Books

We will have 10 cu.ft. of space for all our belongings and camping gear in the Renault.  I'm thinking of calling it "the falcon". . . ."the Millennium Falcon!"  I know, I know, it's been taken. . .but it fits so well.  We'll see.  10 ft. doesn't leave room for an extensive library, and we'll surely want to collect a few tomes along the way.  So what is most important?  Here's the current list:
1.  History's Timeline, a 40,000 Year Chronology of Civilization.  True to its name, the book crams into 250
     small pages of tables and short paragraphs, everything from the Etruscans to the current energy crisis.
     When we see a ruin attributed to the "Jacobite Rebellion" or a theatre dating from the "time of the 6th   
     crusade," I'd like to be able to read a bit about it, without hauling around a laptop and charger, and   
     looking for a WiFi spot.
2.  Europe Through the Backdoor, by Rick Steves.  My current copy is 2006.  I'll pick up a new one soon.
     His travel philosophy has always been mine . . .and as prices for all travel has risen, including rooms, he
     seems to have come around to giving camping the recognition it deserves.  I doubt he personally has
     done, or will do, a great deal of camping, but at least now he writes about it.
3.  Europe on a Shoestring, from Lonely Planet.  The days of "Europe on $5 a Day" are long gone.  In fact,
     we're thinking more along the lines of $50 a day after transportation.  The Shoestring book has 1300 thin
     pages, detailing a good bit of information on all 18 countries we plan to visit. . .and a great deal more.
4   Camping Europe , by Carol Mickelsen.  General touring information. and most importantly, a listing of
     campgrounds or "campings" as they're often called overseas.  I had a similar book 25 years ago that was
     set up for Eurail travel.  It described each rail station and the public buses and trolleys that would get you
     to the campground in that city or town.  It was the only book we carried.  Seemed to be published only
     that one year.
5. Europe Road Atlas, AAA,  Mine is 10 years old, so we'll have a crisp new copy as we begin this
    adventure.  It will be interesting to discover how much we'll use it, with the GPS along.  Between the two,
    we should be lost only half of the time!
These are the five books to which we've narrowed our choices.  Additionally we are each reading a novel of some kind, perhaps scripts for plays we're considering for the fall season at the university, and always a crossword book for those layovers, ferry crossings, and rainy days.  I haven't mentioned it to Jody just yet, but we probably won't have room for her beloved crossword dictionary.  Please don't tell her!

March 21 - The Oliver Syndrome?

"Please Sir, May I have some more?"  No matter the length of the trip, it seems we always wonder what wonderful thing or person might be . . ."just around the next bend."  When we rode the Harley up the continental divide through six states. . .we were two days ahead of schedule in Glacier Park.  So, on to Waterton Lakes, and then Banff, and then finally we did a 180 and headed back by way of Sturgis after seing the Columbia Ice Fields.  We always want "some more, please!" 

Think I'll call it the "Oliver Syndrome."

That feeling returned last night as I read a small article in the new National Geographic Traveler, about the Dordogne area in France.  It told of the 147 prehistoric along the Vezere Valley including the "troglodyte cliff shelters of LaRoque Saint-Christophe and the 17,000 year old cave paintings at Grotte de Font-de-Gaume."  Checking Google map, and the atlas, the "Dordogne" is about 250 miles further south than the route down the Loire valley I'd been planning,  For a Texan, a 500 mile detour is nothing special, but that's in  the trip's first week.  What's to come?

The Ides of March

The calendar pages are flipping and the clock is ticking as departure time nears.  Received my new International Driving Permit the other day.  Seems so odd to be certified "able to drive" by the AAA.  Rather like being deemed  capable of  flying an aircraft . . .by the Audubon Society.  We continue to examine the question of telephone use in Europe.  We'd like to be able to make a call home to the states on occasion, be readily able to receive an emergency call at any time, and be able to prowl the web for info on all kinds of things, including but not limited to, campgrounds.  AT&T has a lot of options.  It seems as though we might take my IPhone and set it on "Airplane" to allow it to operate in WiFi areas only, and avoid coming home to a ridiculous phone bill.  Will continue looking into it.

Got a message today from the PQ people.  We're invited to join in a theatrical event that involves moving into an old building in downtown Prague.  "Eating, living, and sleeping" with a bunch of other theatre folks for two weeks - culminating in three days of performance.  I tried to tell Jody it could save us two weeks of campground fees.  She told me to have a good time. . . .and to give her the car keys.  So much for artistic endeavors!

March 9^th - Outside of three fixed points, Paris, Prague, and Athens, our itinerary is largely guided by two lists we check often. The first is the UNESCO Heritage sites of special cultural or physical significance, while the second is PERSPECTIV - ASSOCIATION OF HISTORIC THEATRES IN EUROPE which lists theatres built between about 1500 and 1900. In order to explore as many of these sites as possible we are planning an literary that looks like this:
Paris - Prague - Athens - Distances
Paris to :                          Total:
Tours 148
Nantes 163
Michel St. Mont 124        435
Le Have
Calais
Amsterdam 521                956
Hamburg 290
Kolding 152
Copenhagen 144             1542
Berlin 356
Prague 223                      2121
Nurenburg 185
Regensburg 71
Munich 79
Vienna 270                      2726
Budapest 151
Zagreb 215
Ljubljana 103                   3195
Dubrovnic 482
Skopje 310
Thessaloniki 258
Meteora 133
Athens 233                       4611
Kalamata 160
Igoumenitsa 322
Ferry to Brindisi
Palermo 757                     5850
Salerno 417
La Spezia 412
Innsbruck 320
Bregenz 116
Geneva 246
Reims 282
Paris 140                                  
Total  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7,783

March 4, 2011, Here it is, and the second tentative step of the trip has been taken. We put a deposit down on the car, a Renault Wind. France stiffly taxes its own citizens when buying a new car, but an American can buy one without the tax. He can use the new car for up to 6 months, and then sell it back to the company for about the cost of having rented it. The Frenchman then can buy the car without the stiff tax, because it is now classified as “used.” It seems everyone but the French government comes out well. The “Wind” is a two-seat roadster with a hard retractable top:

Ours purports to be a 100 hp, 1.6 liter, turbocharged, 5 speed with 10 cu. ft. of luggage space. After hauling all of our gear on the bike to Canada and back, we think we can fit everything into that sized trunk. Our deal with Renault Eurodrive is from 5/30 to 8/8 or 71 days. The first 21 days runs $1,999. The additional 50 days are $1.150 - or $23 a day. Over-all, it is $33 a day. That looks to be about the beginning price for rentals, before they begin adding insurance and other fees. None of the rental companies are willing to work a deal through all 16 or 17 countries we have in mind, especially in eastern Europe.

It seems we received a brochure in the mail from USITT about a trip they were sponsoring for the Prague Quadrennial in the summer of 2011. Their trip began with a flight to Greece, then Turkey and then up to Prague in the space of a couple of weeks. I said something like, “For that kind of money, I think we could do a much better and more extensive trip!” I’m quite sure when we began thinking about this “Prague Trip;” probably sometime around Thanksgiving. Neither of us would be likely to have any summer teaching, the economy being what it is. The PQ  begins near the end of the third summer week. It seems we might as well try to leave as soon as possible and see something of western Europe before Prague. Camping is a given. So the choice of car or train quickly resolved itself to a car. All three French car manufacturers have a “purchase/buy-back” plan, and for a two-month trip, it seems to be the way to go. Probably a Renault Wind, a two-seat roadster with a retractable hard top and 10 cu.ft. of space for the gear, at least that’s what’s got my attention at the moment.

Thursday, February 24^th. Outside of the purchase of a GPS with a European data base, we just made the first big expenditure tonight. There’s no exaggerating the amount of time we’ve spent online shopping for the flight to Paris, where we pick up the car and the trip begins. For a month or so, it looked like LOT, the Polish airline, would be the way to go. . .and we’d touch down first in Warsaw. But, only moments ago, and after months of watching the fares edge up, we nailed Iberian, the Spanish outfit, for nearly $200 less than the Poles! Now we’re in it for sure!