Traval Annals

Today, March 12, 2026, I felt like writing about my travels outside the United States. There were a couple of inspirations for this endeavor - one - text conversations with two of my neighbor friends with whom I text/talk each day, and two. the return this week of a best friend from her most recent trip which was to Costa Rica.

One of my text buddies was talking about her trip to Bulgaria with her son and his wife years ago, and my other text buddy was recounting her trips to Germany. from which country her mother had come during WW2, a war bride.

My ex-husband had sent, a few years ago, a thumb drive to which he had moved the 2000 or so photos we had taken in our year traveling around Europe when he was discharged from the US Army in 1970. He had made slides from the photos he took during our travels, when we returned to the US. And he had, since then, converted the slides onto the thumb drive.

From the thumb drive, I extracted 3 or 4 photos of Sophia, Bulgaria, and 3 or 4 of Germany to share with my text friends.

That made me think of the places I have been outside the US in my lifetime: Mexico - In 1965 when I was about 19, a girlfriend with whom I worked at W. B. Saunders Publishing Co. in Philadelphia, and I went to a travel agent and booked a flight to Texas and made a trip to Mexico. We were so young, and beautiful, tall (both of us were 5 feet 8) and blonde, that we were bound to have experiences both good and bad, but I don't want to talk about that. What I want to talk about from each of the places I visited, is the most memorable thing I saw - in terms of landmarks or other sites. In Mexico, it was the PYRAMIDS of Teotijuacan, which are just outside Mexico City and you can take a taxi, or these days, probably a tour bus excursion there. It was a stunning site! It is, to this day, possobly the most memorable site in my travels. The great pyramid (PYramid of the feathered serpent?) is second only to the tallest pyramid in Giza, Egypt. I tried to climb up it but the extreme verticality of it made me dizzy and nausious, and I had to fall to my hands and knees and eventually, to crawl back down. There was a wide avenue with smaller pyramids along each side. I had never known such a thing existed in this continent. It opened a window of curiosity in my mind that I have pursued all my life through reading books and watching documentaries about Mexican history.

In 1970, my ex-husband Michael, after his discharge from the US army, and I set off from Heilbronn, Germany in our converted VW Van to tour 38 countries beginning with the Balkans, down through Turkey and Greece, across the Mediterranean countries, Italy, down to Morocco, and up through Portugal, Spain, France and England. There were a dozen other central European countries mixed in, and before tht big trip, while we were staationed at Wharton Barracks in Heilbronn, we had also traveled a lot around the closer European countries like Denmark, Sweden, Belgium and Austria and Switzerland. In Germany, my favorite spot was Rothenburg, a protected and conserved Medieval Village. That historic architecture just fixed itself into my artistic imagination - living history. I also loved the architecture of Heidelburg and the Christmas Market of Nuremburg. And I can still feel the sensation of my feet sinking into yards of pine needles beneath the dark shade of the Black Forest, and the smell of the pine. In the communist countries, I was stunned by the cultural domination of the Revolution, the giant two story red flags and incredibly backward and ancient look of everything - the lack of prosperity. People drove to work in fields from large communal dwelling places. in buckboard wagons with car tires drawn by horses or oxen. They worked in the fields with hoes and rakes, not tractors - at least then in that time and place. Yugoslavia was still a country then and Sarajevo was a metropolis not unlike Philadelphia, prosperous and genteel with well dressed people and cars and stores! No one could have imagined the hell it was about to devolve into. In that time there wasn't much tourist travel - no CRUISE SHIPS and no crowds anywhere, so when we got to the Acropolis in Greece, for example, we walked the beautiful ruins alone, or with a scattering of other silent admirers, struck by the grandeur. Same thing all over Europe. We were there before the cruise ships disgorged the swarms to flood every place and cause the resentment of locals and mad crowding of every historic site. We saw the collosseum empty. We sat, young and beautiful and innocent of our own glamour, along the Champs Elysees, in Paris, sipping coffee with other young people and the local French people, quietly reading papers or talking discreetly. In England, it was hearing my own language again after two years living in a small town in Germany at a time when almost no one spoke English. I think visiting the places of great literature meant the most to me, Stratford On Avon, Shakespeaare's home town.

In 1998 or thereabouts, when my daughter Lavinia was a teen, along with another mother, Janice, and her teen daughter, Kaylee, a classmate of Lavinia's from Audubon High School, we traveled to Ireland on a two week tour which was without doubt the easiest most comfortable and pleasant vacation trip I have ever had. We were lucky to get the most charming and talented bus tour guide imagineable. He was not only a masterful storyteller, but a beautiful singer, and a man who loved people and his work. I remember seeing the famine graves outside the bus window, and the celtic crosses, the roofless catles and monasteries, and Dublin! I was a great reader of James Joyce and Dublin strolled right into my heart and I fell in love with it. To walk in the courtyard of Trinity College and to see the Book of Kells with my own eyes. These were like miraculous experiences for me.

My traveling days were almost over, but my daughter grew up and left home and I met a man and we dated for a couple of yeqrs and he was a passionate "Geo-cacher" Those are people who hide little messages with coordinates for others to find and log into online databases. It is a kind of scavenger hunt. They leave them in unusual places, sometimes hard to find, sometimes with prizes. Once we found a rather large tin box cache somewhere in one of the state forests and inside were a dozen issues of Weird New Jersey Magazine! Anyhow we drove to Nova Scotia and the thing that sticks to my memory is the tiny villages, houses perched on top of large round boulders beside tiny coves and small fishing boats in bright colors bobbing up and down on the water which lapped against the rocks. In the morning the fog rolled in on the waves and wreathed the world in mystery.

I had been to Nova Scotia before on one of the several trips my ex-husband and I took to Canada, first on our honeymoon to Montreal where the Montreal Expo was being held in 1967. There was a Habitat 67 architectural complex designed by Moshe Safdie created from prefabricated concrete boxes. People still live there. In our drive across Canada, the forests were what I remember best and the Canadian artist hitch-hikers we picked up and brought back to New Jersey with us. Salmon Harris, one of them, is now dead. I saw an obituary for him in a Vancouver artists' directory. I don't know what happened to Christian Schmidts.

I have no interest or desire to travel anymore which may not sound surprising, since I am 80, but interestingly this is the period when two of my best friends are doing all of their traveling: Nancy has been, in the last few years, to Greece, Italy, France, Canada, and in the summer she is going to Croatia! Barbara has just this week come back from Costa Rica and recently went to Turkey with her boyfriend.

I am so old especially by comparison even though those two friends are also 80. I have mobilty issues, bathroom issues, sleeping issues - the list goes on and on. Living day by day is so challenging for me, I couldn't bear to add more challenges to it not to mention having 5 cats and a dog!

I did all my traveling when I was young, and it is enough. I saw all I needed to see.

One last note about my travels; it happens that I visited each country that my ancestors had left to come to America: England, Ireland, Germany and Denmark and Sweden. I will have to say that I did feel oddly at home in Germany and in Ireland! Possibly because I looked like the people who live there, for one thing, and they were nice to me. I didn't feel like a foreigner, though, of course, I was one.

One thing I observed from writing this blog was the difference between travel 50 years ago before the time of the giant cruise ships and now. Fifty years ago, tourists were one or two or a few, not crowds of hundreds. We got there by plane and though there were tours, they cibsisted of a dozen people, not 4000 disgorged from the giant ship like eggs spat out from a giant queen bee into a port city. I remember Nancy telling me there were so many peope at the acropolis it was dagerous to try to walk up because of the chance of being knocked over in the jostling crowds. So I am glad I went when I did and saw what I saw while it was empty and peaceful and accessible and I was young and fit.

Happy Trails where- ever yours may be taking you! wrightj45@yahoo.com