On the 5thday of our trip, Dennis took us to Bremerhaven. Our first stop was the Emigration and Immigration Museum. It turns out Bremerhaven is where many Europeans emigrated out of Europe and many arrived in the US via Ellis Island. There are records there from the 1600s through the late 1900s. When we bought our tickets, you were assigned a person to follow. My person was a lady named Margret and she was born in the 1820s. She didn’t emigrate to the US until she was in her late 20s. There were stations all through the museum where you could find out more information about her. We each had a different person. The museum had exhibits that depicted the different time periods and all the people would have had to endure on their trip. I ... read more

We made it to Germany on Monday after several flights, but we were glad to be here. We didn’t sleep much. On the long flight, right as we both were falling asleep, the flight attendant made an announcement. “This is important, you must listen” or something like that but in the tone of something major has happened to the plane. She then started again and again said whatever it was in the tone followed by, “you need to fill this paperwork in before arriving in France”. What, ok, but did you have to say it in that tone? Can you say adrenaline rush? Well, that is what we heard and then we couldn’t relax enough to fall asleep. Dennis picked us up at the airport and drove us back to his house. We arrived and got ... read more

Well they switched out flight to a new plane and guess what, it too had problems but those problems only took 30 minutes to fix. we finally took off 2.5 hours late. I was exhausted by then and fell asleep immediately. Tom waited for dinner before retiring. We arrived in Barcelona at 12:30 and took the metro towards the hotel. We transferred to the red line and then got off at our station. It was then about a 10 minute walk (well it would have been but we took a wrong turn). Oh well, we made it to the hotel and checked in. Our room wasn't ready yet so we left our bags and went in search for lunch. we had a nice tappas lunch and then came back to the hotel to change. oh the ... read more

We woke up and got ready and then crossed the street to the café we found last night across from the hotel where we got fresh orange juice and a chocolate croissant. The guy running the café remembered us from last night when we stopped by and asked if he served pastries in the morning. We went back to the hotel and checked out, but we got them to hold our luggage. We then walked the 15 blocks to the metro station and took the metro to the Coliseum. The Roma pass we bought in the states and picked up yesterday allowed us to get on the metro free, but we couldn’t figure out how to use it. We showed it to a guard and he smiled and opened the entrance for us. Ok, so that ... read more

We knew the day was going to be long, what we didn’t know was it was going to become 2 days. Neither of us slept well. Susan still didn’t feel great after last night and then we had to wake up early so that we could get on the shuttle to the airport. We arrived at the airport and we were the only ones from Viking taking TAROM air (the Romanian airline) Almost everyone else was on British Air. We got to the check-in desk and she checked me in and said, “you will have to pick up your bags in Detroit”. Wait, our flight is thru JFK. Originally it was thru Detroit but when a schedule change happened that gave us 15 minutes in Detroit to go thru customs, go thru immigration and passport control, ... read more