Monday, October 11, 2021: Tracey and I ordered an Uber to pick us up at 11:30 am to take us to the airport. The flight to Dulles was miserable because we were packed into our seats on a very small plane. United Airlines must have a committee whose whole purpose is to think up new ideas on how to make air travel as uncomfortable as possible. In our case, there was a speaker right over our heads, with the volume up as loud as it could go, and Tracey and I jumped in shock at every announcement. The trans-Atlantic flight was nice because we sprung for Economy Plus tickets so we had an additional six inches of sitting room. Lufthansa gave us earphones so I watched a couple of movies on our eight hour flight. Still, it was hard to sit that long and, by the time we arrived in Bucharest, Tracey and I had been up for twenty hours. I couldn’t concentrate on reading or watching the movies and drifted in and out of consciousness.
Tuesday, October 12, Romania: Our fight landed in Munich but, because there were so few people flying to Bucharest, we had to walk on the tarmac to our plane and then climb the stairs to gain entrance. Finally, we arrived at our hotel at 1:30 pm. The best way to acclimate yourself to European time is to get on their schedule immediately and do not fall asleep in the afternoon. Try as I may, I couldn’t follow that rule and fell asleep for an hour. A lot of the 90 people from U of L who went on this trip socialized in the hotel lounge so I did my best to introduce myself to as many people as possible before our buffet dinner.
Wednesday, October 13, Bucharest: We spent the morning at the Casa Ceausescu. The Romanian dictator was overthrown in 1989 but spent his 25 years in power living in the house which is now a museum. Our tour included a look at the Italian statues that had been gifted to Ceausescu; heads of state and powerful people gave him the statues to remind visitors of Romania’s link to Ancient Rome and the Italian Renaissance. In an interesting side note, our guide said that when the Ceaucescus were assassinated, the wife had many more bullet holes in her body because she was even more hated than her husband.
In the afternoon we toured Dracula’s (Vlad the Impaler) tomb at the Snagov Monastery. The structure was built in 1407. The Byzantium art on the walls, and the Romanesque architecture, was beautiful and it looked just like a picture from a history book. If we had more time then I would have liked to have spent more time in this space because I wanted to take in all of the frescoes from our ancient past. It was a privilege to be at this monastery and our visit was one of the many unexpected pleasures from our Eastern European trip.
Thursday, October 14, Bucharest: We began our day at the Palace of the Parliament. Ceausescu built this massive structure as a monument to himself and completed ninety percent of it before he was assassinated. In order to make room for the Palace, Ceausescu wiped out whole neighborhoods and demolished three churches. This was one of the many reasons for why he was so unpopular. But the project also helped employ people because he hired five million laborers to build the Palace. Also, he insisted that all of the building materials, especially the marble, come from Romania in order to give a boost to their economy. Today, the Palace is a drain on Romania’s budget; the cost of heating, electricity, and lighting the building costs over six million dollars per year.
Lunch was on our own but, before we ate, Tracey and I took a side trip to see the statue of Romulus and Remus. It was a labor of love because the rain never stopped coming down for our first few days in Eastern Europe, but I had to get a selfie in front of this statue because I shared the story of the famous twins for decades when I taught world history. Once again, the statue is there to remind people of the Roman influence on Romania to this day. After lunch we took a bus tour of Bucharest and then embarked on “The River Duchess,” our Danube cruise ship.
Friday, October 15, Bulgaria: I started the day with a walk with Peter, the physical fitness expert
on our ship, through the streets of Nikopol, where we saw the famous fountain and gate. Then the whole U of L group took a bus tour to Arbanassi where we toured “The Church of the Nativity,” a 17th century stone church with beautiful frescoes. We were treated to an Orthodox choir at the end of our tour. They sang a cappella and it was magical because their voices were fantastic, they dressed up in period costumes, and we listened to them while viewing the Byzantine art.
To round out the morning, we toured the “Konstantsalisva House,” which served as a good example of how a rich person would have lived in the Middle Ages. Next, we were treated to a true Bulgarian lunch and folk dancers entertained us at the end of the meal. One of the women in the troupe grabbed my hand to get me out of my chair so that she could dance the last number with me. It was all in good fun and I made sure that I got a picture of me dancing so that I could share it with the kids.
Our final destination of the day was Veliko Tarnovo, which had been the capital of Bulgaria before and after the Turkish occupation, to do some shopping. Before we went back to the ship we stopped the bus on the side of the road so that our group could take some pictures of the ruins of the Tsarevets fortress, the former seat of the medieval tsars.
Saturday, October 16, Bulgaria: I mixed up the types of excursions that we experienced in the hope that each place we visited would have a unique memory. With that in my, our first activity in Vidin was a “Cooking with Mona” class. Tracey was happy because it was a hands on class and she made Banista, a traditional Bulgarian pastry dish. We went back to the ship after the class and our cruise director gave all of the extra Banista to the crew. It was too early to call it a day so after I dropped Tracey off I took a long walk in the rain. It took about twenty minutes to walk to the Banda Vida Fortress. It is a 17th century Turkish upgrade of a 10th century Bulgarian fortification, built upon the ruins of a 3rd century Roman fort. It was closed to the public so I took a quick loop around the fort, having the place to myself because of the rain, and then I returned to the ship.
Sunday, October 17, Serbia: Our morning started with a close up view of the Djerdap Dam as our ship went through the locks at dawn. The Djerdap Gorge is better known as the Iron Gates and it is where the Danube cuts through the Carpathian Mountains. Later in the morning we passed by the Decebalus Cliff where a Dacian king had his portrait carved into the side of a mountain in 100 AD. The carving was forty meters high and it was Decebalus’ way of thumbing his nose at Trajan, the Roman emperor who was his rival.
The rest of the morning was spent at the Lepenski Vir Archeological Park where the Serbs recreated a dig that included human remains from 9000 years ago. Our afternoon was spent at the Golubac Castle, a fortress that was built in the 14th century but had been overrun by Serbs, Magyars, and Turks. It is a major tourist attraction in Serbia
Monday, October 18, Belgrade: We started the day at the Palace of the Karadjordjevic Dynasty. Our guided tour of the grounds and the buildings were nice but the best part was meeting Crown Prince Alexander II, and his wife, Princess Katherine. Our U of L group had been told that there was a chance that we might meet the prince but we didn’t know if it would actually happen. Alexander gave a quick speech, had his picture taken with our group, and then he shook Tracey’s hand and patted her on the back as he left. As he passed by us I told the prince that Tracey is blind. He looked down and saw her cane and that is why he reached out to her. The princess, trailing right behind Alexander, said to me, “Thank you for bringing the good weather with you” because, after a solid six days of rain, the sun finally came out while we were at the palace.
The best excursion of our cruise was the Yugo Car Tour of Belgrade because of the
memories that it triggered. The Yugo was a piece of junk, having all the power of a lawnmower, a stick shift that took all of our driver’s strength to shift gears, no safety features at all and the whole vehicle felt like it would shake to pieces if we went over ten miles an hour. I loved the experience. It reminded me of driving around in Tod’s V.W. Bug while we were in college and Tracey said that it reminded her of packing six people into Ted Luna’s car to drive down to Fisherman’s Park.
Our driver was Rolph and he showed us the remains of some of the buildings that America destroyed in the 1990s. “Are the Serbians still angry at us?” I asked our guide. “Of course,” responded Rolph. “You bombed us.” Then, to lighten the mood, our driver told us the story of how the young people of Belgrade used to have roof-top parties as the bombs fell. It was safe to watch because the Americans would announce where and when we were going to bomb so the young Serbs could watch from a safe distance.
We arrived back at the River Duchess just in time to see a troupe of dancers perform for the passengers. It was almost too much good to happen for one day. If anyone had asked me, as our cruise ship pulled away from Belgrade, if our trip up the Danube was worth the trouble and the expense, I would have told them of the day that we met a prince and rode in a Yugo.
Tuesday, October 19, Croatia: In the morning we toured the city of Vukovar where the Croats held out against a vastly superior Serb army for 37 days in 1991. Then we took a bus trip to the Vucedol Archeological Museum before having lunch in Karanac. Our final stop of the day was at the Bjian Winery where we saw huge casks in the cellar and we drove past miles and miles of vineyards.
Wednesday, October 20, Budapest: We only had time for one tour today because our whole morning was spent being tested for COVID again. I wanted to do something different for our last day in Europe so we went to the House of Terror, the former headquarters of the secret police in the Soviet-era Hungary. The museum pulled no punches as it kept the prison cells and the execution rooms exactly as they had been before the breakup of the Soviet Union. The main attraction was a T-84 Soviet tank that was parked in the middle of the building and it was surrounded by hundreds of pictures of people who had been killed in the House of Terror. To lighten up a bit after we left the museum, our guide took us to Liberty Square where he could give us a running commentary on the art and architecture of Pest.
If we had been asked why we didn’t start our European adventures with a trip to London, Paris, or Rome, Tracey’s pat answer would have been, “anyone could do that!” Besides, it was fun to travel where comparatively few people have toured. The weather alone was enough to discourage most tourists as it rained on us for the for the first five days that we were in Eastern Europe. Cold, dark, and wet was exactly the weather that I was expecting, however, and I think that I would have been disappointed if it had been bright and sunny.
The whole trip to Europe could not have gone better and I cannot remember the last time that I was this happy for such a sustained period of time. I was so nervous before we left because this was my first time on a trans-Atlantic flight, my first time in Europe, and my first time on a river cruise. Once we finally arrived at our hotel, it felt like a huge weight had been lifted off of my shoulders. And when our trip was over, I continued to ask myself why we didn’t do this type of vacation before 2021. The hard fact is that Tracey and I were not in a position to do it until we retired in May.
As always, it was the other passengers that made our vacation interesting. We have found our tribe; these people were well-educated, well-mannered, and refined. Most of them were older than Tracey and me and that made them more interesting to talk to. They would describe
themselves as affluent and their occupations were as physicians, lawyers, and teachers. Tracey and I were the youngest passengers at 60 years of age and, like us, most of the passengers were retired. I was reminded that retirement is the great equalizer; these people obviously used to be important and powerful, but now no one really cared about their past work lives. It felt nice to be able to relax, full in the knowledge that the other passengers didn’t want anything from me, other than a new friend to talk to, and I didn’t want anything from them except fun people to share this experience with. We were literally all in the same boat together.
The other passengers taught me that life doesn’t end at 60; they had paid their dues and, to reward themselves, they take one vacation after another. “After all,” said one lady, “what am I going to do? Leave my money to my kids? They are doing well enough without inheriting anything.” This was a point of view that I hadn’t considered before and I found her opinion refreshing. So I have answered my own question on what do I want to do with my next thirty years that I have left on earth and the answer is to travel. This moment of clarity is just one of the reasons as to why our trip up the Danube was life-changing for Tracey and me.
And finally, an unintended consequence of this trip is that it really strengthened our marriage. Tracey and I have reached a new plateau, having the time, money, and energy to pull off a massive trip. It helped that we were in lockstep in terms of our goals and expectations. Tracey possesses the organizational skills to pull it off, liked the challenge of packing for an eleven day trip, and kept me from becoming overwhelmed. Our touring gave us some seasoning, made us more interesting people by having us transcend above our mundane lives, and separated us from the crowd a little bit. Our Eastern European cruise marks the beginning of a new phase in our lives, leaving behind our careers and the daily grind, and transitioning into what we will become, which is world travelers.
