There have been so many adventures since I last posted. Covid just kind of took the wind out of my sails to write them all down.
However, with the loss of my beloved travel partner, Cora, I’ve decided to embark on a different sort of adventure – one that isn’t based on towing a trailer. Next week, I leave for Europe!
How did this trip come about? As with most things that I do, it was kind of a spur of the moment decision.
I had a total knee replacement during the summer of 2023. I scheduled it so that it would be after my fiftieth high school reunion and would give me enough time to recover so that I could make the trip to Detroit to celebrate my goddaughter’s wedding in October.
It was a good plan, and it would have worked, too, if I hadn’t fallen getting out of the shower two weeks after the surgery.
The fall could have caused many more problems than it did. As it was, I tore my quads of the operative knee. So, I had more surgery and a much longer recovery. I was strapped into a leg immoblizer and used a walker to get around. It was fortunate for me that the involved leg was my left leg, so I could drive as long as I wasn’t taking any pain killers. This meant that I could still get to appointments and buy groceries and such, so I wan’t completely reliant on others.
The new situation made attending the wedding in Detroit an iffy proposal, and eventually I decided against it. While I could handle driving for fifteen or twenty minutes, the trip to the other side of the state would have been extremely uncomfortable.
Okay, so what does this all have to do with going to Europe? Well, my goddaughter is marrying a man from Greece, and they are having another wedding in Greece in July! I made attending the wedding a goal for recovery. I decided that if I could walk five miles and climb stairs I would be good to go.
I’m pleased to announce that I hit my goals! Nor only was I doing my PT zealously, I loaded up my backpack and wore it as I walked around the neighborhood.
It was inconceivable that I would fly all the way across the Atlantic to just go to one place, so the trip kind of grew.
I figured that after the wedding in July, I would head north to Norway to visit Erik, a friend from my time at MSU back in the ‘80s and his wife, Jen. But then what? Well, I’d never been to Scotland, and my grandmother was born in Edinburgh. Great! That’ll be my next stop!
Wait, not great. That would put in in the city at the beginning of a month-long arts festival – the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Crowds, crowds and more crowds. Uh, that wouldn’t work. I wanted to see where my grandma was from, not this.
So, I decided to put what I was considering doing after Norway at the beginning of the trip.
Now it was time to start booking flights. So many options! Well, one of the options was to stop off in Malta between London and Athens, so I stuck in a visit there, too. I could have gotten a reasonably priced flight from Chicago to Portugal to London at the beginning of the trip, but I figured that I had already been to Portugal, so the extra stop in Malta would be enough “while I’m in the area” travel for this trip.
If you read all the way through this print dense post, kudos to you! I promise more photos in the coming posts.