​Sherrill and I visited more than 60 countries and most of the United States during our 52 years of marriage.  This is number 33 of a series about our lives and travels. If you scroll down, you'll come to earlier posts in this series.  To start at the beginning of our marriage look at the Archives list in the sidebar and start with May, 2017. Older posts you'll find below that are a previous series about later travels.  

​            "Follow in the footsteps of medieval pilgrims?" I asked.
            "Of course."
            It would be fascinating, Sherrill convinced me, to travel the same ancient roads that the faithful trekked a thousand years ago.  And why did they do this?  Because they'd been told that if they prayed to the remains of saints preserved in the churches and abbeys along the route they'd be saved from the horrors of eternal damnation, which they believed in quite literally.  We didn't want to either walk or pray, but did want to see the Romanesque churches and the often spectacular reliquaries that held the bits and pieces of the saints.  The pilgrimage routes crisscrossed much of Europe, but the ones that interested us the most led from Paris to the great church of Santiago de Compostela in Spain.   
            Sherrill, ever resourceful, found a small group tour led by a pair of married professors that would follow one of those pilgrimage routes.  As it turned out, the group was just five, plus the husband and wife profs, and, although we traveled in a van, often we felt as if we'd ridden a time machine back to a feudal world.  
            We flew on TWA (soon to be extinct, although we didn't know it) to Paris, where we started our pilgrimage—as many of the original pilgrims did—at the Sainte-Chapelle on the Ile de la Cite', where the actual Crown of Thorns reputedly had ended up.  The light, I remember, seemed particularly beautiful that day, pouring through the sixteen colored glass windows of Sainte-Chapelle onto our little band of travelers.  The walls around us might have been prisms capturing all the light in the universe.  

​            Our journey, we learned, would combine parts of several of the medieval routes that started at different towns in France and then merged as they entered Spain.  One of the original starting points was the little hilltop town of Vezelay, with the spectacular Romanesque Church of the Madeleine, which reputedly housed the bones of St. Mary Magdalene.  Whether or not the church's relics were authentic, the carvings of the Last Judgment over the door—crowded with sinners being tortured by Satan's troops—made it an appropriate place to begin our pilgrimage.  

​            "They loved all this."  Sherrill gazed up at the fiendish devils energetically tormenting the sinners.  "Didn't they?"
            She was right: the Church of the Middle Ages delighted in showing the horrible punishments waiting for the damned.  The Last Judgment carvings on the cathedral at our next stop in Autun were even more violent, with vast numbers of the damned being clawed, chewed on, and pulled apart by demons.  As we traveled from one church to another, we developed a new appreciation for the wicked imaginations and great craftsmanship of medieval sculptors.  Only the saints, it seemed, were worthy of sympathy and respect.  
            Sherrill was eager to visit the great abbey at Cluny, the world's largest and richest church until St. Peter's in Rome was built, and also famous for once housing the most important manuscript library in Europe.  Most of the abbey, however, was destroyed during the French Revolution and the surviving manuscripts scattered.  Only one of its eight great towers still stood, but its remains were impressive, even so.  

​            The married profs were as low key and pleasant as they were knowledgeable.  They shared what they knew, didn't trouble us with long lectures, but were happy to answer questions.  The earthen-hued houses and buildings, even the church, of our next stop in the village of Conques seemed to have emerged from the rocky earth of the steep hillsides.  As with many of the villages we visited, we encountered few cars there.  The local people were used to walking on their narrow, twisting streets.  Whenever we met them, carrying their shopping baskets, they smiled sympathetically as we stumbled over the cobblestones. 

​            In Conques, Sherrill was able to add quite a few saints to her reliquary list.  The pilgrimage route had come through there, in fact, because of this church's reliquary collection, and especially because of the bejeweled, gilded reliquary that held the remains of the much loved St. Foy, a young girl tortured to death over a red-hot brazier by the Romans because she refused to renounce her faith.  The Romanesque church in the center of the little hillside town, although not huge, was one of our favorites on the trip.  We especially admired the elaborately carved scenes above the western doors: 124 very expressive figures, most of them hideous devils tormenting the damned, eating their brains, ripping out their tongues with meat hooks, roasting them, and flaying them alive. 

​            As we explored these medieval villages built of weathered local stone we began to look at the past with different eyes.  Sometimes, gray clouds swept in to darken the skies, softening the scene, creating shadows that suggested the patina of the centuries.  Other times, we encountered families of pigeons in residence, refusing to respect either the age or the seriousness of the carvings.
            Wouldn't it be nice to live here, where it's unspoiled and full of history? I asked Sherrill as we  wandered through Conques. 
            "There you go again," she said.  "You're such a romantic.  Maybe the people here don't love it so much and would like to get away, but can't afford it."
            "I still think it's beautiful." 
            She patted me on the back.  "Never mind."  

​            A day or two later, we continued on to the city of Cahors, with its fine medieval bridge and cathedral and then on to the abbey at Moissac, where we found even more impressive carvings.  Leaving the countryside behind us, we explored the modern city of Toulouse, which once was a crossroads for the pilgrimage routes.  The Basilica of St. Sernim, the largest Romanesque church in Europe, was crowded with relics, even—according to legend—the head of St. Thomas Aquinas, although we didn't see it.  The glittering silver and gold reliquaries with their histories of working miracles sat there behind glass, placidly ready to perform still more wonders.  

​            We detoured for a day in the fortified medieval French town of Carcassonne.  However, it seemed to us that it had been restored in the nineteenth century until it became more a representation of the Medieval world than the real thing.  It might have been built by Cecil B. DeMille for his fanciful movie epic The Crusades, but we still enjoyed exploring it—not that we would've wanted to live there in the old days.  If nothing else, the plumbing would've been unpleasant.
            Finally, we drove into the Pyrenees and through the historic pass where the French pilgrimage routes crossed into Spain, where we stopped at Pamplona, famous now, of course, for the annual running of the bulls and The Sun Also Rises. 
            That first evening, since we'd been riding much of the day, Sherrill and I decided to go for a stroll.  Our hotel stood isolated on a triangular island bordered by busy streets, the new city across one and the old city across another.  In the newer part of town, a few blocks away, we came to the bull ring and a rectangular monument topped with Ernest Hemingway's bearded head.  Eventually, we wandered over to the older, more picturesque city, where we were surprised to discover large piles of garbage, broken furniture, and even mattresses, piled on corners at the intersections.  

​            That night, in our hotel room, we heard voices and clattering noise from the streets below and saw the glow of fires burning.  In the morning, when I went out for a walk, I discovered that the triangular block with our hotel was surrounded by empty parked buses, like a circle of covered wagons in an old western movie.  Continuing into the old city, I saw that all those heaps of mattresses, broken furniture, and garbage now were scattered ash heaps, still smoldering.  Several people I asked about it agreed that it had been some kind of symbolic gesture by Basque separatists.  

​            Following the Way of St. James (or Santiago), our van crossed the Puente de la Reina, a medieval bridge where several pilgrimage routes joined on their way to Santiago de Campostela.  Eventually, we reached the ancient crossroads city of Burgos, once home of the legendary El Cid—yet another heroic figure once played by steel-jawed Charlton Heston.  However, we were more interested in the magnificent cathedral and nearby monastery, both rich with carved sculptures.
            While staying in Burgos, we went out each evening to join the paseo, when families, couples, and groups (especially teenagers) strolled along the sidewalks and pedestrian streets, shopping, gossiping, flirting, and then, when the hour was late enough, stopping someplace to dine.  We saw no cars trying to "drag main," such we'd seen in California when we were young, just this tradition that engaged the whole community from babies to grandparents and probably great grandparents.  

            After a few more days visiting churches and shrines and their reliquaries, we reached the great pilgrimage goal of Santiago de Compostela, where we stayed in a hostel founded in 1501 by Ferdinand and Isabella for Santiago pilgrims.  Tradition says that the huge cathedral, architecturally a blending of Romanesque and Baroque, was built over the tomb of St. James, one of Jesus' Apostles.  Day after day, as we'd followed the pilgrims' route across northern Spain, we'd seen the medieval markers with his scallop shell emblem along the way.  Sometimes, especially when gazing at the gory Last Judgment carvings, we felt as if we might've been wandering across the dark landscape of Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal, watching plague victims dancing to their deaths behind the black-hooded figure of Death and knowing very well that if it ever came down to a game of chess with Death we'd never have a chance of winning.  No one ever did.   
To be continued....
 

            If you enjoy these posts, why not explore the rest of my website, too? Just click on the buttons at the top of the page and discover where they take you—including to several complete short stories and excerpts from my novels.  Please pass them on to anybody else you think might enjoy them. 
            You also might enjoy reading the new bargain-priced e-book of my novel, The Night Action.  It has been called the last great novel of an past era.  "The novel careens around the night spots of San Francisco's North Beach and the words seem to fly off the page in the style of Tom Wolfe or the lyrics of Tom Waits."  The book is available at Amazon and Barnes and Noble.      Click on the title for the link.  Or click HERE. 
​

​Sherrill and I visited more than 60 countries and most of the United States during our 52 years of marriage.  This is number 32 of a series about our lives and travels. If you scroll down, you'll come to earlier posts in this series.  To start at the beginning of our marriage look at the Archives list in the sidebar and start with May, 2017. Older posts you'll find below that are a previous series about later travels.  

​            "100 Peoples Invite You to the Soviet Union," proclaimed our Intourist brochure.  Inside, those smiling peoples from Moscow to Tashkent and Siberia, from Leningrad to Kiev and Tallinn, beamed at us, often in their colorful local costumes.  On this trip, we visited only part of this vast conglomeration of once separate countries and in the areas we did see the people were not always grinning and seldom wore costumes, but as we traveled we often were reminded that this was the land where Ivan the Terrible and the Peter the Great and Catherine who was both Terrible and Great once ruled, where those proud unyielding autocrats, the Romanoffs, forfeited their lives, and where Lenin still slept, along with the millions of Uncle Joe Stalin's victims. 
            Before we reached Moscow, Cesar stopped the coach at a roadside restaurant so our guide could call Intourist—pre-cell phones.  We could see Marina through the window having an agitated conversation on the telephone.  Finally, she returned to the bus.  As Cesar drove on to Moscow, she explained what had happened. 
            "They wanted to put you in the Hotel Belgrade, an old dump.  I've seen rats there!  Finally, they agreed to another hotel, new and modern.  Unfortunately, all the rooms are singles.  That's because it's a convention center where the Party sends members for advanced training.  It's very nice—even if husbands and wives will be in separate rooms." 

​Cesar drove us to a gated complex in an outlying Moscow neighborhood.  Fortunately, we discovered, it was near a Metro line.  The Hotel Yugo-Zapad was surprisingly modern: a pair of high-rises with a lower, sprawling, conference center where we'd eat, plus tennis courts and pools (not open to us).  Each time we entered the dining area, we walked past a white marble statue of a pensive seated Lenin.  I wanted to take Sherrill's photograph sitting on his knee, but she declined the honor.
            During our free time, we took the Metro back and forth to the center of town, usually to Red Square or the picturesque Arbat neighborhood—the North Beach or Greenwich Village of Moscow.  The stations—one of Stalin's better legacies—were amazingly grand and ornate, with arched, tiled ceilings, fancy columns, sculptured plasterwork, and terrifyingly deep and fast escalators.  To avoid getting lost, since we couldn't read Cyrillic, we identified the names of the stations, counted the letters and memorized the first and last letters.  Somehow, we survived and got where we wanted.   

​            Our included Intourist meals were adequate, but skimpy on fruits and vegetables.  And we each were given one small cup of coffee at the hotel breakfast—no refills.  We discovered a family of Mormons in the group, so we took turns sitting next to them and begging for their coffee allotment.  Whenever we had a chance to duck into a food shop or saw a truck by the roadside, we hurried over to try to buy whatever fresh fruit it might have.  One day, it was only apricots, some ripe, others not, but the group devoured all of them.
            The henna-haired woman at this shop recited in broken English the Odyssey of her woes, no money, no fruit to sell most of the time and when she did get some it often was rotten, a lazy husband who usually was drunk on vodka, kids who ran off instead of helping her, and on and on.  Finally, I bought a small bag of the apricots, overpaying her because I felt she'd earned it with her performance.  

​            Sherrill and I preferred traveling independently, but group travel like this could be entertaining.  A school principal in our group was arrested in Red Square.  Marina had warned us that it was illegal to exchange currency on the street, but a young Russian approached him with an offer he couldn't refuse.  As they were making the exchange, the principal held up the notes to inspect in the sunlight, because we'd been warned that Bulgaria also uses the Cyrillic alphabet.  Instantly, three plain-clothed cops nabbed both men and took them to a nearby police station.  They called our hotel for the principal, but beat up the young Russian and put him in a cell.  Eventually, Marina rescued her American charge, but the young man's fate was unknown.  
            What did the principal want to do with the money?  Buy things?  But there wasn't much to buy in this country.  Russian clothes?  His were much better than any he could purchase here.  How many cute Russian nesting dolls could he need?  Did he simply like to shop?
            "In Red Square!"  Sherrill shook her head.  "I never thought he was very bright, but holding up a bill like that in Red Square!  Poor dope." 
            "It's the kid I feel sorry for."
            Mile after mile of tall, slender birch trees flickered past under a sky of blinding clarity, the horizontal markings on their black and white bark leaping from one to another as we sped past on our way to the ancient walled city of Novgorod.  We might have been in an old black and white Russian movie, fleeing the Czar's troops.  From time to time, we glimpsed ornately painted wooden cottages and small villages among the trees.  We crossed the mighty Volga and spent the night in Novgorod, our hotel on a hill, wedged among old wooden houses, some unpainted.  We definitely had slipped into an Eisenstein movie, I told Sherrill.
            "Don't get carried away," she warned me.  "You haven't had dinner, yet." 
            The days were long, now, and the nights were over in moments, but that gave us more daylight to enjoy the splendors of Leningrad.  The light seemed to glow on the many canals that sliced through the city and off the walls of the palaces above them, but it was hard for us to be sure of the time of day.  We spent many happy and exhausting hours in the vast Hermitage palace museum, and even then couldn't see all the paintings and other treasures that we would've liked to have studied, and, of course, the palace, itself, was worth exploring. 
            "Can you believe it?"
            Sherrill indicated the wide open windows, letting the gritty city air into the galleries where masterpieces from before the Renaissance to the Impressionists and after hung naked on the walls.  In each large room, an old babushka sat on a chair in a corner, knitting or dozing, supposedly guarding the treasures around her, but not one of them would've noticed if we'd walked out with armloads of paintings—and what would they have done about it, anyway?   

​            We also visited the restored Winter Palace next door, built by Peter the Great, expanded and filled with art by Catherine the Great, damaged during the revolution, and almost destroyed during the 872 day Nazi siege of Leningrad, during which more than a million civilians died, most from starvation.  The Intourist guide proudly explained that after the War, the Russian government began an aggressive program of accurate restoration of architectural masterpieces, using authentic materials and methods.  We discovered the same thing when we visited the beautiful Palladian style Pavlosk palace further into the countryside. 
            "This is our heritage," the guide told us.  "It is important for us to preserve it." 
            We were aware, now, as we toured Leningrad, of how much restoration work must have been here done after the War, although they didn't bother with Minsk and other cities we visited: street after street and canal after canal, lined with palaces and other buildings, including several palaces that Catherine gave one of her lovers, Count Potemkin. 
            In a small park across from our Leningrad hotel, stood one of the many monuments we saw throughout the Soviet Union to the Great Patriotic War, as they called World War II.  One day, Sherrill and I noticed that a large crowd had gathered in the park.  When we walked over to investigate, we discovered that a man was selling hundreds of pairs of white athletic socks from a suitcase to excited customers.  
            After several days in Leningrad, our group was treated to what Marina called a "farewell banquet."  The meal was of many courses and nicely served, including one glass of sparkling Romanian wine for each of us and such delicacies as caviar, but the courses nevertheless were small. 
            The next day, Cesar and Marina drove us though another forest and across the border into Finland and its capital city, Helsinki.  Passing the harbor on our way to our hotel, we were astonished to see a huge fruit and vegetable market: scores of tables piled high with produce, vegetables and fruit, strawberries even falling onto the pavement.
            "Wait!" we called to Cesar.  "Stop!  We need to buy this stuff.  Stop!"  

​            
To be continued....
            If you enjoy these posts, please pass them on to anybody else you think might enjoy them.  And why not explore the rest of my website, too? Just click on the buttons at the top of the page and discover where they take you—including to several complete short stories and excerpts from my novels.  

​Sherrill and I visited more than 60 countries and most of the United States during our 52 years of marriage.  This is number 31 of a series about our lives and travels. If you scroll down, you'll come to earlier posts in this series.  To start at the beginning of our marriage look at the Archives list in the sidebar and start with May, 2017. Older posts you'll find below that are a previous series about later travels.  

​          Sherrill was more adventurous than many people realized.  She found our next trip: through the Iron Curtain to the Soviet Union and several of its satellites while they all were still tied together, although we learned that those bonds were starting to fray and come apart.

            We couldn't travel there independently because all trips had to be organized and controlled by the Soviet Intourist agency, but Sherrill discovered a British company that was working with Intourist.  This would be a chance to get farther behind the Iron Curtain, she pointed out, even if we couldn't push it aside, ourselves. 

​            The Communists were hungry for Western currency, so the group was welcome in their world, as long as we played by their rules.  Getting out, we'd learn, was not so simple.  Our entry was East Berlin.  The hotel that Intourist put us in, the sprawling new Palast, swollen with bulgy copper-hued windows, looked like a massive reptile lounging on the river Spree, its sleepy eyes focused on the vast desert of Alexanderplatz nearby.  Inside, despite its pretensions to luxury, it was dark and gloomy, partly because of the heaviness of the furniture and the low wattage of all the lights.
            "They have no taste," Sherrill whispered to me.  "How could they not know how ugly this place is?"
            "Worse than that," I countered, peering over her shoulder around the dusty acreage of the lobby, past the fake leather chairs at the middle-aged bellboys and clerks shuffling in the shadows, to the little hard currency shop in one of the corners.  "I feel like I'm being watched all the time." 
            "You don't need to be paranoid, sweetie.  Losing your mind right now is not a good idea."  

​            Much later, years after unification, I learned that Stasi officers (who worked with the Soviet KGB) really had used cameras and microphones to watch the lobby, elevators, corridors, even some rooms.  Whatever our suspicions, we didn't actually know any of that at the time.  The Palast also, I found out, finally was torn down because it was filled with asbestos.  At least, the hotel was in a good location.  We could stroll to the huge Baroque cathedral and the neoclassic buildings on Museum Island, including the Pergamon Museum famous for the ancient altar from Turkey, all of them dark with grime and dirt, as well as still pock-marked with bullet holes from World War II.  Except for two black limousines that raced past once, the only cars we saw were rusty, aged Ladas, usually coughing smoke.       ​                                   

​            Sherrill and I walked over to Alexanderplatz.  The display windows in the recently built department stores along the rim of the great square were almost empty, but we took an elevator to the bulb at the top of the Communications Tower in the center, also known as the "skewered olive."  We never would have guessed that before the War this vast square was the unsleeping heart of old Berlin.  As we ascended in the elevator, Sherrill nodded toward the pregnant elevator operator, who kept tugging the front of her ill-fitting jacket over the dingy slip that covered her swollen belly.  Not once did she look at us.  At the top, we gazed down on the giant concrete snake of the Wall and the no-man's land hugging its side: It looked  as if it already had started devouring East Berlin and was hungrily eyeing the Western sector.  

​            Checkpoint Charlie and the capitalist glories of West Berlin were our agenda after several days exploring the Eastern city.  Marina, our guide, a fortyish Polish-born British citizen who spoke five languages, was experienced at dealing with Communist bureaucracy. 
            "If we're lucky, we'll get through in under an hour," she told us from the front of the bus, standing behind our diminutive Belgian driver, Cesar, as he steered the Mercedes coach through the erratic East Berlin traffic.  "They go over the bus very carefully.  Once, it took us two hours.  They come on board, look at your passport and match the picture to you.  Mostly, they'll search the bus to make sure no East German is doing a Houdini to escape to the Western zone.  Cesar has been through this before."  She peered through the wide front windows at the little house and gate of the Friedrichstrasse border crossing.  "We have the big German woman," she announced.  "Don't try to be friendly.  It'll make her suspicious."  
            A uniformed guard rolled over a steel-framed mobile staircase and scrambled up to survey the top of the coach.  Simultaneously, a large mirror was slid beneath so that another guard could inspect its underside.  The humorless female guard, standing like a Wagnerian soprano in her uniform and heavy shoes, exchanged terse remarks with Marina, then plodded down the aisle, demanding passports.  It seemed like a joke, but none of us dared smile.  A third guard, with Cesar's assistance, was searching the engine section at the rear of the bus, luggage compartments on the sides, and even the cooler chest where drinks were kept.  Finally, Brunhilde growled at Marina, who stepped down off the coach with her.   
             "You passed," Marina told us when she was back on the bus.  "And Cesar and the bus passed,"  She looked at her watch,  "Only forty-five minutes."
            The bus paused after we were through so we could take pictures, then continued on, stopping at the Brandenburg Gate with the Wall—its skin a chaos of graffiti on this side—hiding part of it, and then at the burned remains of the Reichstag building, once the center of the German government, still not restored after many years.  Eventually, we came to a boulevard lined with sleek new buildings, on one of which a Mercedes logo revolved.  Cesar tucked the coach into a parking place between the Zoo train station and the Kurfurstendamm.  

​            Everyone, Marina told us, was free to explore, shop, visit cafes, even go to the zoo.  Sherrill and I asked Marina to get us a taxi to go to an art museum in a different neighborhood while the others were shopping.   We promised to be back in time to board the coach to return to East Berlin and our wonderful hotel.
            "I can't believe it!" Sherrill indicated a large group of German students at the museum.
            It was true, though: they were excited about an exhibit of hand-woven baskets and other artifacts made by California Indians, identical to those we'd studied in grammar school.
                                                   *            *           *

​            The drive from East Berlin and then across Poland to Warsaw was neither picturesque nor interesting, just long.  We assumed that the route must have been required by the Communists, since there certainly was nothing much to see.  The Hotel Forum in Warsaw was a Communist version of a high-rise, but a great step up from the Palast in East Berlin.  Across a wide square opposite stood the ugliest building Sherrill and I had ever seen.  The favorite architectural style of Uncle Joe Stalin, we were told: stacked layers as on a wedding cake rising to preposterous height, each bulky level beautified with concrete filigree and other architectural gewgaws.  At least one building like it seemed to be required in every major Communist city. 
            "It's considered the best address in Warsaw," Marina told us, "because then you don't have to look at it."  

​            The next day, as Sherrill and I were exploring the crumbling streets and sidewalks on our own, we saw several large posters with a black and white photograph of lanky Gary Cooper  striding forward in High Noon.  Painted behind him and printed on a badge on his vest were the red letters "Solidarnosc"—"Solidarity."  The showdown between the workers, led by Lech Walesa, and the Polish Communist bosses was rapidly approaching.  There seemed to be no doubt that the Poles were restless under their Soviet "masters" and intended to break free.  As we traveled further behind the Iron Curtain, we began to see signs that throughout this Soviet "Union" people craved a better life and their own identities as separate nations.

​            Walking on Warsaw's broken streets and sidewalks was a challenge. Suddenly, Sherrill fell against me, falling almost onto her knees.  She'd stepped into a deep hole in the sidewalk.  Despite the pain, she said that she didn't think it was broken, just a bad sprain.  Back at the hotel, I called down from our room asking for ice for the pain and swelling.  A while later, someone brought up a small bucket filled with tiny ice cubes. 
            I remembered from movies made in Warsaw after World War II by Polish director Andrzej Wajda how devastated the city was, not a whole building left standing.  Since then, the main square in the historic city had been reconstructed using old paintings and photographs as guides, but it looked as fake as a stage set.  When we walked into a few of the buildings, we saw that their interiors had no relation to their exteriors.  We stopped at the site of the notorious Warsaw Ghetto, where a huge monument had been built in 1948 to honor the Ghetto uprising of the Jewish partisans against the German military occupying the city.  One side represented the heroic Jewish rebels, the other the tragic parade of Jewish families to their fate, one carrying a Torah.

            Driving through Minsk a few days later, it was obvious that the city—now capital of Belarus, then part of the Soviet Union—also had been completely destroyed during the War and then rebuilt in the sterile Communist style.  Block after block of austere apartment buildings had been constructed after the War to provide needed housing and nothing had improved since then.  A day later, we discovered that not much of pre-War Smolensk was left, either.  Intourist put us in a cheap hotel on the edge of town, easily the filthiest place Sherrill and I had ever stayed.  Walking across the dining room, our shoes crunched on the grit and we saw herds of dust bunnies frolicking under the tables and chairs.  However, the local Russian guide was very good.  
            A personable young woman in her late twenties, she understood that we weren't too happy and offered to take anyone who wanted to go with her on a walk that evening and chat with us.  Sherrill and I and a few others decided that it had to be better than sitting around in that hotel.  As we strolled on almost deserted streets, she answered questions about the lives that she and her friends led.  Shortly before leaving home, Sherrill and I had watched one of the few new Soviet movies to get to the United States, Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears, which followed the lives and fortunes of three young women, their relations with men (all of whom turned out to be drunks), and their careers.  Judging from this film, the life of a woman in the Soviet Union wasn't easy.  Even the life of the most successful of the trio, who became an engineer, looked pretty Spartan to us—and that was after she dumped her abusive drunkard husband.
            "Does the movie give an accurate picture of life over here?" I asked.
            "Ah," she replied.  "I love that movie.  All my friends love it, too."
            Another lesson from those long days on the road through the Soviet Union was that it was a very large sprawling, carelessly stitched together, quilt of a country.  
            "It's like driving over and over again across central Canada," Sherrill commented, "but not as exciting."   
To be continued....

If you enjoy these posts, why not explore the rest of my website, too? Just click on the buttons at the top of the page and discover where they take you—including to several complete short stories and excerpts from my novels.  Please pass them on to anybody else you think might enjoy them.  
​

Sherrill and I visited more than 60 countries and most of the United States during our 52 years of marriage.  This is number 30 of a series about our lives and travels. If you scroll down, you'll come to earlier posts in this series.  To start at the beginning of our marriage look at the Archives list in the sidebar and start with May, 2017. Older posts you'll find below that are a previous series about later travels.
​

​        We learned a lot that first time in Communist Europe, lessons that we carried with us.  The people didn't have much and were desperate and often afraid, but were helpful and kind.  We remembered the stranger who came over to rescue us at the Prague train station and others we met along the way.  We also couldn't forget the violence we witnessed from our hotel window.  Even knowing that they probably were being spied on, people we met were gracious and tried to be honest with us.  Now, we were emerging from that gray world with its paranoid fears, but it gave us a perspective that we didn't have before. 
            Vienna:  the name was filled with history, romance, beauty, glamour.  So much to see, do, and experience.  A full day in the Kunsthistorisches art history museum, I told Sherrill—several days, maybe.  And the Belvedere museum—all those Klimt, Shiele, and Kokoschka paintings!  And the Schonbrunn  Palace and.... 

​            "How many weeks are we staying here?" Sherrill interrupted me.  "Or is it months?
            We started with the museums, but also were drawn into the city beyond, from time to time stopping at Vienna's famous cafes and coffee houses.  Good coffee and pastry (mit schlag) can do a lot to revive sore feet.  We checked out the massive Opera House, restored since the War, and explored St. Stephen's Cathedral—where we saw St. Valentine's sarcophagus and several reliquaries with the remains of saints collected over the centuries.  One day, we lunched in the basement restaurant of the neo-gothic Rathaus—city hall—and chatted with locals at the next table who told us not to miss the Vienna Woods. 

​            "We Austrians love nature," the suntanned middle-aged woman told us and her companion agreed.  
            We took their advice and bussed out to see the forest that inspired Strauss and sheltered the Mayerling tragedy. It's all too easy to feel lost and vulnerable in a strange place, no matter how much you've studied in advance, when you don't know the language or customs.  You don't want to be rude or thoughtless or just another thick-headed tourist.  However, people like this couple made us feel less like strangers and more like friends.
            Sherrill couldn't miss Freud's home and I wanted to ride the enormous nineteenth-century Ferris wheel in which Orson Welles revealed his evil side in The Third Man, so of course we did both. 
            Number 19 Berggasse looked the same as the other nineteenth century buildings in the neighborhood, but in one of its apartments Sigmund Freud had lived, received patients, and written his books.  Back then, the apartment still was remarkably like when he was there, bookcases jammed full; cabinets, desks, and tables crowded with his collections; paintings, photographs, and drawings covering the walls; and a tall tile-covered stove in one corner.  We worked our way slowly through the old-fashioned rooms, studying the photographs, the bookcases, even the couch where his patients once reclined.  We could imagine the doctor's ideas evolving in these rooms as he talked with the men and women who came to him for help.
            Eventually, we made our way to the Prater and the Ferris wheel.
            "In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias," I recited, as the giant wheel slowly turned, the park sliding past far below us, "they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance."  Sherrill gave me a patient, long-suffering look, but didn't interrupt.  "In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace -- and what did that produce?  The cuckoo clock."
             Sherrill patted me on the cheek.  "That's okay, dear.  Orson Welles, you're not."

​            She once wanted to be an architect and always retained her love of design and decorating.  We hiked along part of the Ringstrasse, the broad boulevard that replaced the old city walls that once encircled the city, lined with parks and handsome buildings, and where Freud took almost daily walks.  We strolled through the city, gazing at the Baroque buildings and their Art Nouveau neighbors with their lavish, organic embellishments and extravagant sculptures over, under, and around windows, doorways, and eaves.  The elegantly severe buildings from the Secessionist period, however, were more to Sherrill's taste.
            "Too bad you need to be good at math," she sighed, "to be an architect."
            Sherrill took me to the Schonbrunn Palace gardens and the 1881 Palm House, the largest greenhouse in Europe.  We hiked up and down winding flower-adorned metal staircases and through the huge glass rooms holding more than four thousand plant species, including a 350 year-old olive tree.  Occasionally, she made a note about a plant that intrigued her.
            "I don't think that would fit in our house--or garden," I murmured once.
            "Don't worry about it.  It'll be okay." 

​            When she was planning the trip, she'd told me that since we'd be so close to Salzburg we might as well go there, too.  As she predicted, a train got us there in almost no time and the scenery along the way wasn't bad, either.
            The old city, itself, was a delight to stroll in, despite the crowds, but our main objective like almost everybody else was to visit the buildings where Mozart was born and lived.  As is often the case, we were surprised by how small the rooms were.  The composer—along with the wildly popular musical and movie The Sound of Music—had transformed the town of his birth into a money machine.  Mozart chocolate balls, Mozart rubber ducks, Mozart ice cream, and then the Trapp family: the opportunities to spend seemed endless.

​            "Since Salzburg is so close to Germany...," Sherrill also had pointed out before we left home.
            "We might as well...?"
            "Go on to Munich," she'd finished.  So we did.
​
           We didn't ignore the splendid art museums in Munich, but the big event while we were there turned out to be the annual Oktoberfest.  Essentially a city within a city, devoted to beer, food, and insane entertainments, with block after block of large tents jammed with people, sizzling meat, and varieties of beer.  Hefty barmaids pushed and shoved their way through the crowds in the tents, astonishing numbers of foaming beer mugs held against their chests by the strength of their arms.  At one point, the surging crowd in one of the tents pulled Sherrill and me apart, taking us further and further away from each other until we couldn't see each other.  Finally, struggling back, I found her clinging to one of the sturdy posts holding up the tent. 
            "And I don't even like beer!" she groaned.

            After this mad time at the Oktoberfest, we continued the madness the next day with a tour of Mad King Ludwig's castles, which Sherrill had wanted to visit for years.  Neuschwanstein was a fairytale castle, alright, though parts of it flirted with the stuff of nightmares.  Linderhof Palace was less insane, but just as extravagant in its own way.  Then we rode a bus—on another of those roads that Sherrill would have hated driving up—to Hitler's Eagle's Nest retreat atop a rocky peak gazing over much of Bavaria.  We could picture Adolf and Eva  Braun up there, host and hostess to the privileged few.  Our next trip, we'd be going back behind the Iron Curtain, deeper than ever before, also a world of absolute dictators.
​
To be continued.... 
​

 If you enjoy these posts, why not explore the rest of my website, too? Just click on the buttons at the top of the page and discover where they take you—including to several complete short stories and excerpts from my novels.  Please pass them on to anybody else you think might enjoy them.