One of the ways we have charted the chapters of our lives has been our trips to Europe. When Larry graduated from Yale Divinity School, we cashed in the three years of Sandy’s retirement fund for high school teaching and took a three-week jaunt using Arthur Frommer’s “Europe on $10 a Day.” (There was also a “Europe for $5 a day”, but for $10 you got a private bathroom). We bought a ticket on Pan Am to Stockholm, and every stop on the return, through Copenhagen, Munich, Amsterdam, Zurich, and London was free.

It took us another 25 years to return, this time to Paris and Tuscany. In the next few years, we returned to France and Italy. We took two groups from UCG to Scotland, and we stopped off in the Taizé’ community in France and took in the labyrinth at the cathedral in Chartres. Each of these changed our lives.

When we retired from our active ministry at UCG the church gave us this beautiful gift of money for travel. Right away we used half the gift to book a trip to Munich, Wurzburg, and then through Roads’ scholar, Prague. Prague was the first time we used an actual tour. This made sense since we couldn’t even read the alphabet in the Czech Republic. We learned and experienced so many new things in Prague. We had lectures on what the communist regime meant to people who lived through it, the horrendous violations of human rights through those who experienced them, and then the Velvet Revolution and the freedom gained in 1989.

We were ready to use the second half of the gift when Covid stopped all travel for a while. Suddenly we realized we better use it before we got too old to enjoy it. Like everyone who watches PBS, we saw those Viking River Cruises as a fairy tale dream. So last year we reserved a 12-day cruise from Paris down the Mosel River through France to the Rhine River in Germany ending in Basel and then Zurich, Switzerland. And wow, what an experience. We have never been on a journey where everything was taken care of so thoroughly.

We got a quick chance to revisit Paris. Then we took a bus to the ship where we stopped each night at a different medieval port along the river that borders France and Germany. There’s a beauty of experiencing the vistas along the river that is unlike any other kind of travel. These cities were founded on previously Celtic and then Roman sites. And they survived through the Franco Prussian wars and two World Wars. The local tour guides often acknowledged the roles these nations had in their own tragedies, and their struggles to find paths to a green and peaceful future.
We were bountifully fed on the boat and also found bakeries and sidewalk cafés in the local towns. And we especially enjoyed fondue overlooking the river on our last night in Zurich.

We are happily home now, thankful again for the kindness that continues to flow through you to us. This may be the bookend with that first “Europe on $10 a Day.” It is a fitting frame for our lives.

Sandy and Larry