So, the travel bug had bitten us and we wanted to do something “exciting”. It was 1998 and we had some time. We knew we wanted to make our 5 year anniversary something bigger, something outside the US, so we started planning and looking at European Travel.

I was born there (in Germany), a child of American parents whose dad was stationed there. We left before I was three.

I was lucky though. My dad was stationed in Germany again after his tour in Vietnam. I was four, that time and enjoyed some experiences that left fragments of memories that have lasted a lifetime. I wanted to recapture and share with Teresa.

Still, we were a bit pensive. First, it was a lot of money. Could we afford it? Second and most important, neither of us spoke another language well. I had studied some languages, taking Spanish and latin in High school, and Teresa had some French, but we were not conversational for sure. We didn’t want to get stuck in a country where we could not speak the language.

Enter Globus, a (mostly) bus tour and a whirlwind trip of a life time. We shopped several tour companies, but this one stood out. It was guided, took us across western Europe hitting 10 countries in 21 days. We would start in London and then onto Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam before turning south again into Germany and Switzerland. From there we would go through Liechtenstein (the smallest country) into Austria and down into Italy before crossing the sea on a ferry to Greece.  All this and we would be in a tour group, so we could not get lost (or could we?).

This solved both the language fear and the cost was reasonable too. We priced out the trip and the airfare and started saving, got our passports and in September, we landed in London.