Monthly Archives: May 2024

The family we met in Bickenholtz told us about a museum in Ulm dedicated to the story of the Donauschwaben and of course we had to come.

Right out front is a replica of the riverboats the emigrants traveled on. We don’t know how long the journey took but it doesn’t look like a very comfortable means of travel.

Maria Theresa and her husband Francis ruled the empire and when they hatched the scheme to hold the lands previously occupied by the Ottomans, Maria Theresa suggested to Francis that he send peasants from his homeland Lorraine for the purpose. And that was the genesis of the Donauschwaben.

We learned through firsthand accounts that the promised houses and livestock rarely materialized and the new arrivals were left to fend for themselves in an undeveloped and infertile landscape.

Eventually they cleared the fields, and after some lean years of harsh weather and crop failures they made a home for themselves. The museum exhibited typical furnishings, clothing, crafts, and tools.

The photo below is from the general area and period Jack’s family lived in just before they left for America, one sibling after another in a perfect example of chain migration. Jack’s grandfather was the youngest and last in his family to arrive.

“For the dispossessed who left their villages in search of an opportunity to earn, there is still an alternative to the factory. Between 1899 and 1914, about 252,000 Danube Swabians, mainly from rural regions, made their way to America.

“They are mostly young people whose future is not materially secured by their parents’ inheritance or by a gainful profession. They hope to prosper in the land of unlimited possibilities and thus to be able to build an existence in their old homeland after returning.”

Most of the emigrants to America prospered, finding work in the industrial Midwest.

Things got worse for the families who stayed. As ethnic Germans they were considered enemies during the World Wars, and many eventually had their property seized or were sent to labor camps or deported.

We spent a long time in the museum, then walked around the town. It’s a very typical west German city and we tried to imagine what it must have looked like when Jack’s ancestors were here 250 years ago.

Down by the river there’s a wall of plaques commemorating some of the regions, specific villages, and even countries where the people of the Donauschwaben diaspora ended up. I can’t emphasize enough how rare it is to have this clear a picture of the history of Jack’s paternal ancestors. Americans are so often a mishmash of heritage and ethnicity. Having a discreet and well-documented ancestral line is a gift. We were both moved by their story.

And then it was on to the Autobahn as we follow the Danube, more or less.

And check this out: miles and miles of solar panels. We’ve never seen so many!

We found a peaceful parkup along the Rhine River which marks the border between France and Germany.

At least it was peaceful until these guys showed up. We assume it was a training march, and those packs look heavy!

I guess this is a good time to explain why it seems we’re racing through Europe. Many European countries have banded together and agreed to remove controls between their borders and allow free movement within what’s now called the Schengen zone, named after the village in Luxembourg where the original agreement was signed. That’s why there’s no longer passport control between, say, France and Germany. That’s a good thing. But the challenging part is that for non-Europeans like us, instead of getting a visa for each country and traveling from one to the next as you wish, a visitor is only allowed to stay in the entire zone for 90 days out of 180 days. There are now 29 countries in the agreement so that means we’re limited to 90 days in what amounts to most of Europe.

When we entered France, the clock started on our Schengen time and it won’t stop until we get to Türkiye, which is out of Schengen. So you can see why we have to keep moving. There’s a lot of ground to cover.

We have another challenge, and that’s the age of our van. Most European countries are serious about addressing global warming by reducing emissions. There are lots of cities or parts of cities where an old diesel-powered girl like Escape Velocity is not welcome. If we should inadvertently enter a low emission zone we could face some stiff fines.

And that’s why we took a circuitous route to our next destination, avoiding the green zones around Strasbourg, France, and Ulm, Germany. We didn’t mind so much, as this led us through the Black Forest on a beautiful sunny day.

We arrived at the banks of the Danube River at a point just before it becomes navigable. It’s from very near this spot that Jack’s ancestors began their long journey down river. I’ve always admired the forebears who made the decision to leave everything and travel to a place unknown in hopes of a better life. It took guts. It still does.

Today’s cheeky parkup is through a hole in the wall. Well on its way to ruin, the parking lot appears to belong to an ex military administration building.

The walls show the pockmarked scars of war. It’s hard to decide if the squatters are moving in or are being forced out. We decide to reconnoiter because we’re hungry, it’s France and there’s a good chance of there being a patisserie in town.

We happen upon a large paved open town square in this tidy town, where small businesses have gathered on the periphery. The square is dominated by a large cathedral featuring flying buttresses and a strange flat topped bell tower whose spire must have topped over at some point.

From across the square Yours Truly spied what might be that patisserie mentioned earlier. Turned out to be the real thing.

After touring the town for a while and discussing what we might scrounge up for dinner from the larder in EV, we both came up with the solution, take out pizza. Yeah I know, doesn’t everybody come to France for pizza? Phalsbourg is not a nightlife kind of town.

So just when we began reaccesing our situation we turned a corner and a tiny shop was just opening up.

It’ll be a few minutes for the wood fire to heat up.

Wood fired pizza in a tiny town in northern France! Kismet. 

It was getting dark now and we were determined to eat at home so it was a quick trip across the square with time out for one last shot.

Longtime readers will know that one of my passions is family history research. When I met Jack, the grandchild of immigrants, he knew little about his heritage except he was sure he was Austrian. Curiously, in each census record after his grandparents arrived in America they reported a different country of origin, first Austria-Hungary, then Hungary, then Romania. Well, that’s the tale of changing borders after World War I, and I was determined to find out exactly where they were from and how and why they went to America.

That deep dive led me to discover the story of a small ethnic German group called Donauschwaben, or Danube Swabians.

In the mid eighteenth century about 200,000 German peasants were encouraged to undertake a long journey down the Danube River to occupy an undeveloped region in Eastern Europe under a scheme to claim land for the Austro-Hungarian empire. Lured by the promise of free land, a house and livestock, and a five-year moratorium on taxes, they settled a thousand villages in the area where present-day Hungary, Serbia and Romania meet. For 250 years the Donauschwaben remained a mostly insular population, retaining their language and customs despite the changing borders and rulers.

Fortunately, the migrants and their descendants have been well documented by a dedicated group of historians who’ve combed through centuries of tightly-held church and civil records. Once I tapped into that motherlode I was able to follow Jack’s paternal grandfather’s lineage all the way back to the 17th century in Lorraine, France. Every time I found the birthplace of one of his ancestors I made a mark on Google maps. So the theme for the first part of our European road trip is to follow the trail of his forebears from their beginnings in France down the Danube River all the way to Romania. We’re curious to see where they started, where they ended up, and something about their life along the way.

By coincidence my brother-in-law’s paternal ancestors also hailed from Lorraine and I marked his villages on my map, too. So we have a lot of villages to visit.

We spent days driving from village to village, walking through the oldest churchyards we could find with little success. Each person I spoke to suggested another village, another cemetery.

The church below was in a village where I knew my brother-in-law’s ancestors lived. Jack was getting a little tired of cemeteries so he waited out front while I walked through the graveyard reading the names on the stones. Two women were weeding and watering the flowers, and one asked if she could help me find someone. When I told her I was looking for Familien Streiff, she and her colleague had a lively discussion in a dialect I couldn’t understand, then she directed us to another cemetery a few kilometers down the road. That’s where the Streiffs are, she said.

Sure enough, there were dozens of Streiff memorials but not any from the era of Dave’s immigrant ancestors. That’s because if the rent isn’t paid on a cemetery plot, the graves are removed and the plot rerented. It’s rare to find graves more than 100-150 years old. I was happy to at least find the area where Dave’s Streiff ancestors lived and snap a few photos.

Then it was on to Jack’s Schulz (originally Schütz) ancestral home, a mere crossroads called Bickenholtz. We found the little church but it was immediately evident there wouldn’t be any significant graves in the tiny churchyard.

There was an older couple with a younger man also squeezed into the yard reading the inscriptions and I heard sounds of disappointment from the woman in German.

“Suchen Sie auch alte Steine?” I asked, wondering if she was also looking for old stones. She was, and was hoping to find her ancestors. I pointed to Jack and told her his ancestors were born here.

“Mine too!” she said. I then told her Jack’s ancestors had traveled to Romania in the 1700s.

“Mine too!” she said, and she asked me which Romanian village they lived in.

“Bogarosch,” I said.

“Mine too!”

What an amazing coincidence to find another descendant of the 18th century migration from this exact village in France to the exact same village in Romania. We exchanged stories and learned that while Jack’s grandfather left Bogarosch for America in 1903, this family stayed in Romania until Nicolae Ceaușescu forced the remaining ethnic Germans to “repatriate” despite having occupied the same land for hundreds of years. Consequently, she grew up in Germany.

As we were talking a storm cloud raced toward us and we all took to our vehicles.

While we sat there in the rain I checked Jack’s family tree on my iPad. I couldn’t find a connection between this family and Jack, but I did find that the man memorialized on the side of the church, Simon Holzinger, is Jack’s 6th-great grandfather.

Jack instantly claimed ownership of the church and wanted to go inside, so we dashed through the rain to take a look. This isn’t the same building his ancestors worshipped in — that one’s long gone — but it was on this spot where his ancestors were baptized and married, many moons ago.

Once the rain stopped we were on our way again. I think we made a pretty good start on Jack’s Finding Your Roots tour.

At first blush the uninitiated would opine that getting to Dinant, Belgium couldn’t be easier. You just follow the Meuse River and stop when you get there, easy-peasy, but that ignores this:

When your home is a gracefully aging six meter long motorhome, facing squeezing through the eye of the needle can be a little intimidating. We passed the test but I did fold the mirrors in. 

Settled into a shady city lot allowed a leisurely afternoon stroll through this charming city. 

We soon found that Dinant has a passionate obsession with giant brightly painted saxophones.

Turns out that Adolph Sax drew his first breath not far from where we were standing and eventually, in his little shop downstairs, set about fashioning brass tubes into twisty shapes, creating a new instrument. It didn’t take long to hunt down the birth place of the saxophone.

The following sunny morning we were keen to explore the Collegiate Church of Notre Dame with its onion shaped dome under the Dinant cliffs. Maybe a little too under the rocks, because in 1227 a major chunk fell off and comprehensively smashed the small Romanesque church. All but one portal was flattened.

Of course you can’t go anywhere in Dinant without first paying homage to Adolph Sax and his giant saxophones. Eventually the church hove into view, just beyond the Meuse River and, of course, the saxophones.

It’s a pretty thing with an awkward onion shaped bell tower. The North portal apparently is the only thing that survived the…let’s agree to call it “the stoning.”

We had a meeting of the minds last night, deciding that we would find a more civilized method to get up the cliff face to the citadel because of this:

And this was it:

Not for everyone but it works for Yours Truly.

We came for the view but got an unexpected lesson in history. It seems that on this cliff top in 1051, Prince Bishopric of Liège fancied fortifying this lookout rock, which controls the strategic Meuse river far below. Certainly no one would be able to sneak up on you.

By 1815 this “impenetrable” citadel was ready for action, but in 1914 the Kaiser’s boys had just the thing: World War I. 

After being annoyed by the trenches the French built the Germans decided neutral Belgium wasn’t behaving neutral enough and blasted the town into rubble. Then they marched 674 innocent Belgium civilians out and summarily executed them. It was a horrendous war crime.

When next we see that merry band of Germans it is called World War II, and it was Erwin Rommel‘s turn to take the town. Isn’t it funny how penetrable impenetrable citadels can be? Situating a town at a strategic location seems to be an invitation for a lot of grief.

Great view, but we have to go. On the way back to Escape Velocity we happened upon these evocative sculptures that weren’t saxophones.

We’re not looking forward to another squeeze through the eye of the needle.

And here’s one last musical drain grate.

Not far down the road we found a quiet parkup by the Church of Saints Peter and Paul in Bailleul.

It wasn’t the most scenic place we’ve parked but it had the advantage of a boulangerie right across the street. Now that’s what I call France!

We did a quick walk around town, which included this unusual war memorial . . .

. . . and a small market in the main square.

The weather was not being kind to us so we huddled inside and hoped for sunshine tomorrow.

Finally the long awaited day arrived and we drove to the port of Dover for the ferry to France. Neither of us had been to France before, and in fact in all of our travels very little has been in Europe. We’ve looked forward to this for a long time.

The ferry is a relatively short journey, a mere 2-1/2 hours. Jack entered the ferry driving on the left and exited driving on the right. I only had to remind him once or twice to keep right, and by the time we exited the port his brain made the switch for good.

Everything we read about Calais advised against spending any time there. Two Irish women we spoke to in a car park in England warned about crime and people attempting to enter the UK illegally as stowaways in motorhomes. We like to think the best of everyone and while we listened politely, we dismissed the warnings as the usual anti-immigrant rhetoric.

We arrived in Calais just after noon and I had mapped out a trip to a laundry and a supermarket before driving to our first night’s parkup. The laundry was in the car park of a Carrefour supermarket in what we immediately saw is a rundown area on the edge of town. The car park was wierdly almost empty. We parked behind the washing machines and I gathered the laundry together and carried it around to the front of the kiosk. Jack stayed in the van.

There were three young men standing in front of the machines blocking my access. They didn’t immediately move away as you’d expect so I smiled, said “Bonjour” and indicated that I was going to do laundry. They stepped aside, and one of the men spoke in tentative English, something about washing clothes.

“Oui,” I said as I loaded the machine and set the program. I was curious why they would hang out at the laundry kiosk but I finished my business and went back to the van. Since we were going to be there awhile I opened the back door and turned on the LPG so we could run the refrigerator. Then I got back in the van and we waited for the wash cycle to end.

When my timer went off I went back to the machines to put the clothes in the dryer. There were only two young men there now. I set the program and started the dryer, then went to the back of the van to get something.

The door was slightly ajar. I know I hadn’t left it open. There was a shoe keeping the door from fully closing. That’s odd, I thought. Then I realized I didn’t recognize the shoe. Then I saw there was a foot in the shoe, and a leg connected to the foot. I swung the door wide to find the third young man crouched into the back of our van under the bed, folded up like a pretzel but not quite well enough to close himself in.

I was struck dumb. Well only for a moment, before I yelled, “What the fuck are you doing!?”

He looked me straight in the eye, then slowly and deliberately unfolded himself, climbed out of the van, and walked away. I stared after him, agape. Then I closed the door and went into the van by the side door, shaken and confused.

Jack was napping during all this and only woke when he heard me cry out but probably thought I was yelling at him. When I told him what happened we agreed we couldn’t leave the van unattended to go shopping together.

I walked alone to the Carrefour, halfway across the car park and out of sight of the van. The store was huge and mostly empty and dimly lit, not the first experience in a French supermarket I was hoping for. I was concerned about Jack and the van and the three young men whose intentions I couldn’t fathom, so I quickly picked up bread and other essentials, hoping we could find a better shopping option later.

When I left the store the three young men were now positioned by the shopping trolleys near the door. I wondered if they were following me but I shoved the thought out of my mind.

Back at the van we retrieved the laundry from the dryer and turned off the LPG. While we were preparing to leave the three young men walked toward us again, and as we drove off, the man who had climbed in the van looked right at me and smirked.

I don’t understand the encounter. We weren’t robbed. I didn’t feel personally threatened. But their behavior is a mystery. Later a friend suggested that perhaps the man who hid in the van was hoping for a free ride to England. But he hadn’t managed to hide himself well, and his smirk as we left lead me to think he just wanted to scare the old lady. If that was the case, he failed.

Even so it was an unsettling start to our European journey.

 In a rogue move, Marce found a park up without even a whiff of the fresh mown grass of a cricket pitch. Electricity thrown-in gratis, walking distance to a bus stop — happy days! — but we awoke to the rising damp of an early morning English mizzle. 

“The droghte of March had pierced to the roote.”

However, we are the Escapees and even with a bus ride and a wet saunter in the offing, we pressed on regardless. 

“And bathed every Veyne in swich Licour.”

We stepped off the bus into a modest puddle, but this charming watchtower was there to greet us in the spitting rain.

We wandered through this charming town in Kent, soaking in its quirky shops, drizzle, and cobbled alleyways until spotting our goal down an unlikely tiny alley.

“Of which vertu engendred is the flour.”

The gates of Canterbury Cathedral.

Unfortunately it seems today is a school field trip day but even that wouldn’t slow us down. 

Under repair but still magnificent, we laid the money down.

It was a considerable sum. Stepping through the beautifully sculpted door, Yours Truly found himself unable to maintain a level gaze as my focus was drawn, really, almost sucked upward until finally stopped by the extravagantly ribbed barrel vaulted ceiling far above.

Mind blown. Bear in mind this thing was built in 1070. Chaucer in his “Canterbury Tales” had his characters join a pilgrimage to this very place. We had barely stepped through the door, so good value for money as the Kiwis say.

Determined to get our money’s worth we examined every nook and cranny until we ran into these pipe organ tuners whose story had all the smalls and particulars you could imagine.

This is just a tiny practice organ. It gets tuned three times a year. The tuner, who tunes organs all over the empire, told us the big organ is tuned every month via iPad!

Deep in the bowels we found surprise after surprise.

With the sun beginning to break through we sadly had to tear ourselves away from the Cathedral to explore Canterbury a bit more.

Who knew Canterbury is the Venice of Kent?

This sums it up rather well.

Once again we Escapees find ourselves pitch side with a game humiliatingly known as “Cricket“ being contested right in front of us.

This place must be lousy with cricket pitches. Many have tried to explain the game’s intricacies to me. Fantastic scores pile up and expand exponentially, seemingly without commensurate effort. I hear matches can go on for days. I suppose it depends on how many tea breaks are called for on the field. I’ll never understand it. But dear Escapees, I know that’s not what you’re here for.

Marce has found us an extremely rare but strange, long and thin parkup in sight of Windsor castle. It’s within reasonable walking distances, so without a moment to lose, due to our usual lack of in-depth planning, we set our course toward the ramparts of Windsor. 

At the gates we found a respectable, well behaved but surprisingly small crowd milling about anxious to wave their little plastic Union Jacks at anything remotely properly British.

Aside from the handful of assault rifle toting guards the mood was lighthearted even after learning that the outlandishly over-priced Windsor Castle tour is not happening today. It’s hard to say why but perhaps these folks with the fascinators have something to do with it.

We had no plans to partake but we did learn that the chapel choir of Saint George’s would be performing in a free Evensong service in the same chapel that Meghan and Harry recently got married in. Certainly worth the price and we’d get in the front gate.

Ok, new plan. It’s the beauty of not planning in depth. That’s the moment when the hellish sound of bagpipes struck up and with as much pomp, circumstance, and polite flag waving as possible, advanced through the Windsor gate directly at us. 

You just never know who you might run into hanging out in a place like this. 

After a quick stroll about town, which is certainly in a festive mood, I found myself chasing after Marce hoofing it off toward Eaton at her usual prodigious pace.

But first a conciliatory stop for ice cream.

Crossing the bridge over Thames River.

Enjoying passing through the quaint town. Quite a bit different than Windsor.

We found a charming cafe that promised the best Coronation Chicken in Eaton. With a twist it’s served in a jacket potato and I thought, how could you possibly go wrong? I’m a fan.

After touching Escape Velocity basecamp we headed back toward Windsor Castle for the Evensong service.

There was a decent sized queue which featured Sister Mary Margaret, the church lady, signing people up for the service and for a sinking moment I thought I would need to know a special password or a secret handshake showing sufficient spiritually, at which time I realized that I wouldn’t stand a chance. However improbable, I passed and as reverently as possible we all walked into that magical place, with the eagle-eyed good sister making sure nobody snuck off to checkout the grounds inside the walls. 

The chapel is intimate, much smaller than it looks on TV, but then that’s why we travel. Of course photos weren’t allowed but happy accidents have been known to happen.

It was ethereal, absolutely sublime enveloped in the powerful sound of the pipe organ, then the intricate parts of a capella male voices intertwining and resolving. We were seated in the quire, the singers just opposite, mere feet from us. It was stunning.

When we got back to Escape Velocity they were still playing cricket on the pitch opposite. No surprise there.

While we were clearing up after breakfast on Sunday morning we heard bells from the church across the river. This wasn’t the ding-dong-ding clanging of one or two bells, but the unmistakable melodious and hypnotic pattern of change ringing. We quickly made our way through town to the church and as I was taking a photo of the bell tower a gentleman rode up on his bicycle and said hello. We told him we loved the bells, and he asked if we’d like to come up to see.

“Oh yes!” we said.

“It’s just the ringing room,” he cautioned, and we followed him up a very narrow spiral staircase to the tower room.

Our host guided us to a bench where we could sit out of the way and watch.

Change ringing is the art of ringing tuned bells in a mathematic pattern that varies the order of striking. This can be by method ringing, where the ringers memorize the pattern, or by call changes, where a leader calls the changes, as in square dancing.

Jack and I have always been fascinated by change ringing, and have on our bucket list hearing a full peal which, depending on how many bells are involved, can take hours. We envision picnicking near a bell tower on a warm afternoon allowing ourselves to be mesmerized.

It’s amazing how much focus is required to ring your bell at the right time. The sequence keeps changing and the ringers really need to pay attention. During another Method one of the ringers got distracted and missed her cue to stop her bell. Oops.

The Methods have quaint names like Grandsire Doubles or Plain Bob Minor. On this particular day, one of the ringers told me they were doing a “simple” Cambridge Major pattern.

When the ringing stopped we were welcomed heartily by the ringers and asked to sign the guest book. Then we followed them to another church where they rang again.

We left them to it and continued to explore beautiful Abingdon. We haven’t spent a lot of time in England but I think we might not find a more charming place than this.