to the two older girls became part of the pattern. The reader needs to keep in mind that personal computers did not exist, often a typewriter was hard to find, and copy machines were rare, so some letters were handwritten and others typed.
Later both of the older girls were stationed for years in Europe, Debra as an army officer and Jerilyn with her army officer husband. Part of the problem in communication was the lack of cheap telephone calls, something the younger generation probably cannot imagine, so the letters continued.
I found I had forgotten much of what had happened to me and enjoyed reviewing my adventures in the United States and foreign lands. Occasionally I will put the age after a daughter’s name to keep the reader aware of the passage of time .
In reading the stories you will note that money always seemed to concern me, and some of the numbers I mention sound very small. But keep in mind how much the dollar has been devalued over the last forty years. Despite my complaints it should be apparent that we were able to take advantage of our travel opportunities to a large portion of the world, some of it even traveling first class.
Living in foreign countries, traveling alone or with various groups, I have had more contact with the locals than the average tourist who is often sheltered from reality.
When I retired from full-time teaching in 1995, I began writing occasional stories on my travels with a trauma team into disaster areas for the Columbia Daily Tribune and in 1998 began writing a weekly travel column, Venture Bound. I feel that I moved so easily into the role of travel writer because of the experience I had had writing letters to my family.
In this book I include an occasional travel story published in the Tribune some years after the trip. These are based on a daily journal I always kept so I could remember what had happened. Often so much occurs in a short time that I would forget important details if I didn’t make a record of them shortly after they happened.
Please join me in the following pages as I relive some of my adventures from around the world.
I have inserted here a Venture Bound column published in the Columbia Daily Tribune Carla and I wrote because the first letters cover the 1977-78 years in Europe accompanied by our two youngest daughters, Rosie and Stephanie. Our daughters’ recollections will give readers a flavor of what it was like to travel abroad especially with children aged fourteen and twelve.
ADVENTURES TRAVELING WITH OUR CHILDREN
At our recent sixtieth wedding anniversary celebration our four daughters interspersed family memories between songs by the Missing Window trio. We will first share some memories of the two daughters who focused on some of our family travels.
Debra: Of course when we were young, Mom and Dad included us in their adventures. We all remember “Bravery Training.” We took hikes, climbed tall objects, learned to shoot firearms and went camping, boating, and fishing.
I remember one hike in particular when Jerilyn and I were grade school age and came upon a water tower with a ladder that reached the ground. We decided to climb it.
I remember looking down from high up the ladder wondering why Dad hadn’t caught up yet. He was about halfway up when he called that that was far enough. I thought, “Who’s this bravery training for anyway?”
We made it back down and felt pretty good about the job we’d done. That’s when I learned that Dad was not at all fond of looking down from great heights. And while having our feet held, we have leaned out on our backs over a wall—not an easy task—to kiss the Blarney Stone in a castle in Ireland, which is said to give you the gift of gab.
Stephanie: If I may interject here—Dad reminded me of a story this week. When we were going on a hike when I was five years old, I sat down in the middle of the path and moaned, “I am so tired of being toughened in.”
At times I have seen more countries and cathedrals and bridges than I care to remember. I recall one time early one morning, Mom burst into the room where I had spent the night, flung open the shades and asked, “Would you like to go to a museum?”
Well, I was stunned. This may not seem like a strange question, but I had never been asked this before. After I got over the shock, I composed myself and responded that I would rather sleep in. Mom laughed and said, “I was just asking to be polite. Get dressed and let’s go.” Needless to say I never ever fell for that one again!
For me Erma Bombeck sums it up well: “Vacations always sound so great on paper…. The truth is if you do them right, they’re hard work. They’re like an Outward Bound experience with diarrhea. We pay a lot of money to sleep in airports, lug around suitcases twice our body weight, eat food we can‘t identify, and put our lives in the hands of people we have never met before.”
Well, Mom and Dad did it right. It was hard work, but I’m glad they took us with them! But I noticed that when all four of us said, “Cathedrals are impressive, but we don’t want to go to another one!” They did indeed listen.
Wayne and Carla: That stimulated memories: crisis events that turned into favorite family stories, like the time six of us spent five days in a nine-by-nine foot tent under almost continuous rain, with a pool of water outside the tent flap and children who needed to be walked or carried to the restrooms at different inconvenient times. That stimulated us to buy a travel trailer with a built-in toilet and shower.
But that wasn’t all peaches and cream either. On a trip back from Disney World in Florida, our car’s transmission blew up while towing our trailer outside a small town in Georgia on New Year’s Eve. The garage man seeing four wide-eyed little girls decided some of his staff could stay late rebuilding the transmission to make sure we got back on the road.
Especially when we all spent a year in Europe, our girls later recognized that some of what they saw expanded their vision about our wonderful world. Jerilyn, without ever taking a formal course on European history, earned five-hour course credit in college by taking a test.
We enjoyed many peak moments when unexpected things happened: like in Cordova, while we were waiting to enter a museum, a group of Spanish girls broke into spontaneous folk dances, or the time when we were at a rundown castle in England and watched a group of actors in seventeenth century costumes rehearse for a historical reenactment event.
We traveled with the girls before smart phones and television were in cars and had to rely on singing and car games for entertainment. Rosie and Wayne still have fond memories of creating stories as we sped along the highways.
At our anniversary celebration we enjoyed a comment by our niece, Carol Kartje, “Journeys are as meaningful as destinations.”
CHAPTER 1
GERMANY, SUMMER, 1977
Dear Jeril,
We are in a pleasant German village surrounded by fields of grain and small forests. The village, like many in Germany, includes many farmers whose barns and manure piles sit next door to the bank or a modern apartment house. Flowers are everywhere, it is quiet, the air is clear, the temperature is seldom over eighty, and good fresh bread is in the shops—all in all, a good place to relax and do as little as possible.
And that is mostly what I’ve been doing. The last two months in Columbia had been days, nights and weekends of activity, much of it almost frantic. As a result the first four weeks here I slept and read and took an occasional work break. (Actually I teach my classes three days a week.)
We
