Spring and summer 2011: Europe, Canada, Boston

It's been almost a year since we last posted a new report on this blog. We did some traveling around California and Arizona last winter (Lake Tahoe, Carmel, Grand Canyon, Sedona, and a few other places), but the time that we might have devoted to blogging about those jaunts was instead taken up with planning for our most ambitious trip to date: a 97-day journey that would include more than ten weeks in Europe, followed by almost two weeks in eastern Canada and a week in Boston.  We left home on April 18 and returned on July 23.

Roughly half of this time was devoted to independent travel, where we developed the itinerary, picked the hotels, and arranged the transportation. The other half consisted of two Road Scholar (formerly Elderhostel) tours, a river cruise, and a week at our timeshare unit in Boston. The Road Scholar trips were the core of our itinerary, and we later added the cruise, but this still left a huge amount of research to choose where to go, what to do, and how to get there during the weeks we traveled independently. We looked at travel books and internet reviews as we made lodging reservations for every night of our travel. It became our full-time job for many weeks, starting in December 2010. And then there was the trip itself, followed by weeks of organizing the thousands of photos we took. That's why this is our first blog post in a very long time.

Here's a summary of our trip:

We started by flying to Iceland, where we spent three nights in Reykjavik.

(click on any photo to enlarge)

From there, we moved on to Ireland (seven nights). We spent a few days touring the west of Ireland, including the coast of County Kerry.

Next came Wales, where we spent two nights in Caernarfon...

... and England, where our first stop was the beautiful city of Bath...

...and Scotland, where we rode one train from Inverness to Kyle of Lochalsh, on the northwest coast across from the Isle of Skye...

 ...and another from Mallaig to Glasgow, through the West Highlands.

In all, we spent 16 nights in the United Kingdom (including five in London, where we arrived less than a week after the royal wedding at Westminster Abbey, and found a lot of congestion and detours).

Up to this point, all of our travel was independent except for three nights in Ireland that were part of a Railtours Ireland package.

We then flew from Edinburgh to Copenhagen to start our first Road Scholar tour, titled Four Scandinavian Capitals. After almost a month of independent travel in Iceland, Ireland and the U.K., it was nice to take a break from deciding where to eat and where to find the bus stop as we traveled through Scandinavia, and let someone else shoulder that responsibility!

Like many European cities, Copenhagen owes its existence to its proximity to water, and the city's canals (like this one in the Nyhavn district) define the geography and feel of the city.

This 17-night tour would also take us to Oslo, which we reached via an overnight ferry trip from Copenhagen that took us through the Oslo Fjord and past several communities south of the capital...

...and then to Stockholm, whose City Hall is the site of the annual awards ceremony for the Nobel Prizes in Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature and Economics...

...and to Helsinki, where Tom's favorite building was the Central Railway Station, designed by Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen (father of American architect Eero Saarinen). It opened in 1919 and today serves an estimated 200,000 travelers a day.

At the end of the Scandinavia tour, we had three nights open before our next Road Scholar program, so we had decided early on that we would fly back to Oslo and do the popular "Norway in a Nutshell" tour: rail from Oslo to Bergen and return, through the wintry landscapes of the mountain plateau between eastern and western Norway...

...with a side trip by boat to see some of the country's fjords. Our ferry carried many tourists but it's also a lifeline for villages lining the fjords that are accessible only by water.

Our next stop was Zurich...

 ...where we spent one night before starting a 15-night Road Scholar tour called Splendors of Switzerland by Rail. Although Tom is a rail enthusiast, this tour was designed more for the traveler interested in the history and culture of the country. But all of the intercity travel, from Lucerne...

...to Interlaken...

...to Brig...

 ...to Locarno...

...to St. Moritz...

...involved trains. In addition, there were several side trips by rail, plus some not on the schedule that Tom added as time permitted. One memorable side trip was from Zermatt to Gornergrat, where we were joined by a couple of our fellow Road Scholar participants for a view of the cloud-shrouded Matterhorn...

...and several glaciers, including the Gorner Glacier.

That trip ended in Zurich, and on the day when most of our fellow Road Scholars were winging their way back to North America, we were on a train for Basel...

where we would start a seven-night Rhine River cruise operated by Viking River Cruises. This would take us to the Black Forest, including the village of St. Peter...

 ...Strasbourg, in the Alsace region of France...

 ...Heidelberg...

...the Middle Rhine between Rüdesheim and Koblenz, where there seemed to be a castle around every bend in the river...

...Cologne, whose cathedral is said to be Germany's most visited landmark...

...Kinderdijk (Netherlands), whose 19 windmills date back to the 1740s...

...and finally Amsterdam. We didn't linger in Amsterdam because we had another destination to get to: Belgrade, Serbia. When we worked in Alaska in 2010 we had gotten to know many young eastern Europeans who were working for the summer at our lodge, most of them on work-study visas. As we were planning our trip we found that two of our friends from Serbia would be there while we were in Europe. They invited us to come see them, and so we ended up spending two nights in Belgrade, and taking a brief but very intensive tour of the city. After all, if we didn't take advantage of their hospitality now, we didn't know if we would ever again get to Serbia. We were very glad that we did.

Here we are with our friends Dusan and Nevena, standing in front of the Serbian Orthodox Temple of Saint Sava in Belgrade, one of the largest Orthodox churches in the world:

While we were there, Dusan and Nevena took us to some excellent Belgrade restaurants, including this sidewalk café in the city's bohemian district, Skadarlija:

For our last stop in Europe, we returned to Finland for four nights. Marcia is of Finnish heritage, and she has a cousin, Seija, about ten years younger, whom she met there on a 1974 trip. They've stayed in contact since then, and as we planned this trip, Marcia emailed Seija, who said, "please come visit." So we did! We spent time with Seija and her husband Ilkka at their summer home (a wonderful log house on a lake, built by Ilkka)...

...and went to a farm that has been in Marcia's father's family for many generations...

...where several family members, including Seija's 95-year old father and four of her sisters, had gathered to greet us.

It was a very meaningful and rewarding end to the European part of our trip.

From Helsinki we flew to Halifax, Nova Scotia, by way of Reykjavik. We were celebrating our 35th anniversary this year, and we had honeymooned in Nova Scotia back in 1976, so we decided to return there on our way home. We were joined there by a good friend from Virginia, and by one of her friends, who accompanied us for a week as we visited places familiar and unfamiliar in both Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. Among the places in Nova Scotia that we returned to on this trip were Baddeck, where the Inverary Inn, where we stayed in 1976, has gone upscale, but where we found a very nice B&B, the Heritage House, which was within easy walking distance of the boat harbor.

We also revisited the Keltic Lodge on the Cabot Trail, where we stopped for lunch (in both 1976 and 2011)...

...and the Normaway Inn, in Margaree Valley, which was delightfully rustic in 1976 and remains so today.

From Halifax we boarded VIA Rail Canada's overnight train, the Ocean, for Montréal. We had a bedroom in the dome observation car at the rear of the train...

...providing a good vantage point for seeing the countryside of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick...

...and the next morning, Québec. We were in Montréal for two nights before boarding Amtrak's Adirondack, which gave us some nice views of Lake Champlain...

...as we traveled toward that day's destination, Albany. One night there, eight nights in Boston where we stayed at the Custom House (the building with the clock tower, center right in this photo)...

...and visited with our son Ricky, Tom's brother Chris, and several of Marcia's cousins, and on the 97th day of our trip we found ourselves on a plane for Los Angeles. Into the rental car for a drive up the coast, and the next thing we knew we were home in Santa Maria.

The trip lived up to our expectations in every way imaginable. We met some fascinating people, both as members of the groups we participated in (Road Scholar attracts some very inquisitive and accomplished folks) and randomly on trains and in our lodging places. The foods we were offered provided interesting contrasts to our usual California cuisine – especially the Scandinavian breakfasts with their wonderful cheeses, meats and breads (amazingly, we didn't gain weight from all the eating we did). We also had mostly clear, sunny skies, although it was often cooler than we expected.

We'd like to think that we learned quite a bit about all of the places we visited, although we know we only had limited time. We certainly carried away many visual images, and of all the sounds we heard, the most universal one in almost every country we visited was that of church bells ringing, sometimes for what seemed like hours.

Several friends and fellow travelers have commented on our stamina in pursuing such an ambitious trip. The reason we did it this way was simple: we thought that if we were going to devote significant time and expense to getting to Europe, we should do as much as possible once we got there.

Physically, we did fine – we never had a day when it felt as though we wouldn't have the energy to do everything that the day's agenda called for. Mentally, it was a bit more taxing, as the amount of information we had to digest began to fill up our somewhat limited brain capacity. Toward the end of the trip, we had trouble remembering some of the specifics of what we had done. Fortunately, Marcia was quite conscientious about doing a daily trip diary. Thanks to her written record, as well as our many photos, and the benefit of time, we can now do a pretty good job of recalling our adventures. In fact, that's one good reason to do a blog – it gives us a vehicle for documenting our travels while we can still remember them!

We'll follow up, as time permits, with more detailed descriptions of each leg of our trip.

Text and images ©2011 Tom and Marcia Murray 

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