Ten Weeks Across Europe, 2016
24 stories, in order from the beginning of the trip.
1April 17, 2016
Dateline May 1, 2016, Crossing the Atlantic, Tampa to Copenhagen
The first leg of our ten week European adventure was the crossing itself, thirteen days on the Norwegian Star from Tampa to Copenhagen. Between long stretches at sea we paused in Bermuda and spent a glorious day touring Sao Miguel in the Azores with our guide Josef, from the twin crater lakes of Sete Cidades to a mountain lake the wind unveiled just for us. We rode out a storm with waves as high as forty-five feet, sailed up the English Channel past the White Cliffs of Dover, and made friends with three couples we hope to see for years. Crossing the Atlantic, as we found out, is not for sissies.
2May 8, 2016
Dateline May 8, 2016, The Norwegian Fjords
From Copenhagen the Norwegian Star carried us north along the west coast of Norway through four ports in a row. We toured art nouveau Aalesund, rebuilt after a 1904 fire with materials sent by Kaiser Wilhelm II; rose at four in the morning to watch the cliffs of the Geirangerfjord slide past; rode the Flam Railway, the steepest in the world, up through tunnels cut by hand; and climbed Mount Floyen above old Bergen. A jammed camera, a fisherman playing chicken with our ship, and new friends from Germany rounded out the week.
3May 14, 2016
Dateline May 14, 2016, St. Petersburg
St. Petersburg was the stop we had most looked forward to, and we drew two rare sunny days to see it with our guide Marianna. Peter the Great's city gave us Peterhof, his answer to Versailles; the Hermitage, the third largest art museum on earth, with its Peacock Clock and its Rembrandts; the mosaic-clad Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood; the Romanov tombs in the Peter and Paul Fortress; and a room of imperial Fabergé eggs. Two centuries of Romanov history, a city rebuilt stone by stone after the siege of Leningrad, and a guide who calls Putin a rock star.
4May 17, 2016
Dateline May 17, 2016, The Baltic Capitals
With St. Petersburg given its own post, this is the rest of the Baltic cruise. Copenhagen was our hub, a city we came to love over three partial days, with its Nyhavn canal, the surprisingly small Little Mermaid, and a memorable dinner of smorrebrod and snaps. From there the Norwegian Star carried us to Warnemunde and the old town of Rostock, the medieval streets of Tallinn, and the rock-hewn church of Helsinki, before bad weather cost us Stockholm and we said our goodbyes to the ship and turned to the trains.
5May 19, 2016
Dateline May 19, 2016, Berlin
The overland half of our trip began behind what we grew up calling the Iron Curtain, and our first stop was Berlin, where we spent nearly all our time on the old East side. We rode the public buses and subways, bought a new lens to finish off our 'International' camera, and shared a table and a few fiery plum snaps with two German businessmen, one of whom asked us to make sure America takes care of them. We walked from the Brandenburg Gate to the stelae of the Holocaust memorial, to the parking lot over Hitler's bunker, to the matched cathedrals of Gendarmenmarkt. It was a day of seeing, up close, the things that were off limits when we were young.
6May 21, 2016
Dateline May 21, 2016, Prague
Prague was our first taste of how far a dollar goes in Eastern Europe, and our introduction to its beauty. We settled into our first Airbnb, found our way to the Old Town Square and its famous Orloj clock, crossed the Charles Bridge, and climbed a long flight of steps to Prague Castle and the magnificent interior of St. Vitus Cathedral. We also learned to mind the taxi meter, and ate two meals and an appetizer for about twenty-five dollars.
7May 23, 2016
Dateline May 23, 2016, Warsaw
We reached Warsaw on an overnight train that turned out to be a private room with bunk beds, rolling worse than any ship. Our Airbnb host Ada met us at the station and led us up five flights to a lovely flat in the Old Town, a quarter the Germans leveled in 1944 and the Poles rebuilt brick by salvaged brick. We met the Warsaw Mermaid and the story of Solidarity, and stood at the edge of the old Jewish Ghetto, a place John had carried in his head since reading John Hersey's The Wall as a young man.
8May 24, 2016
Dateline May 24, 2016, Krakow
Krakow was the warm stop before the hard one. We talked Soviet times with a forthright Polish woman on the train, ate kielbasa for six dollars in the square, slipped into St. Mary's Church the moment a bomb scare cleared, and toasted the city with freezer vodka poured by a barkeep named Ania. The next day took us deep into the Wieliczka salt mine, hundreds of steps down to chapels, a chandelier and a Last Supper all carved from salt. That same day took us to Auschwitz, which we give a page of its own.
9May 25, 2016
Dateline May 25, 2016, Auschwitz
Of everything we saw in ten weeks across Europe, one morning stands apart. From Krakow we were driven out to Auschwitz, and what we found there was beyond anything a history book had prepared us for. This is a short, plain account of what we witnessed, and of the guide's parting words, that the world knew, and that we must stay watchful.
10May 26, 2016
Dateline May 26, 2016, Budapest
Budapest gave us the warmest ending we could have asked for behind the Iron Curtain, because we had Hal. Our friend from an Alaska trip kept a flat in the city and arranged to be there for our visit, and he gave us two days of what he called his forced march: Heroes' Square, the Opera, St. Stephen's and its strange holy relic, a ruin pub, Langos at the great market, and Castle Hill by day and by lights. This post is for him.
11May 30, 2016
Dateline May 30, 2016, Vienna, Switzerland, Milan, Hello Italy
From Budapest the trains carried us west into a different world, where the prices doubled and the mountains began. Vienna gave us St. Stephen's and Schonbrunn, and a hundred-dollar dinner that reminded us we had left the cheap East behind. Then came the Bernina Express, the highest railway crossing in Europe, over the Alps and down into Italy, a calzone in Tirano, soccer mayhem in Milan, and fifteen unforgettable minutes in front of Leonardo's Last Supper.
12June 1, 2016
Dateline June 1, 2016, Venice
Venice was the start of our first trip to Italy, and the start of a happy lesson: order the house red, it is always excellent. We ducked our way through a rustic little flat with five-foot doorways, talked ourselves out of an eighty-euro gondola ride, got turned away from Hemingway's Harry's Bar for John's shorts, and were serenaded at five in the morning by an opera singer under our window. St. Mark's Square was every bit as magnificent as promised.
13June 3, 2016
Dateline June 3, 2016, Florence
Florence was the heart of our Italy, with the local wine flowing at six dollars a half-liter. Our hosts met us with a map and a bottle of red, and from there we walked it all: the great Duomo and Brunelleschi's dome, the Piazza della Signoria with its turtle searching for Utopia, the Uffizi and its two da Vincis, and the Ponte Vecchio with its centuries of shops. But the moment we will never forget was standing in front of Michelangelo's David, far larger and finer than we had ever imagined.
14June 5, 2016
Dateline June 5, 2016, Pisa, Siena and Cinque Terre
With Florence as our base, we took three days out into Tuscany and beyond. We went to Pisa to see the leaning tower everyone told us to skip, and were glad we didn't; to Siena and its astonishing shell-shaped square, just ahead of the afternoon rain; and to the cliffside fishing villages of Cinque Terre on a perfect blue day. Along the way a laid-off engineer turned taxi driver, and two young Chinese executives, taught us a thing or two about the world.
15June 7, 2016
Dateline June 7, 2016, Sorrento and the Amalfi Coast
Sorrento gave us a beach apartment with Mount Vesuvius framed in the window, reached only after our phone tried to march us off a cliff. From there we drove the hair-raising switchbacks of the Amalfi Coast with our guide Julia, through Positano, Ravello and Amalfi, and made a friend of a Polish cafe host named Gabriella we hated to leave. Pompeii fell in the middle of it all, but that day earned a page of its own.
16June 8, 2016
Dateline June 8, 2016, Pompeii and Herculaneum
We gave our one full day from Sorrento to Pompeii and Herculaneum, and a guide named Rosanna turned it into one of the best days of the whole trip. She made the dead cities live again: the shops and bakeries, the wagon ruts worn into the stone, the picture signs for people who could not read, and the plaster casts of those caught by the eruption. At Herculaneum we stood by the boat houses her own professor helped excavate.
17June 11, 2016
Dateline June 11, 2016, Rome
Rome was the grand finish to our weeks of Italy by rail. We threw our coins in the freshly cleaned Trevi Fountain, stood before Michelangelo's Pieta and under the Sistine ceiling, walked the Forum and Palatine Hill, and looked down into the tunnels beneath the Colosseum floor. We caught a bishop's service by luck at the oldest church in Rome, paid our respects to Raphael in the Pantheon, and went back twice to a tiny family restaurant we loved. Then, in the morning, on to Athens.
18June 12, 2016
Dateline June 12, 2016, Athens
Athens opened the last leg of our journey, the part we would spend at sea. We landed from Rome to a hotel right below the Acropolis, watched it glow at night with a glass of wine in hand, and spent a full day climbing through its ruins with a guide named Stavros. We wandered Plaka, made friends over Greek wine with a couple named Cathy and Dino, and then took a city bus to the port to board the Oceania Sirena for twelve days, unpacked at last.
19June 14, 2016
Dateline June 14, 2016, Greek Isles on the Oceania Sirena
Chapter four began with a gut-punch: a memo at check-in telling us the Egypt stops were cancelled, the very reason we had booked the cruise. We swallowed our disappointment, met a couple named Gordon and Karen over lunch who would become lifelong friends, and set off to see the Greek isles. Over four days we rode the cable car above Santorini's caldera, hunted a wine pitcher in Crete, were thoroughly ruined out in Cyprus, and walked the medieval streets of Rhodes. Then came a day at sea we will never forget, with a galley fire and fighter jets buzzing the ship off the coast of Syria.
20June 17, 2016
Dateline June 17, 2016, Nazareth and the Sea of Galilee
Our three days in Israel began on a free Friday we had not planned for. We talked Gordon and Karen into joining us, hired a driver named Haim, and set off for Nazareth, where it all began. We saw the two great Churches of the Annunciation, heard an Arab Christian family in Cana describe living as neighbors with their Jewish countrymen, and dipped our hands in the Jordan where Jesus was baptized. The day ended with the four of us over Lebanese food on the shore of the Sea of Galilee.
21June 18, 2016
Dateline June 18, 2016, Masada and the Dead Sea
On our second day in Israel a new guide drove us two and a half hours south into the desert, to Herod's mountaintop fortress at Masada, where 960 Jewish zealots made their last stand against Rome. From there we floated in the Dead Sea, muddy and crowded and unforgettable, then drove up to Jerusalem to spend the night inside the Old City. That evening we stumbled into a Palestinian Christian restaurant for a wonderful lamb shank, and learned at the front desk that we had gone to the wrong place, our first lesson in how finely the divisions are drawn here.
22June 19, 2016
Dateline June 19, 2016, Jerusalem, the Old City
Our last full day in Israel was a long walk through the Old City of Jerusalem, the kind of day you do not forget. We started at the Zion Gate and the room of the Last Supper, passed the Roman Cardo and the golden menorah, and took in the Temple Mount and the Western Wall. Then we followed the Via Dolorosa, station by station, to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and ended on the Mount of Olives looking across at the sealed Eastern Gate. Holy ground for three faiths, layered one century atop another.
23June 20, 2016
Dateline June 20, 2016, Bethlehem
Our three days in Israel ended in Bethlehem, just across the line on the Palestinian side, where an Israeli guide handed us to a local Palestinian Muslim guide who walked us into the Church of the Nativity ahead of the lines. We knelt where Jesus is said to have been born, browsed the olive-wood carvings in his little shop, and then ran into trouble leaving: a fire on the road, a backed-up crossing, and a long walk on foot through tunnels and checkpoints to get back into Israel, with our guide telling us to keep it to ourselves. Standing where Christ was born, and the day before where he was crucified, left us with chills we still feel.
24June 25, 2016
Dateline June 25, 2016, Istanbul and the End of Ten Weeks
The last leg of our ten weeks took us ashore in Taormina with Gordon and Karen, then off the ship at the port near Rome, where the four of us shared a car to the airport and said our goodbyes. From Rome we flew on to Istanbul, our final stop and the city that was once Constantinople, the Christian capital of the East. We raced the Grand Bazaar before it closed, were welcomed into the Blue Mosque, walked Topkapi and the spice market, and learned afterward that we had stood at the Ataturk Airport checkpoint barely a day before the bombing there. Ten weeks, seventeen countries, and home in time for our anniversary.