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.
“Please don’t jump in the canal.” One wonders what shenanigans prompted the posting of this sign.
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.
I’m concentrating hard, having a long conversation in German, a language stored in a dusty corner of my memory.
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.
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.
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.
Now that we’re road legal and with a new and improved propane system on board, it’s time to cross the Irish Sea and make our way south. We planned to take the ferry back to Scotland and visit another sailing friend on our way to Dover but it turns out our friend is off traveling too, so that route makes no sense. We did some quick time-distance-cost calculations and decided instead to take the ferry from Belfast all the way to Liverpool, an 8-hour sea journey that cuts off some driving time but also gives us an opportunity to stare at the sea for hours and look for dolphins.
It’s been a year since we coaxed Escape Velocity onto a ferry but she didn’t mind one bit, even after having to do a delicate backup maneuver to slot between two giant trucks.
Eight hours is a long time on a ferry and we batted around getting a cabin for the crossing but in the end decided instead on the Plus Lounge, with an all day buffet of snacks and beverages and comfy seating just below the bridge.
Jack wasted no time ordering his favorite breakfast.
It was a gloomy day so not the best sea views we’ve ever seen, and sadly no dolphins, but we enjoyed it anyway and ate our fill of the mostly healthy snacks.
As usual we had no plan on arrival but a symbol on the map intrigued me and before long we were off to Wales.
What caught my eye was the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct, the longest in Britain and the highest in the world. That’s certainly worth a detour. (Is it a detour if you aren’t following a specific route?) It wasn’t the nicest weather the UK can offer up but it wasn’t raining and for that we were grateful.
The aqueduct carries the Llangollen Canal over the River Dee on a stone and cast iron structure with 18 arches. It’s 12 feet wide and 5 feet deep and 126 feet above the river. There’s a towpath along one side, which we walked.
I have a perfectly reasonable fear of heights but despite the palmsweat I made it all the way across and back again with barely a whimper. I even looked down once in a while.
The aqueduct is quite the engineering feat and it’s another UNESCO site for us to tick. After watching the boats and paddlers for a while we chatted with the volunteers in the visitors center, had some ice cream, and continued on our way. Jack is on a mission.
Ten years ago today while on passage to French Polynesia the unimaginable happened and a catastrophic rigging failure brought down our mast. We were 450 nautical miles from land with no way to carry on. Luckily we were not injured and aside from the loss of the rig, the boat was still sound. We limped back to the Galapagos on our tiny engines and eventually to Costa Rica where six months later we were rerigged. The giant lemons life threw at us that day gave us the lemonade of a year in Central America and the gift of new friends and cousins we hadn’t met before. Almost exactly a year after the dismasting we finally made landfall in the Marquesas. We still count that day as one of the best ever. We hope we will always carry on.
You can read the original account of the dismasting and our recovery starting here.
As the days ticked by I kept looking for an affordable flight back to Dublin to rejoin our campervan and get ready to cross the English channel to Europe. Flying from Kochi doesn’t offer the best options and I explored other airline hub cities for better departure times and layovers. I wasn’t having any luck until late one night out of the blue I found an unheard of price for Kochi – Dublin onEtihad Business Class for only a little more than the best economy fares I was finding. Not only was the price suspiciously low, but the connecting city was Abu Dhabi instead of Dubai, and with a long layover. I quickly checked to see if we could leave the airport during the layover. Yes, we could. Sold.
We were sad to leave India. We came not knowing what to expect traveling on our own through a country often portrayed as chaotic and depressing, and fell in love with the people, the culture, the history, the energy, and yes, the chaos. We already have a list of other regions we want to visit. But that’ll be next time.
Our first flight was a comfortable four hours to Abu Dhabi. You can’t always leave the airport on a layover without a visa, but the UAE, or at least Abu Dhabi, allows a transit visa for up to 48 hours. I booked a private city tour that would pick us up and drop us off at the airport.
Immigration in Abu Dhabi was easy. We just showed our Dublin boarding passes and we were stamped and through the gate in no time.
By a funny coincidence, our driver and tour guide was from Kochi, exactly where we’d just come from. That made it the perfect transition for us as we gushed about how much we loved India and Kochi at the same time we were learning about and touring the island capital of the UAE.
We began in the jewel of Abu Dhabi, the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque. You enter via an underground plaza that looks suspiciously like a mall, then enter a concourse where a ten minute walk brings you right to the outer perimeter of the mosque. You experience the complex first in closeup rather than at a distance.
The building is exquisite, like the Taj Mahal but newer, bigger, more elaborate. No expense was spared, with only the best materials sourced from all over the world.
There are 82 domes, 4 minarets, and 1192 pillars. The courtyard is the largest marble mosaic in the world, and the carpet in the main prayer room is also the largest in the world. The wool for the carpet is from New Zealand; the marble is from Macedonia, Italy, and India; the chandeliers are German, made with Swarovski crystals. The whole effect is breathtaking and it was hard to stop taking photos and just appreciate the beauty.
I look stupid like this because I didn’t have a head covering with me and rather than rent one our guide suggested I just wear my hoodie while in the mosque. It was hot.
We spent an hour and a half in and around the mosque and it wasn’t nearly enough, but then our guide drove us to this spectacular viewpoint.
I’ve grown to love Islamic architecture, the domes, the minarets, the symmetry. This one is stunning.
We stopped at the date market, a commercial road lined on both sides by purveyors of dates and other dried fruits. I love dates, and in fact all dried fruit, and this shopkeeper gave me lots of different types of dates to taste. Jack and the driver eventually had to tear me away as it was getting dark.
I was trying to decide how many kilos of dates I could fit in our luggage.
For the next few hours we visited more of the beautiful modern architecture of Abu Dhabi. Everything is so new that at one point Jack asked, “Where are your antiquities?”
There aren’t any, apparently. Before oil was discovered in the 1950s the people here were either nomadic, in the interior, or fishermen, on the coast. There’s a Heritage Center that’s usually part of the city tour but our layover was late in the day and it was closed. That’ll be next time.
These three buildings are a Roman Catholic church, a synagogue, and a mosque, all in the same complex.
Our last stop was the Emirates Palace, a luxury hotel, where we walked through the domed lobby and around the wide terraces.
And then it was back to the airport where we still had a few hours before our flight to Dublin.
Because we were flying business class we could spend the rest of our layover in the top rated Etihad lounge. It’s three stories of restaurants, buffets, cocktails, snack bars, showers, private nap rooms, and all manner of comfy and quiet places to wait for your flight. We took full advantage of the food and lounge areas, but forgot to take photos.
And then we were on our way. We said goodbye to six warm countries in six months, and after a couple more great Etihad meals and a long nap in a lie-flat bed, we said hello to cold and rainy Dublin.
I know there are travelers who only take carryon luggage but we always check one bag between us and usually by the time we get out of immigration our bag is on the carousel. Not so in Dublin. The baggage claim area is small and crowded, and far from the concourses, so the baggage took forever to arrive.
And please tell me why people stand right at the carousel waiting for their bags. Stand back, people, and step up when yours comes, ok? Jack had to fight his way to our duffle and the people blocking the carousel were actually angry that he had to reach past them to get it.
Our routine when we arrive in a new country is to find a cafe and orient ourselves with a cuppa. This cafe was right beside the international arrivals door and we enjoyed watching the excited homecomings.
While one of us stays parked at the cafe with the luggage, the other hits the ATM for local currency and gets local SIMs for our phones. Only then do we arrange ground transportation to wherever we’re going, in this case the one-hour bus ride to Newry, where our friend, van caretaker, and concierge Alan will pick us up for the final leg of this long journey.
It’s cold. It’s raining. We question our sanity in returning so soon, before Spring has sprung.
But it’s so good to be home. Alan took great care of Escape Velocity while we were gone, and she’s clean and dry and warm inside. It took all of three days to unpack, reorganize, dig out our warm clothing and stow our travel gear for next time we fly away.
We learned there’s a historic synagogue in Kochi and on our first day exploring the chaotic market Jack spotted it tucked away down a long alley. We were surprised to see a tropical fish shop inside, and the doors to the sanctuary locked.
This is the KadavumbhaghamErnakulamSynagogue, by some accounts the oldest of the synagogues of the Malabar Jews, establish about 1200. It holds only occasional services and to visit you have to make an appointment with the caretaker. We hadn’t.
When we moved over to Fort Kochi we were interested in visiting the other oldest synagogue, and we hired a tuktuk to drive us to the area called Jew Town rather than hoof it in the Kerala steam heat.
We’re at the end of the tourist season, good because there are no crowds, bad because many businesses have already shuttered for the season. Luckily the synagogue is still open for visitors.
This is the Paradesi Synagogue and as you can see, it claims “oldest in the Commonwealth” status.
Before you enter the synagogue there’s a small gallery of drawings, paintings, and maps illustrating the history of the Jews on the Malabar coast. The congregation of this synagogue are descendants of the Sephardis who were expelled from Iberia in 1492. The Malabar Jews and the Sephardic Jews maintained their separate cultural identities. After India gained its independence most of the Malabar Jews emigrated to Israel, and most of Paradesi Jews emigrated to other commonwealth countries, leaving only a small congregation here.
The synagogue is small but lovely, filled with artifacts and antiquities from its long history. The elaborate crystal chandeliers are Belgian; the hand painted blue willow porcelain floor tiles are Chinese. The provenance and significance of nearly every feature is detailed in small plaques.
Kochi is part of the old Indian Ocean trade route that includes Singapore, Malacca, Penang, and Zanzibar. We’ve loved visiting these crossroads for the lasting imprint in architecture and culture left by the Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, English, Arab, and West African traders. Kochi was, and still is, known for spices and textiles.
Back at the beach we explored the back streets, graveyards, and old and new art as our remaining time in India grew short.
Every time we walked to dinner we passed an intriguing sign: Jail of Freedom Struggle. There was an iron gate and a uniformed guard. We decided to see what it’s about.
The guard let us in and walked us around the compound. It’s not clear when the jail was built or who it housed but it’s believed to have been a transit jail where freedom fighters were held before being moved to other facilities. There are eight small cells with concrete slabs for beds. Pretty gruesome.
Back when we were in Delhi our food tour guide told me all the spices except saffron are grown here in Kerala. I figured I should buy some fresh local spices to take back, but knowing the strict customs regulations on bringing plants and plant products across the border I looked for packaged spice mixes that have a better chance of being allowed. I consulted our guesthouse host and he invited his own spice supplier to bring us some samples. She grows and dries the spices and creates her own blends. Everything smelled so good and I bought more than will fit in our tiny campervan, and some for friends and family too.
We bought even more spices from this lady down the street who had our favorite peppercorn mix and an intriguing ginger coffee that I couldn’t pass up.
With only one more day left we watched our last Arabian Sea sunset before dinner, and peered through the fence at a wedding party on our way home. I’ve barely stopped smiling since we got to India and I can’t believe it’s almost time to go.
While we were checking into our new guesthouse the host offered to book seats to a traditional performance that evening. VIP, he said, and he wasn’t kidding. We were ushered to the front row in the theatre of the cultural centre right across the street.
This was a Kathakali music and dance performance, a style of theatre native to this area of southern India and practiced by the Malayali people.
The performance was in three parts. As the audience arrived the two actors were already seated onstage preparing their makeup, a ritual part of Kathakali. There are distinct designs representing individual characters, and each of the colors is symbolic. The actors spent many minutes grinding natural pigments into a paste then applying base and designs with what looked like sticks. There was an unhurried, meditative quality to the process and it went on for an entire hour. The process presents the transformation of an ordinary human into a mythical character right before your eyes.
Makeup done, the actors left the stage and a musician arrived with a large drum and curved drumsticks. As he set up a narrator described the traditions of the art. He explained that to become a Kathakali performer a boy apprentices at a young age for many years to learn the flexibility and muscle control required to portray the ritual emotions.
This lead to part two of the performance, a demonstration of the actor’s craft. As the narrator described each move or emotion, and the musician drummed trance-like rhythms, the actor demonstrated through his eyes, face, hands, and body the coded moves that tell the story.
At one point as he held his face perfectly still his black eyes circled round and round and round and round, fast and faster, accompanied by insistent drumming. It was at once creepy, hypnotic, dazzling. I was so transfixed by the minute control he had of his eyes and the individual muscles in his face that I didn’t even lift my camera. The man was middle aged and pudgy but moved with the strength, balance, and posture of a ballerina. I’m pretty sure I was staring agape at some of the things he could do. This was by far our favorite part of the show.
During the demonstrations the performer interacted with those of us in the front rows, then invited a young boy onstage with him, where he taught a few moves. The kid was a good sport and we gave him a hearty round of applause.
Finally, after a short break the actors appeared in full costume and performed an abbreviated version of one of the classical Kathakali plays. The musician sang a haunting tune and enhanced the story with his drumming.
At the climax of the play the woman, portrayed by the chubby actor, turned away from the audience for a moment, then spun around and shrieked and was revealed to be a demon. It was quite dramatic, even though we’d read the text of the story in the program and knew it was coming.
This was definitely one of the best experiences we’ve had in India and we’ve chided ourselves for not seeking out this kind of cultural show more often in our travels. It’s always exciting to see traditional art forms, particularly music, dance, and theatre.
