This will mostly be a lot of reading on your part because the pictures we took were not very clear and it gives the impression Europe is a dark and dreary place which is not true, so just bear with me, over the next 2 or 3 days and I will tell you all about a month in 12 different countries, and we only got lost from each other 1 time.
It all started out in May of 1982 when I went with Mom to her "Daughters of the Utah Pioneers" meeting, where she was giving the history of her grandfather Mads C. Anderson, which I had written for her. After the meeting was over a lady came up and told her "how she had enjoyed her history and how her own mother had always wanted to go to Denmark and visit with her relatives that she had never met, but she had died, and how she and her sister had taken the insurance money her mother had left and made a trip to Denmark. They had really enjoyed the trip and had met these same relatives."
She said more but it is not important. I went home fuming! I was so angry because it wasn't she and her sister that had wanted to go to Denmark, it was her mother that wanted to go and all she got to do was pay for their trip. Anyway I think Kent just got tired of my complaining and fuming because he said "I'll tell you what, tell your brothers and sister to be a little generous with gifts to your mother, and make them cash and I'll pay for her and your plane trips over and back next year."
The next Sunday, Gary & Gwen, Dennis & Milly, Pat and Kent & I were all out to Mom and Dads for dinner and I posed this same thing to all of them. Gary and Dennis both said they would pay 1/2 of her Eurail Pass and Pat said she would give her $1,000.00 (she had just sold her mobile home and got that amount over what she had expected), so why did we have to wait until next year? Why couldn't we go as soon as we could get our passports? The very next day we went down town to fill out the applicatiions for our passports and go to Murdock Travel Bureau to make arrangements for our trip which was going to be within the next couple of months. Mont and Mike each gave her some cash and she had a little bit saved so we had plenty of money for moderate hotel rooms and meals if we kept to a budget.
On about July 20, 1982 we enplaned for Europe with Dennis shaking his head and saying "you girls are going to get lost" and my replying "you can't be lost if you don't know where you are going". The country we went into 1st was Bergen, Norway, and this is where we learned our most valuable lesson of all time in traveling. We went from the airport to the train station and there was some people from somewhere in the U.S.A. that told us of this neat plan. NEVER TAKE YOUR LUGGAGE OUT OF THE TRAIN DEPOT until the day you are going back home and have to transfer it from the train station to the airport. have a backpack or a couple of cloth carry on bags you can carry all the time, put a couple of changes of clothes in there and transfer all your bags a couple or three days down the line. Since we could see our luggage as a big big problem we decided to try it. We just transfered our luggage to Copenhagen, Denmark after taking 2 days worth of clothing and 4 days of underwear out and putting in our little carry ons. We decided we could just wash out our blouses at night and get several days wear out of them. We just needed a small bottle of laundry detergent which we picked up a local market. We ended up doing this all the way to Frankfurt, Germany and it worked just great. We would just get to the train station, take out our luggage, put in our dirty clothes and any thing we had bought along the way take out clean clothes and ship them on to the next destination 3 or 4 days hence.
Right up front I will tell you that food was very expensive over there, and we even had a way of saving something there. We always checked into hotels that had breakfast served with the room, I suppose they were the typical bed and breakfast inns. All but a very few had very sufficient breakfasts and we would just keep our great big hard rolls and some cheese and put in our carry on bags and eat for lunch and then all we had to do was buy our dinner.
The countries we traveled through and usually spent at least one night was Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Germany, Holland, Belgium, Luxemborg, France, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, many we spent 2 or 3 nights and flew back out of Frankfurt, Germany. Stay with me until tomorrow and I will take you on some experiences we had in Europe.
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