Europe

By Tom
October 15, 2000 through January 21, 2001

We left Cairo on Sunday morning, October 15, to return to London after a month in Southern Africa and Egypt. Arriving in London at lunchtime, we headed to our hotel, retrieved our baggage from storage, and began the process of repacking for the next leg of our journey through Europe. On this trip, it seems luggage behaves like rabbits. Every time we turn around, it seems to have multiplied. We left on our trip with one bag and one backpack each plus one (extremely heavy) school bag. We managed to make it through 4 weeks in Africa with even less baggage due to weight restrictions on the airplane flights within Zambia and seemed to do just fine, including keeping up with the schoolwork. Now as I looked around the room, we were awash in bags and boxes of "stuff." As I began to look around the room, I asked myself, "Who is going to carry all this stuff?" When I realized the answer was me, I called the concierge and asked where I could find boxes and tape for shipping some of this stuff home or ahead. But more on this later, back to jolly old England....

Having gotten into Cairo very late on Saturday night and leaving very early Sunday morning, we were all exhausted. We decided on an early dinner at a very highly-rated pizza restaurant. Now, I should point out, that we had survived four weeks in Africa without so much as a case of indigestion. So, of course, Carrie and I both ended up with a case of food poisoning (we had salads with our pizza) in wonderful, safe England. Needless to say, our first day back in London was a bit slow. The kids were happy, they got to swim, watch videos, and order room service while Carrie and I recuperated.

We had spent a two days in London in September to repack and relax before heading off to Africa. During this stay, we were lucky enough to squeeze in a couple of sights: the tours of Buckingham Palace and the Tower of London. The Palace tour was much better than any of us expected. We got to see many of the public rooms where meetings, dinners, etc., are held. The art collection was remarkable. The Palace is a veritable art museum in itself. We had Gregory count the number of times he saw the crown symbol of the Elizabeth II. He gave up when he got close to 100. I was hoping to pick up an O.B.E. or some other honor, but it turned out Her Majesty was not at home.

We also went over to the Tower of London, which, as many of you know (and which I didn't know), is much more than just a Tower. It was the center of the government and a gaol (with many famous residents) for many years. The kids enjoyed hearing the stories (quite a colorful history of intrigue in the royal families) and seeing the place where "ye olde chopping blocke" was located. The crown jewels are also quite a sight, but not quite a match for the Hapsburg stash on display in Vienna. (The Kids at Tower Bridge)

On our return to London in October, we focused on the most important historical sites. First stop, Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum. Seeing all these statues gave us an opportunity to introduce the kids to some historical figures and their roles in how they helped shape the world. They might even have heard a word or two of what we were saying when they weren't looking at James Bond, Madonna, or some other popular figure. Gregory and Christopher liked the Jack the Ripper and guillotine exhibit the best. We finished the day enjoying the music and movement in the play, "Starlight Express."

Now, as we noted in our Egypt journal, touring temples and viewing ancient carvings and statues is not Gregory's cup of tea. So, to balance things out a bit, we made a trip to Windsor, not to see the castle, but to see the more important historical attraction in the area, LEGOLAND!!!!! To put it in perspective, when we ask Grego about his favorite place on the trip, he always says London because we got to go to Legoland!!

The following day, we continued our tour of the most important historical sites in London by riding the Millennium Wheel and taking a double-decker bus tour of the city. The weather was fabulous for the ride on the wheel, we could see for miles in all directions. It is not your father's Ferris wheel.

The highlight of this stay in London happened on our last night when we went to the stage production of "The Lion King." The critics (the kids) all raved!!! "I loved it" (Brennan Cusack - Reviewer Extraordinaire). They all remember the small technical problem near the end of the first act when Mufasa got stuck on the rocks rather than falling to his death. Carrie and I loved the staging and costumes. The way they depicted the animals was remarkable.

After four full days in London (and after repacking and sending numerous boxes home and ahead to Salzburg) we headed up north to Norwich, in East Anglia, to visit our friends, the Ghersens. Cliff and Nicola and their two children, Olivia and Peter, are friends from Santa Barbara. Cliff took a sabbatical from his teaching at Montecito Union School so they could spend a year living where Nicola grew up. They have rented a beautiful old thatched roof house out in the countryside. It was a wonderful way to spend a few days (in fact, we were having so much fun, we stayed longer than we planned). It was great for Brennan and Gregory to see their friends, Olivia and Peter and for all of us to get together to catch up on our experiences being away from home.

We left the Ghersens and Norwich on the 23rd of October and headed for Paris. We took the train to London and then boarded the Eurostar train through the "Chunnel" to Paris. It is quite civilized. It sure beats the old ferry from Dover!

Paris has always been a beautiful city, but it seems they have really spruced things up in recent years. There was new gilt on all the statues and monuments, buildings looked cleaner than I remembered from past visits, and, this being October, the crowds were smaller than during the normal summer busy season.

There are many beautiful sights in Paris, but the highlight of our trip was the Eiffel Tower. (Highlight number 2 for the kids was riding the Ferris wheel in the Place de la Concorde). We climbed the many hundred stairs to the second level and then rode the elevator to the top. We watched the sun set over the city on a beautiful evening. As we reached the bottom, the entire tower was lit up for the evening. WOW!

Paris is a city of wonderful museums. The question for Carrie and me was, "How much will the kids put up with?" On the first day, we went to the Musee D'Orsay. We armed Brennan with a book on Monet and sent her in search of his paintings. Gregory looked for the Van Goghs (something about only having one ear fascinated him). Christopher looked at everything. After a couple of hours of visual overload, we went out to wander around the City.

We also spent a couple of hours in the Louvre, walked down the Champs Elysee, climbed the Arc de Triomphe , visited Notre Dame (the hunchback was not there...) and wandered through the streets soaking up the beauty of this remarkable City.

We were also fortunate to catch up with our friends, Mark and Marie Pomeroy, and their son, Alexandre. The Pomeroys live up the street from us in Santa Barbara and are also spending a lot of time this year traveling around the world. Alexandre and our kids had a wonderful time together, splashing around in the hotel pool and hanging out together in the hotel while Mark, Marie, Carrie, and I got to enjoy a night out in one of Paris' wonderful restaurants.

From Paris, we took the TGV, France's version of the bullet train, down to Nice. It was a wonderful ride through the French countryside. Traveling by train in Europe is really a great way to go. Carrie and I could relax and the kids could get some schoolwork done. (Though not necessarily at the same time!)

We spent the night at a beachfront hotel in Nice and picked up a rental car for our trip to Italy. We drove as far as Portofino, a small town on the west coast near Genoa. We had planned to spend only one night here, but fell in love with this little town and our hotel on the hill. It is a picture-postcard village sitting among some hills along the water's edge. The main part of town is down along the water where a few fishing boats (and a number of large yachts) were anchored. This is a place we could visit again (though probably without the kids....).

Upon leaving Portofino, we headed for the real reason we did not go directly from Paris to Rome: the Leaning Tower of Pisa. The kids had this on their list of places in the world to see. We drove to Pisa, and spent an hour or so visiting the Tower , which was built as the bell tower for the church next door. It was interesting to see all the work being done to try to keep the Tower from falling over. It is now encircled with cables to keep it from toppling over due to an increase in its "angle of lean" since I had first seen it 20 years ago.

After leaving the tower (there is nothing else to recommend in Pisa), we headed to the train station for the remainder of our trip to Rome. Now, back to the baggage. We had skinnied down our load in London, but had ended up with 8 bags plus backpacks for this part of our trip. (Something about needing warmer clothes for fall in Europe...) Since the bigger bags were on wheels, it was not too bad. Then I discovered that in train stations like Pisa, one must go under the tracks to get to one's platform. I also learned Pisa has no porters. Fifteen minutes later, we arrived on the platform, with me sweating and #$%^@^% about luggage and railroad station design. We took advantage of our late departing train to get in some schoolwork while waiting on the platform.

We arrived in Rome on October 30, and immediately set about decorating our hotel rooms for Halloween. The hotel staff got a big kick out of seeing cobwebs and spiders on the outside of our doors and goblins and other scary creatures spread around inside. Unfortunately, Halloween is not a big deal in Rome. Some of the stores had decorations in their windows and there was even a Halloween shop near the Spanish Steps, but trick-or-treating has not yet arrived. Our guys got dressed up in their costumes and trick-or-treated between the two doors of our hotel room. We hoped plenty of candy would help with the disappointment of not having a real Halloween, but to no avail. It was tough not being home for the second most important holiday in the kids' year.

Being Catholic and in Rome, we spent our first day in Vatican City, visiting the Vatican Museum and the Sistine Chapel and seeing St. Peter's. I think the kids actually enjoyed the Sistine Chapel once we sat down on one of the benches and played a game trying to find different things in the pictures. A highlight of the trip to St. Peter's was walking through the Jubilee Doors. The Jubilee Doors at St. Peter's are only opened during a Jubilee Year, usually once every 25 years. Pope John Paul II declared the year 2000 a Jubilee Year. Those who enter through the Jubilee Doors get special consideration for their prayers. Even in late October, St. Peter's was crowded because of the Jubilee Year celebration.

We spent a day taking a car down to Pompeii, the city buried under a mountain of volcanic ash in the late 5th century. It was a fascinating visit, as the speed of the eruption and burial of the town left so much of the city intact. We were able to see buildings with the murals still visible on the walls. We could see the expressions on the faces of some of the people who were killed in the eruption by viewing the plaster casts made of their bodies which had been entombed in the ash. All of us truly enjoyed this remarkable archaeological site.

After doing battle at the Coliseum , throwing coins in the Trevi Fountain , and playing baseball in the Borghese Gardens, we left Rome on the train (thank goodness for Roman porters) for Venice. Now, we can talk a great deal about canals, the Bridge of Sighs , visiting a Venetian glass factory (where the kids got to try their hands at blowing glass, gondola rides, St. Mark's Cathedral (where we did go to Mass in Italian), and wonderful Italian food (all of which we enjoyed). However, the highlight of our trip to Venice (and, I daresay, to Italy) was feeding the pigeons in the Piazza San Marco. $1 a bag for corn and the kids were covered in pigeons. We spent a delightful three days in Venice and returned to the Piazza many times to feed those poor, undernourished, winged rats.

We took the train to Salzburg on November 5, to enjoy a month of staying in one place. The house we had rented was on the side of the Monchsberg, the large mountain that forms the backdrop for the old town of Salzburg. We were just below the abbey where Maria Von Trapp spent her early years and a ten-minute walk from the center of the old town. It was a wonderful setting. Salzburg turned out to be a wonderful place for settling down for a little while after three solid months of moving around. Christopher sat down with our computer atlas and figured out we had traveled about 30,000 miles already on our trip.

Our days in Salzburg were very relaxed, getting up and having school in the morning and then exploring the town in the afternoons. We went to the Lake District east of Salzburg one day and saw the beautiful resort towns and mountains of the region. Unfortunately, most of the restaurants and the train to one of the mountain peaks we wanted to visit were closed for the winter season.

We did take the time to make a 3-day trip to Vienna (where Carrie and I spent the first few days of our honeymoon). It was the weekend before Thanksgiving, and the first weekend of the Christkindlmarkt, the traditional Christmas market, in Vienna. (It was also here that we discovered "gluhwein," a warm, spiced wine that you can buy in kiosks all over town. It became our drink of choice to stay warm throughout our shopping excursions (and any other time we could find it in Austria). We started loading up on ornaments and other Christmas decorations. We also visited the museum that houses the Hapsburg family jewels and other valuable souvenirs of the history of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. As I noted above, the crown jewels of England are spectacular, but we thought the Hapsburgs' collection was better.

We also made two trips to the Wien Statsoper, the Vienna Opera House. The first was to take Christopher to see the opera, Don Carlo. It was a nice production of a not-too-famous Verdi opera. We went back two nights later to see "Der Nussnacker," the Vienna State Ballet's version of The Nutcracker. One of our family's holiday traditions is to see this each year. It was a wonderful performance. The story line had a different twist to it than the version we are used to seeing in the U. S. Drosselmeyer is a bad guy in this version, taking his niece away while the prince tries to find them. The dancing was the best we have seen. Of course, like all good Viennese, we retired to the Sacher Hotel for coffee and some Sacher torte after the performance.

A highlight of our time in Salzburg was our German lessons. Carrie found a wonderful woman through the Austrian-American Society, Herta Gallee, who came to the house for about 9 one-hour sessions. She had a lot of imaginative games for the kids to help them learn vocabulary. The kids were much better than we were at hearing the sounds and remembering the words. It gave us all a little more confidence in trying out a few expressions during our time in Austria.

At Thanksgiving, we were lucky to have my sister, Mary, join us for the weekend. Luckily, she was able to find some "tinned pumpkin" in London for us to use in making pies. We were able to get a turkey at the local butcher (though she was amazed at how big a turkey we wanted - all of 15lbs.) We did discover that they don't sell pie pans, as we know them at home, so we settled on a "pumpkin tart." Carrie and Mary also led the crew in some heavy-duty Christmas shopping.

After Thanksgiving, Salzburg opened up an ice skating rink in the middle of the Mozartplatz. This became our venue for gym class for our last week in Salzburg. Gregory described it this way....

"I went ice skating four days in a row. The first day I fell down 10 times. The second time I fell nine times. The third time I fell eight times. The fourth time I fell seven times."

Brennan had her own take on ice skating:
"One day we went to an ice skating rink in the Mozartplatz. Gregory was just learning how to ice skate. I know how to ice skate because two times a year I go to an ice skating rink in Santa Barbara with my friend Carly and her mom and my mom."

On December 2, we packed up our rental car and sadly headed out of Salzburg to our new adventure in Seefeld, a village about 12 miles outside of Innsbruck in the Tyrolean region of western Austria. (A moment on baggage: We arrived in Salzburg with 8 bags and collected a few boxes from London plus some fall clothes sent from home and a few Christmas presents. We could barely get everything into our large minivan (think Suburban on steroids....the rabbits were back!!)

In Seefeld, we had rented a wonderful house about a half-mile from the center of the village. Julie and Fritz Jennewein and their family were wonderful hosts and made our stay even more comfortable. When we arrived, our first question was, "Where is the snow?" While last year at this time, Seefeld enjoyed a meter of snow on the ground; we were enjoying temperatures in the 40's and beautiful greenery set against the mountains.

We settled in to the house and spent the next few weeks doing schoolwork, exploring the town, preparing for Christmas, and praying for snow. The kids renamed one of the rooms in the house, "the torture chamber," because we banished them to do schoolwork there if they were being too rambunctious in the kitchen (our regular classroom).

We did find some skiing at a glacier about an hour away from Seefeld, so we were successful in strapping on the skis and finding our way down the slopes. Seefeld was the center for Nordic skiing at the 1976 Olympics and was full of plenty of things to do. They have a wonderful center with a swimming pool and ice-skating rink that we visited often.

My parents joined us for Christmas, and we had a wonderful family celebration. The kids had a great time seeing their grandparents. We made a trip back to Salzburg to see the Marionette Theater production of "The Nutcracker." The marionettes are so lifelike, we began to think we were watching a live performance.

We did get some snow before Christmas and the weather was colder so we were able to enjoy sledding and some skiing around the holidays. As Brennan described it:

"One day it started to snow. Christopher and I got dressed and got our jackets on and went outside. Christopher and I made a snowman. First, Christopher made a snowman. Then I made a snowman. That day was fun!!!"

New Year's Eve was quite a night as we learned the Austrians do like their fireworks. At midnight, we were treated to a 45-minute fireworks display on all sides of our house as all of the neighbors and people in the hotels in the area shot off their own collection of roman candles. It was like the 4th of July!!!!!!!

We were really able to take advantage of winter after Christmas as it finally began to snow a little more and the temperatures dropped enough so the ski areas could finally make snow all day. All three kids really improved their skiing abilities. They all tried snowboarding, too. Thank goodness for the helmets. After a day or two of that, they went back to skiing. It looks hard to learn. (No, I did not try it. I couldn't afford to get hurt with all the luggage to move....) I have a feeling they will be on snowboards again....

We had a number of other visitors while we were in Seefeld, all helping us keep in touch with what was happening at home. Our niece, Rachel Wilson, joined us a few days after Christmas for two weeks. Rachel is in her first year at Bryn Mawr and was taking a well-earned break from schoolwork and swimming practice. She had never been skiing before but was nearly paralleling down the hill after a few lessons. Her father was ecstatic because now he has someone to take skiing!! Rachel was a delight to have with us. Carrie and I both hope our kids will grow up to be as fun, well-rounded, and nice to be with as Rachel.

Christopher's friend from Santa Barbara, Alexander Kayfetz-Gaum, also joined us for a week after Christmas. It was great for Christopher to be able to catch up on all the inside scoop on what was happening back home. On the ski slopes, Alexander and Christopher were an even match, so they had a great time going off together down the slopes. Alexander is a nonstop talker, so we were never lacking for conversation....

Our friends, the Ghersens, allowed us to repay the hospitality they showed us in England by coming to visit for a week in January. We were delighted to see them and we all had a ball skiing together (after morning school lessons). (The Ghersens on Top of the World) The highlight of their stay was the discovery of "snow rafting." In the early evening, after the skiing had ended on the small hill near our house, a group brought out a snow raft. It is essentially a large river raft that is towed up to the top of the hill by a snowmobile. A skier is attached to the back by a rope and acts as the steering mechanism and the brake. The snowmobile operator pushes the raft off the top of the hill and down you go!!! Brennan and Gregory describe it better than I ever could:
Gregory: "Last night there was a big raft. There was a snowmobile that pulled the raft up the hill. When you go down the hill you go off two jumps. The first jump you go like three feet high. When we got to the bottom of the hill we said, "Again, again!" Mommy said OK. It was really fun!"

Brennan: "One night we went on a snow raft. Daddy said we could only go on the raft one time, but we ended up six times. There was a skier tied to stop you from falling in the little creek. The skier said there was a little jump, but it ended up to be a giant jump! A snowmobile pulled you up. It was really fun!!!"

Somehow a sled will never be the same...

Harriet Lyons, the teacher who put together our homeschooling program, also visited us in Seefeld. She was in London for other business and came over to check to see if our teaching was up to snuff and if the kids were keeping up with their work. It was a great relief for Carrie and me to find the kids were doing just fine. We both breathed a sigh of relief. Then we realized we still had another semester to go......

We finally began to pack up our stuff to prepare to leave Austria on January 20 for our next leg: to South America. Now, I realized we had accumulated some stuff during our nearly three-month stay in Austria, and that we did have Christmas gifts to send home, and ski clothes. Let's just say that I am on a first-name basis with everyone in the Seefeld Post Office and, should Austria wish to privatize this business, this would be a good year to do so. We did get it back down to one bag and backpack per person, plus TWO school bags with lots of extra books. I never realized how fast kids go through books (and how much they weigh)!

With some reluctance, but with an air of excitement in anticipating landing in a new continent, we left Seefeld and Austria by train on January 20. After spending a night in Frankfurt, we got on our first plane since returning from Egypt in October, and headed for Lima, Peru.