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This is a journal documenting a month-long trip that my husband and I took to Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, and France during the fall of 1996.
The purpose of this journal is two-fold: one is to act as a diary for my husband and myself, since a thirty-day, five-country tour such as ours was filled so many memories that it is hard to exactly keep track of them all! The second reason is to sum up all the stories we have on our trip to Europe and to share our experiences, not only with friends and family, but with anyone who shows an interest in Europe and travel in general.
It is for this second reason that we have posted our journal here, on our website. If you are daring, read it from start to finish (the most effective way), but if you are simply interested in a particular city or country, you can jump directly to it. If you've been there before, you might enjoy another point of view, and if you haven't, it might convince you to go (or not).
I sincerely hope that you enjoy our experiences --
some of them were wonderful, and some of them were bombs.
BTW: Be sure to read the footnotes (that's where most of the jokes are...
).
Please use the left frame to navigate through the journal. The bottom frame will act as a footnote window, and when a link appears in the text in this window, click on it and the footnote will appear below.
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We nicknamed this section "Travels with Europe" because of our
constant interaction with the published information from
Rick Steves, who hosts
a PBS show of the same name. We are in no way professionally or personally
linked with him, and our adoption of a similiar title is not intended to be any
infringement on his business or personal life. We are merely adopting the adage
that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
Rick Steves even called us in response to a letter which we
sent him with regards to our trip and our use of his literature. I guess that
it was a good thing that we missed his call because then our answering machine
was able to record it for posterity!
Special thanks to Britta Peterson
for scanning in our Europe photographs!
This journal copyright © 1996, 1997 by Tracia Barbieri.
Feel free to invite others to read it, but please do not publish it.