Author Archives: Marce

If you haven’t been here for a while and are checking in to see what’s up, scroll beyond this post. We’re trying to catch up and we’re logging posts by date. We’re currently in the UK but we hope to tell all the stories about our journey through Europe, Türkiye, and Morocco. We’re determined to get it all down, and we’re kicking ourselves for falling so far behind. Sorry about that.

We left our beautiful parkup overlooking a reservoir and headed for a filling station that has LPG on tap. We’re not desperate to fill up but we’ve learned to take advantage of services when they’re nearby and convenient. Google maps predicted a fairly direct 17 minute drive.

We turned onto a narrow road with a sign warning “Not suitable for longer vehicles.” We don’t consider our van very long and the sign didn’t specify any particular length.

As we entered the road, Jack said he saw another, smaller sign that said “Don’t follow SatNav, you’ll get stuck.” I didn’t see that sign, but as we drove a few meters the road looked more and more dodgy. 

“Stop!” I said. “I don’t think we can go there.” Jack was game, but I insisted he back out and after a vigorous discussion he agreed and backed out onto the street we’d turned from. We didn’t know which way to go. Google maps indicated the narrow road as our only option to get to our destination. 

“Wait here.” I said, and I looked around to find some local knowledge. There was no one about. The pub across the street looked like it might be open. I ran over and as I entered, six people turned to face the door. One woman gave me the local greeting, “Yahrite?” 

“No!” I answered, an inappropriate response that garnered confusion. “I’m in a campervan and Google maps wants us to go down that street,” I explained, pointing toward the skinny road. 

“DON’T GO THERE!” they all shouted in unison. A man asked where we were going, then said he’d show me how to get there. He walked me outside and with a combination of pointing this way and that, then showing me on my phone, he gave elaborate directions to get to a place that seemed so close, but was going to take a bit of savvy navigating to get there. At one point he had us going way west of our destination, but when I protested he said, “Trust me, this is the only way to get there.”

He told me the skinny road would have been ok for awhile, maybe even over the very narrow bridge.

At the bottom of the hill there’s a turn that we wouldn’t be able to make, he told us, and everyone gets stuck. It’s a narrow, tight, steep hairpin that a long wheelbase can’t manage. That’s us. We would have bottomed out.

“There’s a farmer down there who charges 200 quid to pull you out.” Apparently he rescues 2 or 3 vehicles a week whose drivers ignore the sign on the fence at the turnoff, like we almost did. 

I repeated the directions twice to make sure I had it right and then we were off.

The directions were spot on.

After miles of twisty one-lane roads and a construction detour, we finally reached our service station and filled up the LPG tanks.

It’s not unusual to get the “Don’t follow SatNav” warning from businesses or campsites or even the apps we use to find parkups. Google Maps wants to send you on what it thinks is the most efficient way, but apparently their programming can’t evaluate the suitability of a road for vehicles when suggesting a route. I consult several different mapping and navigation apps now. Most of the time.

What were we thinking?! One year exploring Europe; sounds like plenty of time. Ha! Our only plan was to wait out our Schengen time first in Türkiye and the Balkans, and again in Morocco. In between we only had a vague plan and decided almost day by day where to go and whether to stay longer in a place or move on. We made a few mistakes in planning, e.g. overestimating our distance to the ferry in Marseille, which caused us to unnecessarily cut short our time in Italy. All those blank places in the middle that we didn’t get to will be for next time, especially France, which we found so welcoming to motorhomes, unlike England, sadly.

The UK might break the bank, especially with the weakening dollar. We can’t return to the Schengen zone — most of Europe — until mid July. In the meantime we’d like to be someplace warm. It seems we’ve had The Year Without Summer except for a few weeks in Türkiye and a brief heatwave in Romania. We spent so much of the past 13 years in the tropics but this past year had us wearing holes in our wooly socks.

Still, look at that track! Twenty-six countries in one year. (For reference, we spent six months each in Scotland and Ireland alone.) Every mile was driven by Jack. And remember, he was driving a right hand drive vehicle on the right side of the road. Yesterday he drove onto the ferry in St. Malo on the right, and when we docked in Portsmouth he drove off on the left. Never a wrong move by my hero!

We don’t know what the coming year has in store for us. Like the rest of the world, and especially those of us from the US, we are on tenterhooks, adopting a wait-and-see approach. We’re aware of how fortunate we are to be able to travel, and we have our fingers crossed that we can continue to explore the world at our age-adjusted pace. There’s still so much to see.

Right now we have van maintenance to do, a safety inspection and insurance renewal to get through. After that we’d like to be someplace warm. We’d like to stay in one place for a while. We’d like to see family and friends. We’re working on it.

Yesterday our navigation system failed to fire up after more than two years of faithful service. We rely on it so much and without it I have to give Jack turn by turn directions from my phone, making every journey a shouting match and exhausting for both of us.

We found a nearby car audio repair shop today and they’ve determined it’s the wire to the ignition, and not easy to replace. We started with one guy working, then two, and eventually three guys poking around our dashboard and engine bay.

I have very little cash on me so I hope they will take a credit card. That’s if they can fix it.

Back in business and no, they didn’t take credit cards and no, I didn’t have enough cash. There was no ATM in the vicinity so I gave them all the local cash I had plus some Euros.

After being on the road for a while we noticed our house battery wasn’t charging. A little troubleshooting and that was fixed. But then the third shoe dropped.

We missed the highway exit to our parkup, a tree-lined lot promising shelter from the brutal sun with a pizza shop around the corner. Google maps delivered the bad news that the next opportunity to turn around and go back was 26 km ahead, almost at the Turkish border. It’s been a frustrating day. We were so looking forward to a cold beer and a pizza. I scrambled to look for an alternative parkup with an alternate pizza shop but in the end Jack drove the double cloverleaf to go back the 26 km. Thank goodness.

Tomorrow we are Türkiye bound!

We set aside the afternoon to visit the Evangelical Cathedral with its tall spire and unique tiled roof. Construction was begun in 1371 on the site of a Romanesque church, and was finally completed in 1520. It was originally Roman Catholic but like many churches we visited, converted to Evangelical after the Reformation.

For 300 years the church was the burial place for local VIPs. The practice was halted in the 18th century, the existing tombstones removed and embedded in the wall, making an unusual gallery of the dead. A QR code leads to details of each person.

The church houses two pipe organs, and we were fortunate that they were both being tuned and played while we were there.

Hats off to Father Xavier Dressler, record-holding organist. Forty-seven years is admirable.

There was a lot to see in the cathedral but Jack kept eyeing the tower steps.

Longtime readers know I suffer from what I consider a completely rational fear of heights. Nevertheless I almost always follow Jack on his missions to get to the top of wherever we are. In this case, I’ve got no problem with enclosed spiral staircases. You can’t see up and, more importantly, you can’t see down.

“Sure,” I said. “Let’s go.” I didn’t give it a second thought. Spoiler alert: I should have.

After what seemed like we should have been at least halfway, the spiral steps ended and we crossed a scaffold bridge into the upper tower.

And this is where my palms started sweating. Looking up, I gasped at how much further we had to go. And looking down, well let’s just say I tried not to.

This is where my fear of heights becomes irrational. Intellectually I know this is perfectly safe, yet I had to talk myself up step by step.

I arrived at a small platform at the level of the bells where I took a breather along with a couple of young men who were also finding this climb a little more challenging than expected. We all hoped the bells wouldn’t chime just then.

Past the bells and up one more flight of narrow open steps and we were finally at the tippy top. And yes, the view was worth it. But my palms are sweating even now with the memory of looking down.

We were so fortunate to have a beautiful sunny blue-sky day and we spent a long time admiring the views from every side.

And then it was time to go down. Down is harder because, well, you have to look down. And that’s the part that scares me.

Going down those open stairways was the most frightened I’ve ever felt. The fear shocked me because I’m normally not a fearful person.

I was comforted knowing I wasn’t the only one who took a long breather between flights. And there were others who had to be talked up or down inch by inch. I instead had a personal photographer who documented my experience.

I breathed a sigh of relief when I got past those flights of open stairs and scampered down the spiral steps to the bottom.

As we left the tower it sounded like the organ tuner was putting the pipes through their paces. We found a seat in the vestibule and listened until my palms dried and my heart rate returned to normal.

I wrote before that we don’t know exactly where in Transylvania Jack’s grandmother was born. But as we listened I imagined that she may have sat in this church and heard this organ over a century ago.

As we drove closer to the Carpathian mountains Jack grew more and more concerned about the condition of our front tires. They passed inspection before we left the UK but Jack wants more tread before we start climbing mountains. He wants Michelin CrossClimate M&S tires and he will not be denied. Why we didn’t do this in a place where we speak the language I don’t know but the search was on for specific tires in a specific size somewhere nearby in Transylvania.

As luck would have it we found a Michelin dealer on our route. We walked in and showed them a screenshot of what we wanted. The man shook his head. They don’t have them. No surprise there.

“Can you get them? How long would it take?” I asked. We’re in a nice place. I figured we could wait a few days or a week.

He thought for a moment and shrugged.

“One hour?” he guessed.

Sold!

We settled into the customer lounge and before long Escape Velocity had two new front shoes. We both feel safer and Jack says she handles better, too.

We’ve looked forward to visiting Transylvania for a long time and now we’re finally here. We’re in Sibiu, the former Hermannstadt, settled by Saxons in the 12th century. The Saxons were the first wave of Germans to lay claim to these parts, long before the Donauschwaben were sent down the Danube in the 18th century. And just as Jack’s paternal grandfather was part of the Donauschwaben migration, his grandmother was what’s called a Transylvanian Saxon, descended from those early migrants from Saxony as well as Luxembourg, Belgium, and Lorainne. Unfortunately, we don’t know exactly what village she was from so we won’t be searching graveyards for her forefathers, but we’re happy just to explore the area she was born in.

Sibiu, as Hermannstadt, was once the capital of Transylvania and it’s grand and beautiful.

On this sunny day we enjoyed street performers and buskers as we explored the city.

There’s a lower town and an upper town. The upper town is the old city center with most of the historic buildings. The lower town holds colorful houses and remnants of the city walls and defensive towers.

The centerpiece of the upper town is the magnificent gothic Evangelical Cathedral of St. Mary, with its seven-level 73 meter tower, the second tallest in Romania. I think you can guess where we’re headed next.

We have long anticipated visiting the Romanian village that Jack’s family called home after their journey down the Danube in the 1770s, and from which his grandfather emigrated in the early 1900s. I had a list of ancestors who are buried there and we hope to find their graves.

We found the Catholic cemetery and parked at the gate on a brutally hot day. It was the beginning of an intense heat wave that would last for weeks and affect most of Europe.

This region, known as the Banat, was previously under Austro-Hungarian, then Hungarian rule before being awarded to Romania after World War I. Notice, however, that the inscription at the top of the gate is in German. The area was inhabited by ethnic Germans, including Jack’s family, for centuries.

The cemetery is in poor condition and difficult to walk around in places. As soon as we entered the gate we found stones with the family names we were seeking but not yet the specific ones.

We could only stay out in the heat for a half hour or so before taking shelter in the shade or back at the van.

While we were having lunch in our campervan a Roma woman walked toward the gate carrying a bucket. She stopped at our open door and put her hand out for money. We honestly didn’t have a farthing because we’d just left Hungary and hadn’t yet found an ATM for Romanian currency. We shook our heads and indicated “No.” She didn’t react and just moved on. Jack said her begging gestures seemed automatic and well-rehearsed. A few minutes later she came out of the cemetery and her bucket was now filled with water from the tap in the graveyard. She walked past us without a glance and crossed the street. Presumably she lives in a house with no running water.

We found a row of stones bearing the name Schütz, the original family surname. In the dialect spoken here it sounds like “Shits” which obviously doesn’t go over well in America. Jack’s grandfather was encouraged to change it to Schulz when he became a citizen in 1915. (I tried calling Jack “Schitzi” but it didn’t stick.)

We spent the better part of two days trying to read every stone in the cemetery. The stones are very deteriorated and the inscriptions are nearly impossible to make out. In places they were completely encased in ivy that we both tried to tear off so we could make out a name and date.

We aren’t sure if we found the specific people we were looking for because while we could usually make out a surname, we couldn’t be sure of the first name or the dates.

We are sure, however, that this plot of ground holds the remains of generations of Jack’s ancestors and their neighbors. I’ve read the parish records of this village. I feel like I know these people. Seeing their final resting place brought the history of the village to life.

We left Bogarosch and drove to Timisoara, the county seat, to visit the Banat Village Museum.

We parked in what little shade we could find with our campervan door open and a young man out for a run stopped to say hello. Noting our UK license plate he asked it we were British.

“American,” we told him, “in a UK van.”

Turns out he’s German and his parents are Donauschwaben and left Romania in the 1990s for Germany. The history of Germans here runs deep.

We were excited to visit the museum but with our usual luck it was closed, not just for the day but for an entire long weekend for a special event.

The guard at the gate took pity on us when we told him we’d come all the way from the US to visit and he let us in to see the historic houses.

These are original, although certainly repaired and restored, and they helped us visualize the life Jack’s ancestors lived.

The house below is from the 18th century, so would have been like the original homes in the Banat after the migration. I’m not sure that chimney is up to code.

This one from the 19th century is a step up from the crude timber house. As the village prospered their dwellings grew larger and more comfortable.

We enjoyed exploring the buildings and we appreciated the information plaques in English. It was a disappointment that we couldn’t enter the rest of the museum but we were grateful to the guard who let us in at least to this part.

We had one more stop to make before we left the Banat.

After Jack’s grandfather and his sisters emigrated to America, their parents, Jack’s great-grandparents, moved to a neighboring village, and presumably that’s where they died. I spent years trying to find where they were buried but never found a burial record. As a last resort we drove to the village and walked the graveyard. Since all the parish records are so complete and residents so well documented from birth, through marriage, to death and burial, I didn’t hold out much hope of finding them. But we had to try.

This graveyard is smaller and in worse shape than the first one but we did our best to read the graves before surrendering to the blistering heat.

This marks the end of the trail of Jack’s paternal ancestors. Well, not really, but we’ll take up the journey of another branch a little later. Now we just want to get somewhere cooler and see something of Romania that isn’t a graveyard.

Our wet Slovakian weather continued and glued us to the inside of the van waiting for sunshine.

Eventually Jack got bored and said we may as well be driving so we continued south through more Pennsylvania look-alike terrain.

As we approached the Hungarian border the sky suddenly brightened and so did we.

Where we can park the van makes a big difference in how we experience a city. In Budapest we found the perfect place on the edge of the city and near both the bus and the metro. In minutes we were at stop #1 on the self-guided audio tour I downloaded. This has been my approach here in Europe. If there’s a free walking tour we take that, or if there’s a free-to-download audio guide we do that.

We started with a walk through an enormous city park where we searched for statues of Bela Lugosi, George Washington and a tiny Dracula.

We appreciated the beautiful weather after the rain we’d had the last few days.

Budapest is huge and there’s more than you could possibly see in a year, let alone a day, but top of my list was the central market, a restored Neolithic hall where I could have spent a week and a lot of money. Markets are always my happy place.

Jack indulges my love of markets but he does occasionally need to be fueled with coffee and a pastry. We found this fun cafe with a choice of international brews. We didn’t do a taste test but we did rest our legs for the next stint.

Why is there a statue of TV detective Columbo in the middle of Budapest?

We wanted to visit the Holocaust Memorial Park but the area was closed for security reasons and we could only photograph the Emanuel Tree through the fence. Each leaf bears the name of a local Holocaust victim and I’m disappointed we didn’t get to see it close up.

Much of our visit to Budapest was about finding public art. We sought out this memorial to Swiss diplomat Carl Lutz who saved more than 60,000 Jews from the Nazis by creating safe houses and providing transit documents. He was awarded “Righteous Among the Nations” by the state of Israel.

Oh sure, we should be eating traditional Hungarian food, but when we find eggs Benedict, we have to go for it.

There were so many more places we wanted to visit in Budapest but our feet gave out before our desire to see them all. Down at the river we thought we might book a sunset cruise but it was right out of our budget. So we settled for a beer.

Prague, Krakow, Budapest. We’ve loved them all and they all deserve more than a quick visit. Some day maybe we’ll be back. But the calendar reminds us we have a long way to go and a dwindling number of Schengen days to get there.

We drove south and parked in a beautiful field. Tomorrow we head for the Romanian border.

We cannot get by Auschwitz. We should not even try, as great as the temptation is, because Auschwitz belongs to us, is branded into our history, and – to our benefit! – has made possible an insight that could be summarized as, ‘Now we finally know ourselves.’

Gunter Grass

I don’t know what I can say about visiting Auschwitz — or any Nazi death camp — that hasn’t already been said. We went out of a sense of duty to bear witness and we knew it wouldn’t be easy.

Entrance is free but you must book a time slot. You can explore on your own or pay for a guided tour in one of 20 different languages. We chose the tour, and it was helpful to be escorted around the enormous grounds to specific buildings and displays. However, we didn’t learn more from the guide than we already knew about the Holocaust and the death camps. The true value of visiting is to experience firsthand the place we’ve seen so many times in newsreel footage and movies.

As we entered through the famous gate I felt a wave of fear and sadness and it stayed with me even after we walked outside hours later.

We were immediately struck by the rows of multistory brick buildings. The image we had of Auschwitz was of the low wooden barracks we’d seen on film in countless documentaries and feature films so the brick buildings surprised us. We learned they were originally built as army barracks and were repurposed and modified during construction of the camp.

We followed our guide from building to building. Some housed displays or photographs, some remain as they were as housing or for special purposes. We took very few photos of these often disturbing displays.

The infamous Block 10 was the site of Josef Mengele’s gruesome medical experiments.

I was glad to see these faces. Each was a person with a mother and father, a spouse, a brother, a sister, a child, not just one of six million. I wanted to read all their names, and I lagged behind our group, wanting to acknowledge every one of them. Seeing these expressions of hopelessness, fear, but also often strength, affected me almost more than any other part of our visit.

This is a reconstruction of the death wall, where thousands of prisoners were executed.

We walked and walked, into buildings, through displays, up and down staircases, then out again. The narrow pathways lined with barbed wire were as claustrophobic as the interiors.

We boarded buses for the short drive to Birkenau, the adjacent extermination camp, and this is where we recognized the long low barracks we’d seen so many times on film.

Who hasn’t seen this view? It gave us chills.

Most of the barracks had been destroyed but there are a few remaining to give you a clear picture of the living conditions.

We ended at the ruin of one of the gas chambers, destroyed by the Nazis when they evacuated the camp as the Russian army approached in January 1945. Our guide left us alone with our thoughts for a while.

It was a quiet bus ride back to the visitors center. Jack and I sat on a bench across from the entrance to rest and reflect before walking home.

On our way back to the van we saw where people have left the time slot and language stickers you wear on your tour. We added ours to the lot.

Here’s the part we both can’t fathom: Oświęcim was a thriving community since the Middle Ages, then was largely cleared and destroyed by the Nazis when they built the death camp and the I.G. Farben chemical factory. After the war, after 1.1 million people were murdered at the camps, after the world learned what horrors took place there, people moved back to Oświęcim. They built homes and schools and churches and shops and playgrounds on land that certainly harbors the ashes of victims. They live within meters of the site of incomprehensible atrocities. If you believe in ghosts, they are certainly here. And I can’t imagine calling this place home.

I wrote previously about Jack’s paternal ancestors and their 18th century journey from Lorraine to Romania. My research uncovered one thin branch of that family tree originating in Czechia, right up against the border of Poland. It would be a shame to follow the main branch down the Danube without a side trip to these little villages as well. So we decided to continue East and as long as we’re here, we’ll make the pilgrimage to Auschwitz. We drove to the border.

It’s a joke between us that I claim many of the places we travel to look like Pennsylvania, the US state we both grew up in. Pennsylvania has rolling farmland, hardwood forests, old granite mountains, deep gorges, and green river valleys, so it’s not surprising to see similarities in a lot of places. If you’ve ever been to Pennsylvania, I think you’d agree this looks exactly like Pennsylvania.

We made three or four stops in the villages I’d marked on my map but just like in Lorraine, old graves are few and far between. I knew where Jack’s ancestors had lived and died but we couldn’t find them. We did find a few markers in German so we knew we were in the right place but either Jack’s ancestor didn’t have markers or they were long gone.

I loved this unusual World War I memorial.

The last village we visited was bisected by this very subtle Polish border. We couldn’t even find a graveyard there.

Disappointed and hungry, we stopped at a park for a bite to eat and to plan our next move. It was fun to watch the families enjoying the beach on a beautiful spring day.

This gentleman stood akimbo for the better part of an hour, showing his stuff. Sometimes he turned around and graced us with the posterior view. Eventually he mounted his bicycle and rode away, job done.

We crossed the border into Poland and found a parkup about an hour from Oświęcim, or Auschwitz.

Once again we were near a cemetery and we came across this plaque as we explored the neighborhood. It describes the Death March from Auschwitz in January 1945 and the prisoners who were murdered in this village.

If it’s difficult to read the inscription (click to enlarge) you can find information about the Death March from Auschwitz here.

The villagers buried the victims and erected a memorial which has evolved as the victims have been identified. Many are still only commemorated by the numbers recorded by the parish priest at the time of their burial. It’s a deeply sad place and I spent some time, as I always do at memorials, reading every name, and in this case, number.

Back at the van I visited the Auschwitz-Birkenau website to schedule our visit and English language tour only to find that it was booked solid until the following week. So much for not planning ahead. I booked the next available day and we headed for Krakow. I’d love some pierogi.