Tallinn, the capital city of Estonia, is 55 miles due south and just three hours by ferry from Helsinki, Finland. In fact, it may not feel too different from Helsinki at first, because Tallinn entertains a lot of Finnish visitors, especially of the bridal party and groom’s get-away sort. The next biggest group of visitors […]
The ceiling of the Church of the Holy Name of Jesus in Wroclaw, Poland is a cacophony of color, which is putting sort of mildly. One wonders what goes on in the mind of artists who pull off things like this. Is it ecstasy, or pure technique? And how exactly do you do a rough […]
The Jewish Cemetery in Warsaw is a bit of a surprise. In the middle of the city that once had 300,000 Jews who had been there for centuries, it’s now almost taken on the character of a ruin. It was established in the early 19th Century and has over 200,000 headstones. But after the Holocaust […]
One of the many cool things about Stockholm is the architecture. Stockholm architecture has a style similar to other northern cities. And, it’s got color. There are lots of blues and yellows, like the Swedish flag, for example. And colorful architecture is important in Stockholm. Because for the most part, the weather is gray, gray, […]
We were wandering around Stockholm when we were prevented from crossing the street by a couple of traffic cops. We could see down the street a ways that a group of horsemen in blue uniforms were forming up for something, but since there wasn’t any big parade scheduled, or any holiday that we were aware […]
We flew from Helsinki up to Inari, Finland for a few reasons. We’d been in cities too long. And it was above the Arctic Circle, which was a first for us. We wanted the midnight sun, and we got it. Just across from where we were staying was the large, deep and cold looking Lake […]
We make a point of visiting all Unesco World Heritage sites that are within easy reach of where we are. So, we took a bus from our central Wroclaw hotel out to the Centennial Hall on the edge of Wroclaw. We hadn’t done much research into what we would see, so, with no expectations, we […]
It dawned one of those sniveling gray days we’ve gotten used to since we’ve been in northern Europe. By the time the tour van arrived to pick us up at 7:30, it was raining steadily. It let up briefly on the one hour drive to from Krakow to Auschwitz, but by the time we arrived […]
We had never heard of the Rumbula Massacre until we visited the Latvian Museum of the Occupation in Riga. (Great museum, terrible website, btw.) The museum itself is an eye opener to the terror the Latvian people were subjected to by both the Soviets and the Germans during and after World War II. The museum […]
Dave Ritsema, unlike some of the non-stop travelers we’ve interviewed, has created for himself and his wife, Linda, an excellent launching pad for travel. He says he got the travel bug when he was in high school and performed in Holland one summer with a singing group, in coffee houses and parking lot tents. But […]
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