would share some final bits and pieces about the trip. The first stop after leaving Athens was Volos, the sixth largest city in Greece with a population of about 150,000.   Here is a view of the town as we were arriving in port. One of the selling points for Viking cruises is “an included tour in every port.”   Our shore excursion for this day was a bus ride up the winding switchbacks of Mt. Pellos with stops at two of its twenty charming villages:   Portaria and Makrinitsa.    Our visits to these towns were marred only by the fact that Viking sent at least six busloads of passengers on that same included tour so the streets were teaming with tourists from our ship, all wearing Quiet Voxs around our necks with earpieces that allowed us to hear only our particular guide’s narration of the tour. Scott and I managed to find a quiet café where we enjoyed a STRONG Greek co...