The other day I drove down from Memphis, TN to Jackson, Mississippi. I was on a literary journey to visit the home of the famous writer Eudora Welty. The road down there is Interstate 55. It is one long, straight, and incredibly boring highway of mostly black tar. I say mostly because in some stretches it is worn down to a Georgia red clay color with only a hint of its former blackness. The only visual distraction this time of year was field after field full of fluffy, white cotton ready for harvesting. The speed limit is 70 and everyone pretty much goes closer to 80 especially the semis. The road is full of semis as it is a straight shot down to New Orleans. I was speeding along trying to get something decent on the ... read more

Sometimes, in one's travel experiences, there are things that stand out as unforgettable: the first glimpse of Machu Picchu; the first canal ride in Venice; a bullfight in Spain (although the fight never took place because of a damp ring) being in the middle of furious Spaniards hurling anything they could get their hands on at the 'deciders' was worth the price of admission; Auschwitz in Poland; people trying to knock down the Berlin Wall with their bare hands using anything they could hurl at it; the 16 hour 'Cusco Day' parade; and the village of Lidice in the Czech Republic to name a few. I first saw it in 1991 when our friend, Dusan, brought us to see it. I had never heard of Lidice (Le-dee-cee) but I have never forgotten it. I would like ... read more

This was another month long marathon trip( Sept./ Oct. 1995) with my now ex-husband. We began in Hamburg with a visit to our friends Horst and Waltraud Jungclaus. Next, took a train to Berlin where we stayed with our former exchange student, Sebastian, and his family. Berlin was almost unrecognizable to me. There was no longer any part of the 'wall' anywhere to be seen around the Brandenberg Gate. The Reichstag was being reconstructed waiting for the Bundestag (like our Congress) to come home from Bonn (where they had met when it had been the capital of West Germany). You could now drive all over the city without having to stop at checkpoints to be searched. We were taken to the Pergamon Museum on the famous Museum Isle (formerly in East Berlin so mostly off limits) ... read more

Long story shortened...My family hosted, over a period of 20 years, about 50 (+/-) foreign students. In 1991, my now ex-husband and I went to visit some of them. We started in Hamburg, Germany to revisit the Jungclauses. This was a couple whom we had met in 1986 through the organization 'Friendship Force'. We stayed with them a week or so and then took a train to Berlin where we stayed with the Heine family. Their son, Sebastian, had been one of our students in 1988. After a wonderful stay for another week or so we were put on a train to Prague where we were to meet our friend Dusan Kubis. He was 35 but had been a counselor at a 'Peace camp' in Deerfield, MA in 1989. The camp was looking for local homes ... read more

We spent one whole day cruising down the Danube so I thought I would tell you a little about the river. It is the 2nd longest river in Europe and the 25th longest in the world. It srarts in the Black Forest region of Germany and ends about 1,766 miles later on the Romanian coast and then empties into the Black Sea flowing from west to east. The Danube river basin is more than 300,000 square miles and includes parts of Germany, Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia/Herzegovina, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Romania, Moldavia, and Ukraine. While I mostly knew the 'Danube' as a pretty Strauss waltz, in reality it has shaped the destinies of many countries. The river was used to transport cargo such as salt, wood, and ores. The Roman emperors recognized its strategic location centuries ... read more