I found the following Travel Journal in a bag of my old stuff given to me by my mother. It’s from my from my Trip to Europe with school in 1998.
I’ve provided it below, unedited And awesome. I’ve left it mostly intact and punctuation preserved for your enjoyment. Go ahead and laugh, I did.
4/16/1998
Books are the legacies that a great genius leaves to mankind which are delivered down from generation to generation as presents to the posterity of those who are yet unborn. ~Joseph Addison, Chicago Cultural Center (former library)
I expect Germany will be like country kind of towns with lots of public transportation and then in the big cities more very modern looking buildings and I expect the people will be very friendly.
4/17/1998
The towns here just kind of end. And then there is nothing for miles. Walking in Rothenburg was like walking back a few centuries. Even in the smallest town, which is where we are staying, there is a bus stop.
4/18/1998
Today we went to Dachau. It was interesting. There were many more concentration camps than I thought there were. I guess we only hear of the big ones. I also learned that Dachau’s gas chambers were never used to kill anyone. The gas chambers at Dachau were never used and nobody knows why. It was strange being at one of the Nazi concentration camps where people actually died by the hundreds.
4/19/1998
We had to get up at 5:45 this morning which meant I got about 5hrs of sleep. That stunk. We headed out to Neuschwanstein, Ludwig II‘s castle. When we got there we hiked up the mountain to the castle and toward it. After touring the castle we went up on the bridge that was a few hundred feet high.
4/20/1998
Today was travel day. We have to go to Venice which is about an 8hr trip but we stopped a lot along the way. Our travel plans were sort of changed because of some snow conditions. Instead of going to Innsbruck on the way to Venice we stopped at Salzburg. That was just as good because Mr Stoker lived there for a while and showed us around quite a bit. I bought some spoons there while shopping and a chocolate pretzel which was very good but was so rich I could only eat 1/2 of it. When we got to Venice it was suppertime and we had pasta and then some viel stuff hat I didn’t like at all. After all that just our group went out and walked around the town we were staying in (not Venice but close).
4/21/1998
Today was the best shopping day so far. When we got up we ate (the same thing for the 6th time in a row) and then took the bus to a boat. When we got to the boat we had to wait about 10 minutes before they got started. Then it was about a 15min ride. After that we took a 2hr tour around Venice and saw the “sights.” I imagined Venice to be much better than it was, but it was really a dump. But I suppose if you build a city on top of water it will tend to do that. We had freetime for about 6hrs and then went back to the hotel. The worst part about the day was it rained for most of it. In Venice it normally is quite whet though, so… They even have planks a foot off the ground to walk on in case what they call a (double high tide) happens.
4/22/1998
This morning we left from Venice for Verona and then on to Lucerne. Today for once it’s not raining. Big surprise! It’s travel day and it’s not raining because we’re not doing anything. It took about 10hrs to get from Venice to Lucerne. I only got about 1hr of sleep on the bus. When we got to Luzern nothing really happened, we ate then hung out for a while and went to sleep.
That’s it. Which is really sad, because Lucerne was my favorite part of the trip. I think Switzerland really spoke to the outdoorsman in me. This makes me wish I had kept a real journal of everything.
Randy Aldrich 