Europe

A side track around a wannabe microstate

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Two weeks ago, Steve and I took the train from San Marino to Rome, where we met our old friend Megan and visited our fifth microstate (the Holy See). From there we flew to Microstate #6: Malta, stayed for three nights, then took a Ryanair flight to Catania in Sicily, the large island off the toe of the Italian boot. We’ve been here for the last 8 days, a significant side track from the theme of this trip; Sicily is not an independent country, though it sure resembles one. It’s been a part of Italy for only 161 years, before that hosting a dizzying succession of cultures and conquerors: Stone Age settlers 5000 to 6000 years ago, North African invaders, Elymians and Carthaginians, Greeks, then Romans, Barbarians, Byzantines, Arabs, Normans, a Holy Roman emperor or two, Austrians, Spaniards, Brits, and finally Garibaldi (hero of Italian unification.) I’m sure I’ve forgotten some. All have left their mark, and for a brief spell after World War II some Sicilians agitated for independence. Had they succeeded, Sicily would have been more a ministate than a micro-one. It’s ten times bigger in area than Luxembourg (which in turn could contain all the 6 smaller European midgets.)

Bottom line: Sicily is a staggeringly old, fairly large, and complex place that I’ve barely begun to comprehend.

To try to gulp down as much as possible, we rented a car at Catania Airport and after spending two nights in Sicily’s second largest city…

The centerpiece of one of Catania’s main piazzas is what surely must be the coolest elephant statue anywhere.

…we hit the road, moving every morning for the next five days. It’s a madcap way to travel, and I don’t recommend it. But it allowed us to cover close to three-quarters of the island’s coastline and glimpse so many wonders, it seemed worth the price in energy. We made it halfway up Mt Etna……which wasn’t erupting but instead was blanketed in fog (thwarting an ascent all the way to the crater). Later that day, we paid a lightning visit to the ancient Greek theater in the lovely resort town of Taormina.

The next day in Syracuse, we paid homage to Archimedes, the local who became the father of modern engineering.

The adjoining town of Ortygia is very beautiful,

The next day we drove to Noto… and Ragusa

An astonishingly hilly place!

Then on to the remains in Agrigento, where one of Sicily’s richest and most powerful Greek cities once prospered.

The 2500-year-old temple in Segesta, which we visited a few days later, was never finished but remains astonishingly well-preserved.

Throughout our travels, Steve rose to the challenges of the road, steering our little Opel Corsa around the hairpin turns…

Like this!

…leading to Erice, maybe my favorite stop on the driving tour.

A medieval town on the top of a hill, it offers views like this.

And wonderful pastries like this, left in the fridge for us by our Airbnb hosts.
This was the view from our private patio there.

Palermo has been a fine and surprisingly finale. It has a reputation for crime, urban decay, and corruption, but in our Airbnb here, which overlooks the main street in the heart of the old city, I’ve loved the energy crackling all around us.

The window in our living room opens onto the central street in the old town.
It was pretty empty when I shot this photo out the window because it was raining.
But Saturday night it was jammed with tables and revelers.
At one point, a thicket of fans gathered to scream with joy and take photos of some actor. (We never found out who it was.)
We’ve seen lots of brides being captured in their finery.

Tomorrow we’ll have to push back from the banquet table, stuffed but hardly sated. I can see how one could feast on Sicily’s offerings for weeks without digesting it all. But we have one more microstate to visit and one more wedding to attend before heading home on Sunday.

Adrenaline-powered travel

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So far this trip has been spectacular. Steve and I both feel great. It will rank among my most satisfying and interesting journeys of all time, I’m already sure. But our transit to Malta was a reminder that travel in the time of Covid is not for the faint-hearted.

Malta, the third-largest of the European microstates, is smack in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea. You can get to it by ferry, and I tried to arrange that. But ferry rides ultimately proved too complicated.

That left airplanes. To get there, I booked us on an Alitalia flight leaving Rome around 5 pm Thursday afternoon (9/23) and arriving in Malta about 6:30 pm. From Malta to Sicily (our next stop), I got seats for us on Ryanair. But then from Sicily to Nice (France), Alitalia once again seemed like the best choice.

I knew Alitalia was iffy. The Italian airline filed for bankruptcy back in 2017, but they’ve managed to continue operating since then. They treated me well in 2020, the first time I had to cancel our microstate trip (because of the pandemic). They ultimately refunded every penny I had paid. This time around, I spent more for refundable Alitalia tickets because I knew things might get snarled up.

The first hint of the coming disaster arrived in my inbox the day we got to Liechtenstein. Alitalia had canceled our morning flight from Rome to Nice, the email informed me, moving us to a late-afternoon flight that would require us spending most of a day in the Rome airport. At least as disturbing: when I went online to look at alternatives, I found a note at the top of the page saying Alitalia would sell no tickets after October 15. That’s how we learned they were finally going out of business.

I scrambled and managed to book flights to Nice on Lufthansa — about the same price, if longer (we’ll have to fly from Sicily to Munich to Nice, requiring almost 6 hours in airports and on planes instead of three and a half.) But since our Alitalia tickets were fully refundable, I had some hope of getting that money back.

This turn of events made me nervous, though, and last Wednesday, the day before our flight to Malta, I made sure to check in and get our Alitalia boarding passes. The flight was on time, the website said, and with the passes in my Apple wallet, I felt relieved.Less than two hours later, while eating what we thought would be our last dinner with Megan, I got another email from Alitalia, this one informing me our flight the next day, for which I had just secured boarding passes, had been canceled. No explanation was offered for why.

How could we get to Malta now? Would our microstate streak be foiled by Italian flakiness? Google Flights didn’t offer any good alternatives, but when I checked the Air Malta website, I found a 10 am flight Friday morning for a fraction of what the Alitalia tickets had cost. Only three seats were left, but I managed to secure two of them for Steve and me. This change in plan required us to cancel the hotel I’d reserved in Malta for Thursday night. Instead we got a room at the hotel near Rome’s airport. Megan was already booked in there to spend the night before her departure on Delta for the US — which coincidentally left at the exact same time as our Air Malta flight: 10 am Friday morning.

In some ways, this change proved fortuitous. It gave us all of Thursday with Megan, and the three of us shared a phenomenally good meal that night at a waterside restaurant near the hotel. Because of concerns over the longer lead time required for a US flight, she decided to take the 6:45 am airport shuttle the next morning, while we would go on the 7:30 one. We said our heartfelt goodbyes in the hotel lobby Thursday night.

I got the first WhatsApp message from her Friday morning, just a moment after we had boarded our 7:30 shuttle bus.

Since our flight was also due to depart at 10, this sent a jolt of adrenaline through my system. Later, we learned that at hundreds of striking air workers were staging a sit-in that morning on the highway between Rome and the airport. To protest EU constraints on the hiring of Alitalia workers by the new carrier that’s scheduled to replace it (called ITA), they reportedly brought a fake coffin draped with European flags and plopped it in front of the airport.

The coffin must have gotten there after we did. Steve and I arrived to find the airport eerily empty. Though Alitalia’s presence had obviously dominated Terminal 1, all human trace of it had vanished: no staff, no passengers.Happily, we found humans behind one Air Malta check-in counter; there we queued up behind maybe a dozen other passengers. When we reached the desk and the stressed-out clerk asked for our proof of vaccination and Maltese Passenger Locator Form (PLF), I felt almost smug showing her the QR codes for both. She unsettled me, however, when she also asked for our VeriFLY clearance for Malta. VeriFLY is a Covid document-verification app that we had downloaded in San Diego. We’d jumped through all its electronic hoops and had gotten a cheery reassurance that we were cleared for travel there. But we’d heard it was no longer required, so we hadn’t checked ours in a while.

When I pulled up the app, a disconcerting message informed me “Needs to be completed!” We protested that we HAD completed it, but the app had somehow forgotten what we’d told it, and besides, we had also just presented our vax proof and PLFs. But the desk clerk was flinty. No green check mark from VeriFLY, no Malta.

Fortunately, we had arrived at the airport with lots of time. So we managed to jump through the VeriFLY hoops again, get our boarding passes……make it through yet another documentation check at the gate……and more upon arrival. My bags were searched more thoroughly than any time in memory. (Oddly, Steve received no such scrutiny.)

In the end we arrived, however, and now I can say unequivocally: it was worth it. But that’s another story.

Free spirits in the world’s oldest republic

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Although my last post was a paean to train travel, we couldn’t take a train to San Marino, the fourth microstate on our tour. A tiny independent realm located roughly a third of the way down the eastern side of the Italian boot, San Marino once was accessible by train. But Allied forces destroyed the line during World War II, and instead of being rebuilt it was replaced with a highway. So most visitors drive to San Marino. The other way to get there is on a bus from Rimini, the nearby Italian city on the coast. Steve and I boarded one of those Sunday afternoon.

Storm clouds drained the color and light from the sky, but after a half hour or so we began to get glimpses of a promontory rising up in the distance: Mt. Titano. It was on that peak that a pious stonecutter from Croatia fled and lived as a hermit at the beginning of the 4th Century. His name was Marinus — later Saint Marinus, aka San Marino.From what I could make out, his beatitude resulted from his being a kindly and inspiring fellow who persuaded lots of people to become Christians. Legend has it that he also miraculously cured the dying son of a local noblewoman, who was so grateful she gave him the mountain and some land around it. San Marino thus enjoys the distinction of being the only country in the world founded by a saint. On his deathbed, Marinus supposedly whispered to his countrymen, “I leave you free of domination by other men.” Repeatedly, Steve and I heard that freedom, independence, and self-reliance continue to be core values of the modern Sammarinese.

That alone might have made me love the place, but San Marino has more going for it — at least the old heart of the community on the top of the mountain. Walled and fortified over the centuries with three massive towers, it’s a daunting place to penetrate even today. Our bus deposited us in a parking lot more than halfway up the promontory, near the base of the old walls. An elevator took us up to a higher level……but then we started trying to follow Google Maps’ directions up the stony warren of streets. We quickly got lost…

Here’s Steve, smiling despite our confusion.

…and for a while were scared we might have to haul our bags up several flights of steep stony stairs.

This photo shows only about a quarter of the total stairs up to the next level.

A policeman finally pointed out a path we could roll up. Here I have to say that if you hate slogging up and down steep inclines (not to mention stony stairs), San Marino might not be your idea of a vacation paradise. But then you would miss out on vistas such as these.We finally made it to our hotel, got a good night’s sleep, and awoke to a wonderland bathed in sunshine. In the tourist office, I was able to buy a stamp:

That’s Oscar, holding in his arms Federico Fellini, who was born in nearby Rimini.

San Marino has its share of museums, churches, and other modern attractions (a torture museum, a vampire museum, a sort of Italian Ripley’s Believe It of Not). Its streets are jammed with shops selling jewelry, leather goods, souvenirs, and startlingly realistic toy guns.None of that interested us much, but we were dazzled by San Marino’s three great towers. This tiny enclave for more than 1700 years avoided being overtaken by those who coveted it (including Cesar Borgia, Napoleon, and various rapacious clergymen and nobles). The story of how that happened is so complicated, it made my eyes cross. Clearly luck had something to do with it; probably good diplomatic skills too. But the towers also deserve a bunch of the credit. One looks just right for locking up Rapunzel.The biggest and oldest tower feels like part fort/part castle.We poked among the nooks and crannies and I reflected that being Rapunzel here might not be so bad, providing one got a room with a view.

We left San Marino Tuesday morning (9/21) and took the bus to the train to Rome. There we had roughly two days in which we visited Vatican City and packed in lots of sightseeing with our old friend Megan (who lives in Rhode Island but coincidentally was in Rome just when we were passing through).

The Vatican is the smallest of all the microstates, and I plan to write a proportionally short post about the time we spent there. But now it’s Friday afternoon (9/24) and we have arrived in Malta after a hair-raising journey. I’ll describe that next.

Liechtenstamped

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Even now, in this time of pandemics and panic, no one checks and stamps passports when you move around between many countries in Europe. In Andorra, Steve and I asked at the tourist office about getting our books stamped, but all the girl at the counter could offer was something that looked designed for children. (We passed.) Luxembourg appeared to be way too cool for faux passport stamps. But Liechtenstein was into it. In the center of Vaduz (the tidy little capital), we saw signs like this.

Around mid-afternoon last Thursday (9/20), Steve and I walked to the Liechtenstein Center and paid a few Swiss francs to get a postage stamp and this souvenir:

A few minutes later, serious rain finally caught up with us for the first time on this trip. We’d been on the road, moving quite a bit. I was tired, and my umbrella offered only partial protection; my feet got very damp. I felt dispirited. We abandoned any further touristic efforts and retreated to the Airbnb apartment in which we were lodging, not far from the center.

These locals were attending the inauguration of a new piece of public art. Vaduz has a LOT of public art. But the ceremonies were in German, and we were getting soaked.

The next day, the world felt renewed: warm and sunny and inviting. Throughout the morning we stockpiled tantalizing glimpses into the strange but pleasant little country that boasts it’s the last remnant in the world of the Holy Roman Empire. It’s also the only country named after the person who bought the place: Prince Johannes Adam I of Liechtenstein (aka Hans the Rich). For centuries, his descendants didn’t actually live in the land bearing their name, but they’re well-entrenched today. The current prince still actively rules the place, and he and his wife, son, daughter-in-law, and four grandkids live in the ostentatious palace that clings to the hillside high above Vaduz.

There it is in the distance.
Another view of the castle, which is closed to the public, being a private dwelling. Note the grapevines in the foreground. You see a lot of those around town.

Probably my most enduring memory of my 24 hours in Liechtenstein will be our ride on the little “train” that once a day tootles around the town.

The operator had installed protective plastic sheets between each row of seats. It gave the ride a slightly psychedelic feeling, which seemed appropriate.

Through earplugs dialed to English, we listened to some minimal commentary and a whole bunch of bouncy Teutonic music. The musical climax was a rousing rendition of the Liechtensteiner Polka. In the city center, we saw vegetable fields and cows munching emerald grass next to the main highway through town.

We also noted many massive buildings that we assumed house the countless companies from all over the world that set up headquarters here in order to decrease their tax burden. (While lower than what those companies would pay elsewhere, that tax money is a significant contributor to Liechtenstein’s current wealth.) The soulless structures share the streets with old homes that could have informed Walt Disney’s vision of Euroquaint.

We had to tear ourselves away around 2 p.m. to catch the bus back to Switzerland, and the train to the Swiss town of Chur, starting point for our Saturday morning ride on one of the most famous trains in the world. But I left with my stamps and the lingering refrain of that unforgettable polka.

Lux

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To those friends (at least 2 of ‘em) who warned we might be bored in Luxembourg, I can only say: no way! Steve and I had some dazzling moments during our stay there (Saturday 9/11 to Wednesday 9/15). They weren’t the kind of offbeat or exciting adventures that make for the most interesting blog posts. But I can say with confidence: if you ever get a chance to visit the Grand Duchy, do not turn it down.

Luxembourg, we learned, is the first country in the world to make all local public transportation free. This is a nice amenity! One of the frictions of traveling in any strange country is figuring out how to pay for the bus or metro or train or whatever. We took a high-speed train from Paris to Luxembourg City, where we walked out the door of the train station and got on a spiffy free tram that took us to the city center. In the center, we stayed in the spare bedroom Airbnb’d by Mohit and Prarabdhe, two Indian Ph.Ds who have permanently moved to Luxembourg. The next day we got on a tram going in the other direction to a transportation hub where we climbed on a free bus that took us out into the countryside. It almost felt like having a private driver at our disposal.

This is a country where people are very good at signs.
On board the free bus to Echternach, a 30-40-minute ride from Luxembourg City.

I can also attest that Luxembourg is a great place for walking and hiking. The center of the capital looks extraordinarily prosperous — no surprise, given that Luxembourg, largest of the 7 microstates on our present tour, is also the country with the highest GDP per capita in Europe. I couldn’t help comparing what it’s like to stroll around Lux City and Antigua, Nicaragua (one of the poorest countries in the world, around which we were strolling just three months ago). In the former, streets and plazas are vacuumed and buffed, not busted up and filthy. Tantalizing shops and restaurants and bars and pastry vendors line the streets instead of tense, hungry looking folks hawking lottery tickets and single cigarettes. On the day of our arrival, well-dressed Luxembourgers jammed the place, ambling, shopping, wining, breakfasting, lunching, and dining.

Built originally as a fortress on a rocky cliff, the city walls command great views of the lower city.

We walked down to the lower part Sunday morning and found postcard views and woodsy paths.

I wanted to visit Luxembourg even before conceiving of our Microstate Tour. What made me think of that was reading Bill Bryson’s hilarious account of hiking the Appalachian Trail (A Walk in the Woods). At one point in it, he compares that challenging trek to hiking in Luxembourg, where he reported being able to sleep in cozy inns after days of making one’s way along glorious trails. I was intrigued, and I learned that one of the most famous byways in Luxembourg is the Mullerthal Trail, which consists of three big multi-day loops. I tried but failed to find the sort of arrangement Bryson had described. Maybe Covid caused the outfitters to shut down, at least temporarily. But I still wanted to squeeze in a bit of Luxembourgian hiking, so I booked us into a sweet little hotel in the charming town of Echternach, a trailhead for both Mullerthal and other local pathways.

This was the view from the outdoor restaurant in front of our hotel. In one corner of the plaza a brass band played tunes such as Rocky Mountain High and Sweet Caroline.

On Monday the weather was glorious, so we tackled an 11-mile outing that included part of Mullerthal 2.

In the Middle Ages, local folks quarried grinding stones at this trailside spot, creating a man-made cave.

We took it easier the next day, exploring short sections of Mullerthal 1 and visiting the touristic highlights of Echternach. Most of these I won’t bore you with. But one I should mention. Echternach is home to the ruins of a villa built by Roman conquerors roughly 2,000 years ago. No walls remain, but all of the foundations are intact, and it’s obvious how magnificent the place once was.The Luxembourgers have built a sweet little museum explaining the site. Alas none of the signs were in English. It didn’t really matter. We didn’t need to read placards to understand that this was one of those small but pleasant wonders you sometimes stumble upon, a bit like the country it’s now part of.

Andorran lightning

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No electrical bolts struck anywhere within earshot of us Thursday, nor did it rain more than a few sprinkles. The lightning instead was the speed with which we toured Andorra, stop #1 on Steve’s and my Grand European Microstate Tour. Barely 60 hours passed from the time we pulled into the underground parking lot of our hotel in Andorra la Vella (the capital) Wednesday afternoon (9/8) to when we sped out of town shortly before dawn two days later. However, we crammed more interesting activities in it than I had thought would be possible.

Before going to Andorra, I’d never given much thought to why France and Spain are two separate countries. Leaving the broad flat planes of southwestern France, then weaving first through verdant foothills, then into one hairpin turn after another was an aha! moment for me. Thickly wooded, the Pyrenees are beyond rugged — rocky and vertiginous as any mountains I’ve seen anywhere. It was suddenly easy to understand why, once Catalonians had staked out this enclave and gotten recognized as an independent fiefdom (in 839), neither France nor Spain lusted for it enough to fight a war over. Isolation has advantages. The Andorran borders have been more stable over the centuries than any other country in Europe.

Happily, the French tollways and all the Andorran roads we traveled on are in superb condition. From the border it took us less than 45 minutes to reach Andorra la Vella. It fills a narrow valley; the mountains surrounding it rise up high and press in close.

Around 77,000 Andorran citizens inhabit the whole country. They welcome roughly 10 million tourists per year, which makes the ratio between residents and visitors the highest in the world. Mostly the tourists come from two reasons: to take advantage of all the mountains (skiing in winter and hiking in the summertime) and/or shop. Andorra’s like a great big duty-free store. I bought nothing except for a stamp (to stick on my notebook), but window-shopping on Andorra la Vella’s main shopping street was entertaining in itself: a parade of storefronts flaunting pricy watches, perfume and cosmetics, running shoes, guns (and Samurai swords!), jewelry, booze, designer clothes… and, of yes, tobacco products. For some reason, tobacco grows well in Andorra; locals have cultivated and exported the noxious leaves since the 1800s. In the lobby of our hotel, I gaped at the first cigarette-vending machine I’d seen in decades. People vape in Paris, but in Andorra, they smoke the old-fashioned way and sell the old-fashioned brands.

Steve and I rambled through the twisty passages in the old town, and popped into the tourist office down by the river, where a helpful staffer gave us maps and brochures. Thanks to her, we learned that hiking trails overlook the town on both sides of the valley. We originally had wanted to spend the day hiking in the countryside but the stormy forecast made us shelve that plan. It felt like a gift to instead be able to do a mini-hike. We easily ascended from our hotel to one of the paths and followed it for about two miles.

One of the countless community gardens

Among other sights, it led us through the most extensive complex of communal garden plots we’ve ever seen. Roosters crowed and hens clucked while apartment complexes covered the distant hillsides. It was an extraordinary contrast.

Eventually we left the path and descended to one of Andorra la Vella’s tourist wonders: a glass-walled, 18-story structure housing the Caldea spa, said to be one of the largest in Europe.

The glass tower in the distance is part of the Caldea spa.

Sadly, we couldn’t bring in our phones (because we had nothing with which to waterproof them) so we have no photos of the wonders within it. Imagine, if you can, a chlorinated theme park, containing at its heart an enormous lagoon filled with warm, chest-deep water. Several gigantic bowls were set within it: aerial jacuzzis accessible by staircases. Off the central area, we wandered into saunas and steam baths and other piscine variations: one room with jets of water that massaged you, an “Icelandic pool” where you could walk through adjoining basins filled with icy and and very warm water. On one outdoor balcony we paddled in a “panoramic pool” and enjoyed more watery jets. On another we swam into a circular track through which a strong current coursed. We spent almost three hours in the complex, marveling at all the weird aquatic pleasures. (One soggy irritant: the fact that cloth face masks provided by the facility were mandatory throughout.)

Because of all its tourists and duty-free shoppers, Andorra ranks among the more prosperous countries in Europe. Andorrans live longer than the citizens of almost every other place on earth (around 83 years, on average). Crime is almost non-existent, and stress is minimal.

The mellow nature of life here was palpable in the plaza that’s been at the heart of Andorran life for centuries. A large, stone three-story structure dominates one side of it.Built more than 500 years ago as a noble family’s home, it was later acquired to be the seat of Andorra’s government. We toured it and chuckled at its coziness — the large kitchen where the councilors would sit around a large hearth to warm up……the wooden cabinet with seven separate (old-fashioned) locks in which Andorra’s founding document is stored. (Today it still requires an official from each of Andorra’s seven political districts to use his key in order to open it.)

Only in 2011 did the country build a big modern parliament building; this austere concrete edifice stands on another side of the plaza. It’s the equivalent of the US Capitol. “Where are the guys with machine guns?” Steve wondered aloud when we approached it. At the Elysee Palace in Paris, every corner bristles with military muscle. I haven’t been to the White House for a while, but I assume it’s at least as aggressively intimidating. Andorra has no military, but even a watchful policeman would have made this heart of Andorran political life look more governmental. There was none.

We pulled open the front door and walked in, looking for someone who might direct us to the tourist office; braced for being stopped and questioned. Not a soul was in sight. I was too shy to knock on one of the closed office doors, but no one would have stopped me had I tried.

We walked out of the building and gazed at the nearby sculptural installation, a bevy of statues saluting poets.If you want to live long and prosper, they seemed to whisper, moving to Andorra and reading poetry isn’t a bad formula. But we’ve bade goodbye to this and pressed on to Luxembourg, an administrative center for the European Union, where the memory of those statues feels like a dream.

Weather wonderland

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I love to travel, in part, because it reminds me how unsophisticated I am about weather. Living in San Diego for as long as I have has dulled my weather wits; made me stupid about preparing for what’s to come. Most of San Diego’s weather ranges from glorious to blah (in cloudy May and June), but it’s all good enough you don’t have to plan your activities around it. Stormy weather rolls in only rarely, but when it does, it’s usually relentless and intense. It can last for days. You cancel outdoor plans.

When I’m in a foreign country and my phone’s weather app shows rain in the upcoming days, I tend to freak out. I assume the rain will screw up my plans. I’m often pleasantly surprised.

Weather didn’t impact the three days we had in Paris. They were archetypally perfect: cool in the early morning with heat building to San Diego levels of balminess by late afternoon, all under powder blue skies adorned with puffy passing clouds.But rain was forecast for Bordeaux on Friday, with heat moving in on the weekend and building to scary sounding levels Monday and Tuesday.

When our train pulled into the Bordeaux rail station early Friday afternoon, Olivia, Steve and I dodged light raindrops on our way to collect our rental car. These soon dried up, however, and by the time we dropped Olivia off at her hotel, the sun was out and the center of the old city felt pleasant and looked splendid. I’d arranged a home-exchange house in the country, very close to where Annabelle’s wedding reception would be held Saturday evening. We found it and settled into those comfortable quarters, then drove to dinner in the little town of Fargues St. Hilaire about 10 minutes away. By the time we arrived at 7:30, a torrential deluge had begun, intense enough to get us very wet as we dashed (under an umbrella) from our car the short distance to the restaurant. After we finished dinner, the downpour had stopped.

Nothing marred the perfection of Annabelle’s wedding the next day, held at 3 pm in a 1000-year-old basilica in the center of Bordeaux.It was sunny and quite warm outside, but all that stone kept out the heat.

There’s Olivia, chatting with the priest, who coincidentally happened to be an American. The interior of the basilica wasn’t air conditioned, but it felt like it was.

By the time we emerged from the church around 4:30, the heat still wasn’t overbearing.

Rose petals did briefly rain down on the bride and groom.

Over the next three days the temperature forecasts for Bordeaux looked worse and worse: around 90 on Sunday. Maybe 95 Monday, and I think I saw 97 at one point predicted for Tuesday. What surprised me, though, was how much of each of those days was lovely: cool and pleasant throughout the morning.

We stayed in the bottom floor of the house in the distance.
Had a delicious walk down the footpath from the house.

Sunday we weren’t uncomfortable at the wedding brunch on the back lawn of the chateau.

It’s possible the amazing setting distracted us.

The grapes in the vineyards surrounding the chateau looked happy!

Monday morning (after Olivia had returned to Paris), Steve and I made the 40-minute drive to St. Emilion, an important wine-making center. The ancient town and its vistas are almost indescribably charming, and we walked and lunched outdoors and felt cool until mid-afternoon, when the heat finally began to be oppressive.For our last full day in Bordeaux (yesterday), we returned to the center for more walking, another lunch, and a visit to the city’s wine museum. The pattern repeated: weather interchangeable with San Diego’s at its best in the morning, only heating up enough to sap our energy late in the day.

It was definitely shorts weather, but not sultry enough to sweat.
When we visited in the morning, it wasn’t even hot enough to lure many tourists into frolicking in Bordeaux’s famous mirror pool.

This morning (Wednesday) we packed up our rented Ford and headed for the first stop on our grand tour of Europe’s seven smallest countries: Andorra. As we drove south, my phone’s forecast looked like this, disconcerting to anyone bound for the rugged Pyrenees for a two-night stay. At one point, we drove under repeated signs warning about the thunderstorms ahead.

But after a few sprinkles in the early morning, the clouds disappeared, and by the time we whizzed through the border (with not a customs or passport or Covid vaccine checker anywhere in sight), Andorra’s Pyrenean splendors could not have looked more stunning had a professional postcard photo producer arranged the scenes.

This appeared to be the border, but everyone just breezed through it.

We drove up all those hairpin turns to get to this amazing viewpoint.

I’m writing these words in our hotel room in Andorra la Vella (the compact capital city). I’ve heard a few distant rumbles out our window, but no rain is pouring yet. The forecast still looks so bad I can’t imagine we’ll be able to hike most of tomorrow, as I had planned. But I’m wising up; amping up my reserves of flexibility. I think I need them at least as much as my umbrella.

Feeling grateful for the good weather.

Hoops

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Nothing like heading to Europe on the day the European Union removes the US from its “safe list” of countries whose citizens don’t have to jump through lots of Covid hoops. I think this news broke as we were flying from San Diego to Dallas. Reading the details of what had happened, as reported by the New York Times, I wasn’t too worried, however. It seemed folks who were unvaccinated would be affected — but not Steve and me.

I worried more about getting into France. Up to the minute we departed, the rules were that vaccinated folks could get in if they presented:

1) Their passports

2) Their CDC vaccination cards (completed at least two weeks before entry)

3) A form testifying to the fact that one wasn’t sick and had no signs of Covid (or immediate recent contact with anyone infected)

Steve and I assembled all these things and even fed them into an app called “VeriFLY” that electronically documented our readiness for French travel. In the Dallas airport, the crew at the check-in desk also gave us another complex Passenger Locater Record form to fill out on the plane.

We had all these pieces of paper ready at Charles DeGaulle airport when our plane touched down 10 minutes early Friday morning. After deplaning we hurried to the passport-control booths, where a cute young Frenchman casually thumbed through our passports and stamped each of them in turn. Almost as an afterthought he said, ‘Vaccine, vaccine?” “Sure!” I responded, flashing him my white CDC card tucked into my passport jacket. He waved us on, not even interested in seeing Steve’s card or the Passenger Locator Form or the health testimony forms we had painstakingly prepared. We collected our bags, breezed out of the secure area, and less than 40 minutes after our plane’s wheels hitting the tarmac, we were in an Uber heading for the home of our friend Olivia.

Another more ominous hoop loomed. Around the beginning of August, the French powers-that-be ordered all French people to show an electronic vaccine passport in order to ride on trains, visit museums, or dine in restaurants. Because the EU has standardized digital vaccine records, this passport is easy for French people to get. But for folks vaccinated abroad and armed with proof such as those white CDC cards, it’s been more complicated. At first Americans who were either in France or arriving in France by August 11 were told they could submit an application for a digital pass and three supporting documents (passport, pdf of a white CDC card, and copy of a ticket out of France) to a certain email address. But if you were arriving after that, you were supposed to wait.

On August 12 they opened the admission process for a few more days, then pushed it further down the line every few days after that. Steve and I were overjoyed when on the Thursday before our departure (8/26), the French website said we at last could submit our documents. Within minutes we had uploaded them, but we heard nothing for days, up to and including the morning we arrived at Olivia’s. This was worrisome; we had tickets to a couple of museums on Wednesday and Thursday, as well as a Friday morning train for Bordeaux.

We did have a backup plan in case our passes failed to show up. Testing stations like this are all over town, and if you get a negative test result, you can receive a 72-hour pass. But we wanted to avoid this particular hoop, if possible.

Exhausted from the flight, we took a nap Tuesday afternoon. When we awoke, the electronic vaccine passes were in our inboxes!

We loaded them into our Apple wallets, and Olivia helped us get them printed on paper as a backup. We had to use them for the first time Wednesday afternoon when the three of us made our way to the Place de la Concorde to visit the brand-new Hotel de la Marine museum (which reminded me more of the Palace at Versailles than anything else I’ve ever seen in Paris.) Attendants at the door demanded to scan our electronics passports, and the QR codes worked. We used them again Thursday afternoon when Steve and I went to the brand-new (Pinault Foundation) contemporary art museum that just opened in the renovated former stock exchange building.

Steve getting his digital vaccine pass checked in order to enter the Hotel de la Marine.

We showed them again them this morning and got blue wrist bands confirming our vaccinated status to get on the TGV. But we didn’t need them to get on the metro. Or city buses. Or into grocery stores or pharmacies or Monoprix or the sidewalk cafe where we had coffee and croissants yesterday morning. We did have to don a mask to enter all those places, and Olivia says technically everyone is supposed to mask up outdoors too. But only half the folks we see on the street are masked.

I feel confident that at least in France, any additional Covid hoops will be trivial — and probably non-existent at the wedding this weekend. Down the road there could be more. But the reality of what we’re seeing on the ground in France makes me think I shouldn’t worry much.

Two weddings and a tour of the teeny-tiny countries

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If you’re reading this, it means Steve and I have managed to cross the Atlantic Ocean, enter France, and make our way to the apartment of our friend Olivia in Neuilly, just outside the Paris city limits. We will have begun an adventure I began planning two years ago, inspired by an invitation to the wedding of Olivia’s older daughter, Annabelle. Originally, we expected to fly to Europe in May of 2020, but the Covid lockdowns forced everyone to cancel all their plans. When the wedding was rescheduled and a second wedding (of Annabelle’s sister, Marguerite) was set for May/June 2021, I rebooked everything. But a surge in case levels led the sisters to postpone their celebrations again.

Now we’ve made it into the country and are just four days from the first nuptials, which will take place in Bordeaux. The second event takes place October 9 in the south of France. In between Steve and I have planned a wide-ranging tour through some of the smallest countries on earth: Andorra, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, San Marino, Vatican City, Malta, and Monaco.

We’ve both been to Vatican City before, and Steve made a lightning visit to Liechtenstein in 1974, but the rest will be new to us. The micro states stand out in other ways beyond their limited size. They rank among the wealthiest countries on Earth, and their citizens live longer than almost anywhere else (because prosperity and physical well-being go hand in hand?) They have oddball forms of government. Three are principalities, one’s a Grand Duchy, Vatican City is a city-state (Malta and San Marino are humdrum republics.)

We have to fly into and out of Malta (an island). But mostly we expect to get around on trains and buses and in a couple of rented cars. We smile at how this trip reminds us of our honeymoon 47 years ago. Then we tore around Europe’s Big Bruisers — France, Germany, Switzerland, Yugoslavia, Greece, Italy. How different will it be to visit the pipsqueaks? We don’t know. But we are optimistic it will be interesting.

Parisian

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Three full days have passed, so jam-packed that there’s been no time to write. Now it’s early Sunday morning, sunny and clear. I caught a New York Times story yesterday about the fact that all the recent warm weather has generated unusual levels of smog. We noticed it vaguely, but it’s seems like nothing, compared to LA on a bad day. And in the plus column, the city fathers have made it free to ride on all the buses and metros in the city these past few days, in an effort to encourage people to abandon their automobiles. It’s certainly worked for Steve and me!

The Viaduc des Art with the Promenade Plantee above

 

A beautiful section of the Promenade

On foot and transported gratis by the good taxpayers of Paris, we’ve experienced all manner of things we’d never seen or done before. Two photography shows (one on Brassai and a mind-boggling salute to Henri Cartier-Bresson at the Pompidou center) and a collection of 100 impressionist paintings that are normally in private collections but currently have been gathered here at the Musee Marmottan. That’s in the same neighborhood where we had our very first home-exchange house 34 years ago. As I cringed, Olivia tapped on the windows and got the gracious young resident (who was in the midst of preparing a dinner party for friends) to actually let us come in and gawk at how she and her husband have remodeled the place. Well done!

We also: checked out Paris’s Chinatown area, explored the artisans’ shops in the Viaduc des Arts (and then walked back on the Promenade Plantee — the one-time railroad tracks that were the first elevated park project in the world and since have inspired others elsewhere), and participated in a party (for 50 or so?) at Olivia’s Friday night that pretty much blew our minds (certainly the dancing that started around 11 and went to 2:30 in the morning.)

One of the desserts we've consumed chez Olivia. How cute (and delicious!) is that?
We depart for Marrakesh at 6:10 this evening. Once again, it’s going to be tough to say goodbye to this place.