The marvelous adventure is over, and we are back in Wisconsin. I don't know if anyone is still checking into this site as I let it fall by the wayside the past few weeks.....but we're back....and getting ready to head out again to Nantucket. So in the end we drove 20,370 km. through 21 countries...not to mention travel on quite a few ferry boats. With gas ranging from 9-12 dollars a gallon...gas looks cheap here on our return! Actually so do most things...After seeing $9 sodas in Norway! The trip ended in a mad whirlwind. We drove across Germany and went [View Full Entry]

---

---

Denmark was a good fit for all our traveling styles. Throughout this journey I've tried to keep a balance of all our divergent favorite parts of traveling, and we hit them all in Denmark. For Chase you need history, especially medieval or Viking and good museums are most appreciated. Marshall likes animals and activities. As for me, I like scenery and seeing things that look totally different from other regions, such as houses or clothing styles. We got it all in spades in Denmark. For Chase there were Viking sites galore. We visited old grave sites and forts, some had [View Full Entry]

---

---

We are on the boat from Norway to Denmark now. After leaving Finland we spent a couple of days in Sweden. Stockholm is a beauitiful city built on a number of islands connected by bridges, so you always see water and beautiful boats. The changing of the guard at their palace is fun, because they have about 50 soldiers on horse back, some with swords, some playing musical instruments. We saw the Vasa, a ship that had an extra cannon deck and so was top heavy and sank her first 15 minutes out of the dock. She lay under water for [View Full Entry]

---

---

Marshall and I had a really relaxing week in Finland, Chase on the other hand was worn out, bruised, but very happy by the time we left. We spent 8 days in Finland so that Chase could study with one of the world's foremost medieval sword fighters. He trained all day on two saturdays in workshops with other students, trained privately each mornng, then again at the sword school for about 4 hours in the evening. We stayed in a little cabin in a campground on the edge of Helsinki, which was pleasant. Marshall and I had plenty of time to [View Full Entry]

---

---

Mark joined us in Prague, as did the entire rest of Europe it seemed. Here we are for 3 months, and we chose Prague as a place for Mark to join up with us for 5 days, not realizing it was the biggest weekend of the year in that city. It was the 4-day May day weekend, and the entire continent apparantly decided to go to the Czech Republic. We could only find a place to stay for the first two nights, which we thought would be o.k. to see the city. But it was so jam-packed the lines to get [View Full Entry]

---

---

After our whirlwind visit to Vienna, Slovakia gave us a slower paced few days. All over Eastern Europe there is work being done on buildings and streets, making up for years of crumbling neglect. This was quite evident in the small capital city of Bratslavia. It has a charming old center which was apparantly ignored for about 40 years, and is now getting fixed up. We headed into the center of the country to an old mining town. We went into a tea house that felt like something out of my childhood in the 70s in California. There were pillows [View Full Entry]

---

---

Last time I posted was from Romania, the morning that turned into my favorite day of our trip...if not my favorite travel day ever. Throughout Hungary and Romania I have loved all the horse drawn carts. We saw a farm with a sign that it gave cart rides. We ended up getting a couple of hour ride through the Romanian countryside in an old wooden wagon filled with hay driven by "Cowboy" and his charming little grandson, who spoke no English. We went into the little town where Cowboy lived. It was like entering into a Mother Goose nursery rhyme. [View Full Entry]

---

---

We left Turkey and began our 3 week or so journey through Eastern Europe into Scandenevia. The first stop, Bulgaria was certainly a change from the countries we've seen thus far. For one thing, we entered the country completely blindly with no plans or ideas of what we'd see. I mistakenly thought Bulgaria was in a guidebook I had brought, so we had no information at all about the country. The alphabet is again different from ours, or the Greek, and fewer signs were translated into our alphabet here, presumably because of fewer tourists. I soon learned the sign for Sofia--the [View Full Entry]

---

---

Our border crossing from Greece into Turkey, and our first few hours in Istanbul had us so nerve-wracked I thought I would not enjoy the stay....but a few days later as I luxuriated in a Turkish bath, life couldn't have gotten much more blissful!!! Crossing from Greece is still like crossing a military zone. You must go through 6 or 7 checkpoints, each one with a bunch of soldiers with machine guns. Each asks for the same passports and car papers. At one point we had to go inside and get visas to which Marshall asked rather sadly "aren't those painful [View Full Entry]

---

---

Greece has been a grand adventure. Staying on the Peloponnese Peninsula was great for day trips to many ancient sites and several islands with ease. We went into Athens twice, and saw all the sites such as the Acropolis there. On Sunday they have a huge flea market that spills out over several blocks and contains much junk but also amazing quantities of cool antiques like swords, war memoroblia, phonographs with the big horns. Chase bought an English W.W.I helmet. We went to Delphi, which according to Zeus, was the center of the world. He let two Eagles go on opposite [View Full Entry]

---

---