Third Travel Cycle Begins   The essays in this website mark the beginning of our Third Travel Cycle. Our First Travel Cycle, Beverly's and mine, lasted for over three decades, the years of study and employment starting in the late Fifties. It involved frequent European travel and the study of a number of languages, perhaps most notably, studying German in Mainz in 1961-1962. Also rather notable was our 1972 drive in a VW from the West to Moscow and back. This was supplemented by extensive domestic US travel, and ended in 1990, the summer we lived in Spain for eight weeks studying advanced Spanish in Málaga. Given all this activity, little did we realize that year that it was the end of an era.

During the Nineties, our Second Travel Cycle, we ended up taking an unplanned ten-year hiatus from European travel, limiting ourselves to occasional domestic US travel. This sudden change was not intentional, but resulted from personal matters involving change: Beverly's retirement in 1991; mine in 1992; selling in 1993 the Westchester home we'd built eleven years earlier; exchanging in 1994 our three-year-old condominium in Florida for the present larger one, and remodeling it; buying in 1994 our present condominium in Manhattan, and remodeling it. At the end of those years of change came the diagnosis in 1995 of Beverly's illness and its slow advancement. I was convinced at one point in this time that we would never do any major travel again, perhaps not even domestic.

But after the success of some one-week local car trips in our van, and then the success of a one-week cruise in 1999 on the Nordic Empress from New York to Bermuda and back, we got more confident in combining travel and illness (the cruise was "testing the waters" in more ways than one), and we decided to attempt a European trip, specifically by ship because of the wheelchair. Later on, we even conquered air travel with a wheelchair, but at this point, we made plans for 2000 by ship.

It was to be a one-year trial, so we were unaware once again that what we were starting in 2000 that has lasted to the present, turned out to be the current Third Travel Cycle, a period Beverly enjoyed right up to the time of her passing in 2004. This third cycle has finally added world travel beyond Europe and North America, and has included the development of this website to reflect it. But as we started this Third Travel Cycle, there was no doubt in our minds that the first trip, in 2000, would be back to Germany, since, after our many earlier visits there, we had missed all the drama of reunification during the 1990’s. If that trip were successful—and it was--a 2001 trip would be a modified update of our 1966 grand circuit of Britain and Ireland.

Although I traveled with a laptop for the first time ever in 2000, I was so busy with getting us around, doing all the driving, and managing the wheelchair, that I hardly wrote a word, and only continued to maintain the hard-copy travel diary that has covered all our travels from the beginning. But since 2000 started a new travel cycle, it's fitting that the below summary of that first trip be added after the fact, for the sake of completeness. In that way, this website, started in 2005 and based at the start on modified emails to friends and family written en route from 2001 to 2005, now covers the entire Third Travel Cycle, from 2000 on, fulfilling its intention for that cycle as

Germany   We were particularly pleased that we'd set up the Germany trip to sail on two ships of interest, the QE2 eastbound, and the Deutschland westbound, but also were able to tie Europe and North America together since the Deutschland also stopped in England, Ireland, and Canada. On this five-week trip, we left on June 19, the date I've put on this posting, and crossed for the first time on the Queen Elizabeth 2 (Photo by Trondheim Havn) to Southampton. There followed a complex set of rail connections--with wheelchair--that arrival day, via London, then Eurostar to Brussels, Thalys to Köln/Cologne, to Frankfurt. We rented a car and visited, beyond Frankfurt, Wiesbaden and Mainz, where we'd lived and studied.

Heading for Berlin, where we'd been many times, the political changes were nearly incomprehensible to me. Driving in the Harz Mountain area, which had been split by the Iron Curtain, I crossed the former border, whose location I knew, without realizing it. Only by doubling back did the change in pavement color at what was also a state line show its change. A nearby, despised border tower was being preserved as a historical monument, which I suppose, had to be.

We stopped in a number of places, some new, others already visited, all picturesque small towns: Goslar, Wernigerode, Quedlinburg, Halberstadt, Wolfenbüttel. We stopped at the former official Autobahn crossing at Helmstedt-Marienborn to see the abandoned East German buildings. We went to Magdeburg, Dessau, Halle, and in Leipzig ate in the 15C Auerbachs Keller (Photo by Morn the Gorn), famous through Goethe's Faust. We stopped in Weimar, Erfurt and Eisenach, and stayed in Potsdam, adjacent to Berlin, at the Cecilienhof Palace (Photo by Gryffindor), site of the 1945 Potsdam Conference, now a hotel.

We took a side trip to Dresden, and then went back to Berlin to stayed in Berlin Mitte. We were totally amazed that there was so little remaining on the surface of Berlin's former division. I couldn’t believe the change driving north on Friedrichstraße where Checkpoint Charlie had been. Empty wasteland was now a thriving business street once again, but as we had never known it, since that was before our time.

We had contacted old German friends, Gerda and Heinz from near Oldenburg in the north and Ingbert and Ingeborg from the Bodensee/Lake Constance in the south, and had a two-day Berlin visit with them.

Westbound we sailed from Cuxhaven, near Hamburg, on the new Deutschland, where we met friend Jürgen and his family. The previous summer, on our return from Bermuda, we had spotted the Deutschland docked in New York. I never knew a new German ship had been built, and after researching, we booked passage. She doesn’t usually do Transatlantics, but we took what was the first two-week segment of a world cruise, making stops on both sides of the Atlantic.

Plymouth   We stopped first in Plymouth, at the western end of the south coast of England, where among other things, we saw in the old harbour the Mayflower Steps, at the lower left of the picture, which is considered to be close to the site where the so-called Pilgrims sailed on the Mayflower on 6 September 1620 (Photo by RobertBFC at English Wikipedia).

Waterford   We then stopped in southeast Ireland, in Waterford, home of Waterford Crystal (Photo by TR001), such as this trophy. Although we don't often buy souvenirs, as we were leaving Europe at this point, we stopped in a shop and purchased four Waterford Crystal stemmed wine glasses to celebrate the beginning of our Third Travel Cycle.

Canada   After having done transatlantic crossings on more traditional routes that took at least close to a week, it was a lot of fun for us to cross the Atlantic in just three days, although it was between Ireland and Newfoundland. We stopped in Saint John's, then in Sydney NS, Charlottetown PE, and Halifax NS. In Halifax harbor, we saw the celebration for the Tall Ships, which had just arrived from New York. When we finally disembarked in New York, we heard of the Concorde crash in Paris, which had been specifically chartered to bring passengers to the Deutschland to replace those of us getting off.

It was for us a landmark return to European travel after a decade, a moving return to old and new locations in Germany, a Wiedersehen with old friends, the making of new ones, and the start of our Third Travel Cycle, which I now continue on my own.

Acknowledgements   I woke up one morning with the image of how I wanted this website to look, especially the home page with its photos. I presented the ideas to Yefim Furlender and his daughter Vicky Furlender, who, between them, obtained the domain, and set up and designed the website just the way I wanted it, and I thank them for it. In addition to their design input, further critiques and ideas came from my sister Chris DiNapoli. I want to thank Sharon Ledeboer for her permission to use her picture of me on the home page, which involves a story. She took that picture at the Memorial Dinner for Beverly at the entrance of the Fontainbleau Room of the Sofitel Hotel in Minneapolis. I had been pleased that the hotel had set up the Table Assignment Chart in such a beautiful frame. However, it seemed even more fitting for the website to have a picture of Beverly in that frame. I have multiple copies of the picture I call “Beverly in Blue”, taken some time ago while she was still teaching, and Vicky was clever enough to be able to artfully electronically insert Beverly’s picture into that frame, for which I am grateful.

You will find an explanation of my self-coined word "languist", part of “Travelanguist”, in 2005/1 “New Coinages”.

This website and all the Reflections therein are dedicated to my Co-Travelanguist