Karen, my sister, and I bought Eurail passes and toured a lot of northern Europe via backpack and youth hostel. We agreed that Karen would bring her camera and take photos and then she’d get double prints when she got the film developed (maybe at a Fotomat…are you remembering these days) so I would have photos.
In lieu of a journal, I documented the trip on postcards sent to my grandmother and my parents. (They all lived in Albuquerque and I alternated who received the next card so they would share information when they got together.)
I had enough frequent flier miles on the then-new American Airlines AAdvantage program and earned enough miles for two round-trip tickets to Europe. Karen bought the Eurail passes. Our original starting point was Oslo, but then American Airlines opened up flights to Berlin after the wall fell and we were able to change our trip to start in Berlin (then we took an overnight train to Oslo and carried out the trip as originally planned).
In two weeks (July 4-20, 1992), we went to Germany, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Netherlands, and France. We visited Monica in Oslo (a college friend of mine), Doug and Anne Marie in Stockholm (Navy friends of Karen), and the Ekman family in Karlskrona, Sweden (Ingrid and Krister Ekman and their sons Mikael, Torbjorn, and Magnus–we didn’t know them, but Ingrid was a high school exchange student with a friend of mine who made the connection).
We flew over together from Dallas to Berlin, then when the two weeks were up, Karen took a train and a ferry from Paris to London and went back to work. I was still on summer break from teaching and stayed in France to participate in a calligraphy workshop led by Mark Van Stone–a great calligrapher and a great teacher. (Trust me, not all calligraphers can teach.) We spent time at the Louvre and in the town of Avranches getting first-hand looks at medieval manuscripts and codices and workshopped trying our hand at Carolingian calligraphy.
My favorite part of the historical calligraphy tour was the Abbey of Mont Saint Michel. To this day, it’s my favorite place I’ve been to in Europe. According to legend, in 708 the bishop of Avranches, Aubert, had a vision in which the archangel Michael instructed him to build an oratory on the tallest point in the area–a rocky outcrop at the mouth of the Couesnon river. Over time, as sea levels rose, it became surrounded by water and is now classified as a tidal island, becoming fully isolated during high tides. That isolation is probably why it was never conquered or destroyed in the many battles in that region of France over the next millennium. Because Karen went home and I got tired of writing postcards, I don’t have much documentation of that portion of my trip.
Karen captured the trip in photos and text, including photos of my postcards, on her website. I’m not going to rebuild all of that in this blog but instead refer to her site.
(NOTE: Mont Saint Michele photo free to use from simplewikipedia.com, all other photos by Karen Overall, 1972)
