Oh the Places I'll Go

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...

I suspect that, like me, you have seen the photographs of Santorini, the Greek island that is almost always represented by white buildings with blue domes.  Getting to see Santorini in person was one of the anticipated highlights of my cruise around the Aegean Sea.  It turns out that those two iconic white buildings with the blue domes are not representative of the town that is perched on a rocky cliff high above the sea.   Here is a view of the town of Fira, the largest city and the capital of Santorini, at sunrise.  I took this photo from our ship, the Viking Venus. Santorini is a volcanic island--actually five islands—with the towns built in the calderas left by previous eruptions.   We began our exploration of the island with a motorized sailboat trip to the uninhabited island of Nea Kameni which most recently blew in 1955.   We hiked up the lava-strewn mountain to the caldera—the depression formed when a volcano blows its top...