I really can't remember the beginning. I know from the news reels at the end of the year 2008 that there was a lot of bad weather in January and February. I know from my job where I teach high school that there was tension in the air as we entered the last few months of classes in our old building and prepared for the move to a brand new school. I know that up until May of 2008 that aside from the packing at the school and the ending of the school year, everything was pretty much like the previous years -- until June. I have been traveling to Europe with high school students, their parents and others since I started teaching in 1994. The only exception to that is the year my father died, in 2000. I took that summer after his death off to help my sisters with my mother. Before teaching high school I served in the USAF for 27 years and travelled with the military for al those years. But this summer started a great trip. We left in early June with the tour company I have been using all these years but this time the trip also included my wife and two of my youngest daughters. My youngest had travelled with me a few years before. She was born while I was stationed in Italy. A Naples Italy baby. She was in her last couple of months of college working on a bachelors degree in German and as part of her studies she would be spending part of the summer in Austria in class at a college in Klogenfurt Austria. My other daughter who joined us, Rebecca, had recently graduated from Boston College with her Master's in Criminal Justice and along with my wife and my sister and several friends we started a regular tour with the tour company for ten days and then we stayed behind in Europe to travel.
The first part of our journey with friends and family was a trip from Paris through Switzerland into Austria then to Munich Germany and ended with an overnight train trip to Berlin. The tour was great as most all of our tours with this company had been, EF Tours, with the possible exception of two issues. The first was that due to the fact that the group I organized was spread across the map as far as departure cities were concerned, I opted to leave earlier than everyone so I could meet them at the airport in Paris. This was especially important for those first time travelers to met someone they know and recognize as they got off the plane in a foreign country. So when I left from Nashville Tennessee early in the morning for Paris it was with the assumption that we would all arrive within a few hours of each other but that was not to be. The group from NYC got in first on time and then the group from Syracuse was just an hour or so late but the Nashville group, my family and some students from the school did not get in until relatively late in the day. My wife sat next to a woman who spent the majority of the flight in the bathroom. Unfortunately the reason this woman spent all this time in the bathroom is she must of had a virus or stomach flu that decided to visit my wife while on the Metro subway system. She must have looked like a drunk huddled in the corner tossing her last meal. We did not go on the tour to Montre Mare with the rest of the group simply because she was too weak to walk and was still very ill. When we made it back to the hotel she spent that night and the entire next day as the rest of us traveled and toured Paris, in bed.
The tour itself was great. Our first stop after Paris put us in Innsbruck. Having been there several times I told everyone how peaceful and beautiful the city was -- what a surprise to find it in the middle of party chaos as the world soccer games were going on and the entire city was celebrating with a gigantic party. Spanish celebrators ran through the streets, beer flowed, and music blared from bands everywhere. It was a blast and the parties followed us from Switzerland to Vienna Austria, to Munich Germany and then finaly to Berlin with the tour. Our last day with the tour group was a great one in Berlin but we were anxious to begin our own part of the summer. As we left the group at the airport and made our way downtown to pickup a rental vehicle we were a mixture of excited and scared! It had been since 1994 when we were last in Europe by ourselves and not with a group tour. We had retired from a very small NATO installation in Northern Germany just above Aachen called Geilenkirchen NATO Airbase, named after the adjoining town. We lived there in a small German farmhouse from 1990 to 1994 and we all felt that it was some of the best years of our lives. The small town, the feeling of community, the heritage of the people and the community, the environmental awareness of the people and the friendliness were all things we loved about living there. I rode a bike back and forth daily to work, a four and a half mile trip each way that kept me fit and healthy the entire time we lived there. Without television as a family of six we spent our evenings and weekends riding bikes, visiting historical sites and traveling the country. Nestled at the apex of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany our home was located in the best place for us as a family. We wanted to go back. While our daughter Christina and son James could no
[*]t come on this trip, the rest of us carried them with us in our thoughts as we began our journey home.
