Book Entry 173: 1986 Our Big Adventure Across the Sea (part two)

After spending a night in a the Montrose Palace, the rest of our trip we spent our nights in little rooms over bars or little hotel rooms…what an adventure.  It might have been the very first night “after the Palace”  we spent in a tiny room over an eatery.  The room was so small and narrow there was only room for single beds end to end on one wall.   

 The room was said to come with a Continental breakfast.  A cute little table was set in the corner of the restaurant for us.  On the table were two slices of rye bread and a boiled egg for each of us.   We never knew where we were going to end up.  We saw a little of Germany and Italy but Switzerland was by far my favorite.

Everything we saw was new and different than what we were used to.  Labels were in a foreign language, statues were of things I knew nothing about, and vendors in the streets selling flowers and chocolates were just a few of the new and wonderful sights.

At the boarder of Italy the guards were young and forceful.  Larry laughed at how close they got to his face when they questioned him.  It made them mad and they made us sit in a room for over two hours before letting us continue on our way.

We toured the home of the Von Trapps, the Sound of Music family. The hills were so beautiful.  At one point we stopped just to look at the scenery.  We could hear a bell ringing in the distance.  It was the bell tied around a goat’s neck with his flock.  It was so beautiful…just like in the movie.

 

  

We visited Rotterdam, the walled city.  It was beautiful!  We spent a whole day there looking in shops.  Rotterdam is where we bought a clock and shipped it home.  We paid with a Wells Fargo card and the clerk asked if we really did ride in stagecoaches like on the card.

 

 

We saw herds of sheep wandering the hills.  Their tails were not docked.  We saw herds of pigs running and playing on mountain sides.  The animals were so clean, not in pig pens, but on grassy hills.  They seemed peculiar until we figured out what was different with them.

          We toured a real castle.  When we arrived in our tour bus the opening of the wall was so narrow the bus needed to be backed up several times in order to make it through.  We saw the dungeons, the small hallways, and ornate carvings on the walls.  I thought it was interesting that the hallways were so small.  The guide said they were like that so when an intruder came in his amour fittings he could not fit in the hallway.  

(You can see the gentlemen coming from the hallway – these were not tall men – imagine a person in full body armour trying to fit!)

         

         In the same castle we were shown the upper story restroom where the people who lived and worked at the castle used the potty.  The potty contents went directly to the lower story where it was funneled into buckets.  The lower room was where local prisoners were kept.  The liquid waste had a ditch going out under the castle wall.  There were shovels in the lower room and high open windows where the “occupants” were required to pitch out the solid waste.