Uffda, it’s been awhile. Since last we wrote our pace has increased to the point where it’s hard to even, as my mother would say, sit down and say “God bless me,” let alone write blog posts. Add to that the difficulty in keeping three devices online through ten countries and negotiating the logistics of different toll and emission schemes and all the other challenges of a European road trip and I hope you can forgive us for this lengthy lapse in posting. I’m here to just bring you up to date on where we are and we hope to backfill when we get a chance to sit down and say, “God bless me.”
We left the UK on the twentieth of May after finally getting insurance and safety inspection sorted. Entering the EU starts the clock on our Schengen time, a limit of 90 days in 180 days. It’s a rolling calendar and complicated to manage but we’ll deal with that in a later post.
We took the ferry to Calais and in the following weeks we drove through France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary. We visited Dinant, Phalsbourg, Ulm, Regensburg, Pilsn, Prague, Auschwitz, Krakow, and many places in between. We’re currently in Romania where we’ll be for maybe two weeks.
The theme for the itinerary is to follow the trail of Jack’s ancestors who left Lorraine, France, in the late eighteenth century and traveled down the Danube River to what is now Romania where they settled an uninhabited region under a scheme to claim land for the Austrian-Hungarian empire. This migration of German peasants to an empty corner of Eastern Europe is well documented and an interesting part of European history. We were determined to see where Jack’s ancestors started out, where they ended up, and something about their life along the way. It’s been quite the education. As a family historian, it’s a gift to have a cultural group remain intact, to have the descendants of that group preserve their customs and genealogy as completely. We’ve had some amazing encounters on this journey but again, more on that later.
From Romania we plan a quick trip through Bulgaria to Turkey where, if I can sort it, we’ll leave the van for a few weeks while we visit our family and friends in America for the first time in nearly 2-1/2 years.
As always you can follow our track at https://share.garmin.com/escapevelocity. Be sure to tap View All and zoom out. Otherwise you’ll just see our current position.
Here are some random shots to whet your appetite.
We have many stories to tell. We’ll get to it.
