I first went to Europe in 1968 at the age of 14. I arrived in Naples with my family on the Italian liner Michelangelo after a seven day crossing from New York City. We were moving as a family to Rome as my mother took a job as a director of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the UN. I’m not sure I had spent much time thinking about Europe before that having grown…
Today we woke up in Zurich for the first of three days covering as much as we can see of Switzerland. I had planned out our visit to take full advantage of the available. Swiss rail passes which cover all trains, boats, cog railways, aerial tramways, buses and museums that Switzerland has to offer. After testing the train service and the museum tickets in Basel yesterday we arrived in Zürich and checked in to the…
It’s a rainy day in Basel, so we are taking in the art of the city before going on the obligatory shopping spree. A few things converge to make a mid-sized Swiss city like Basel punch so far above its weight in the art world. There are the historical roots of the city as Basel’s art collection dates back to 1661. The Amerbach Cabinet, bought by the city, is considered the world’s oldest continuously public…
This is the last day of our Rhine cruise. We are spending the morning in WWII remembrance in Colmar before heading into the Black Forest in the afternoon. Everyone agrees that especially for Europe, nationalism and WWII was Hell. The biggest hero to go into Hell and return was Audie Murphy. He is one of the most remarkable stories to come out of World War II. Born in 1925 into a dirt-poor sharecropping family in…
Europe’s road to integration was paved by centuries of recurring, often catastrophic warfare. After the devastation of WWII, things needed to change. World War II left Europe more physically, economically, and demographically devastated than any conflict in its history. It was a continent of rubble, displaced people, and collapsed institutions. An estimated 40 million Europeans died, roughly two-thirds of them civilians, a reversal from WWI, where soldiers made up most casualties. This shift reflected the…
For years I have heard about Baden-Baden, but I’ve never found a reason to find myself to this lovely little town on the Rhine. Thanks to the summer drought in Central Europe and the low-water condition of the Rhine, I’ve finally found my excuse to get there. Given our extra unplanned Sunday in Strasbourg, a day when almost all the shops are legally closed for business (a huge constraint on Kim’s enjoyment of any place),…
This morning we are pulling into a sunny Koblenz Germany in the central Rhine. The Rhine River Cruise transition has begun. This is the beginning of the castle region of the Rhine and we have already seen one while eating breakfast. The one that’s overlooks Koblenz is Ehrenbreitstein Fortress (Festung Ehrenbreitstein), perched high above the Rhine and Moselle confluence in Koblenz. It sits on a plateau overlooking the “Deutsches Eck”. It’s one of the largest…
My plan on this cruise was to get my daily exercise in early in the morning by going up onto the Sun Deck of the River boat. Yesterday when I went up at 6 AM it was dark cold and rainy so I made it one time around the track and went back down to my room where I did the best I could with the limited floor space in doing my stretches and calisthenics.…
This morning we docked for several hours in Kinderdijk, south of Amsterdam and just east of Rotterdam. Kinderdijk is one of the real low-lying spots of Holland and is supposedly where the young man of fables, Hans Brinker, stuck his finger in the dyke to keep it from failing. What’s interesting is that these ancient clay levies they call dykes are not the sort of structures like concrete dams that could or do spring leaks…
Anne Frank was a Jewish girl born in Frankfurt, Germany in 1929. When the Nazis rose to power, her family fled to Amsterdam, but after Germany invaded the Netherlands in 1940, life grew increasingly dangerous for Jewish families there. In July 1942, when Anne was 13, her family went into hiding in a secret annex behind her father’s office, along with another family and a dentist. For over two years, they lived in cramped, silent…