Dresden

We visited Dresden, Germany as a day trip from Prague.  The drive took just under two hours, and was very scenic; a portion of the drive was on the Autobahn, which wasn’t really any more exciting than any stretch of interstate highway between Montana and North Dakota, or Kansas and Colorado.   We parked blocks from the center of old town, in a parking lot that paved over some great building that had been bombed, but never rebuilt under Communist rule in East Germany.  The city center was full of gaping spaces that had been re-purposed as parking lots, or in some cases, simply fenced off pits.

Prague

We'd had incredible luck with weather conditions for our entire trip, in part because we were chasing summer around the globe.  However, our first day in Prague was one of those rare rainy days. We were enough ahead of the weather that when we arrived, the first thing we did was find a department store where we could buy umbrellas.

Crossing Bridges

We crossed a lot of bridges in our travels; some of them were even physical ones.  Locations of each picture are in the alt text, if you hover your pointer over the image.

Auschwitz and Birkenau

This will be a difficult post to write, and to read; it was certainly a difficult day, but one we don’t regret.  While planning our trip through central Europe with our friend Nicole, the three of us had agreed to tour Auschwitz while we were in Poland.  Nicole arranged for a private guide who would take us through the original Auschwitz I camp in the morning, and the expanded Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp in the afternoon.  The tour included a car and driver to take us from Krakow to Oświęcim, the city where the camps were formed.  The drive was 70 minutes, and our driver played a documentary video showing the interview of a Soviet army photographer who was attached to one of the units that first reached Auschwitz.  It was much more raw and devastating than what we had previously seen in American documentaries and films about Auschwitz.  Eventually, we all had to look out the windows and simply listen to him; the photographs were horrific.  We were all wondering silently whether or not we were prepared for what we were going to face.

Postcard: London

Victoria Tower, Palace of Westminster, London, England.