PREFACE
SEPTEMBER 1 to 23
For our eighth Cathedral Quest adventure, we decided to go to Central Europe
to visit Berlin, Dresden, Prague, Kunta Hora, Budapest, Vienna, Melk Abby and
Salzburg. Two out of our past seven
adventures had been on a Globus Tour. Even
though we enjoyed our Spain 2009 trip, we missed many of the cathedrals and
churches that we were told that we would see, our hotels were often too far from
the center of town, and we ate mostly prearranged hotel dinners.
We went when the bus went whether we were ready or not.
We had been successful in the five trips that we planned on our own, so
we decided to plan our own trip again this year.
My wife spent many hours on the computer finding us lovely apartments and
hotels, booking tours of special buildings like the Reichstag in Berlin, the
Parliament building in Budapest, concerts and operas plus a number of fine
restaurants. We strongly
suggest making reservations well in advance.
Except for our first trip to England in 2003, we had rented a car and
driven. Our investigation found that
this was not practical or economically wise as we were going in and out of five
different countries. We decided to
take the train from city to city. By
booking early we were able to get reduced rates.
The trains worked out very well. Each
city had a variety of transportation options so a car was really not necessary.
Last year we bought a Toshiba netbook for a domestic vacation.
It was a great and inexpensive investment.
Every night on this trip, we wrote a summary of our day’s adventure
along with five or six photos taken that day and emailed it to our families.
This was the basis of our daily journal.
We saved a copy of the letter in Word and embellished it.
When we got home we were able to fill in histories and other details for
publication on www.cathedralquest.com.
With so much of the writing already done, we hope to have the entire trip
on the website in the near future. In reality it has taken over three month to
place this trip on the internet.
I was using a 4G card in my
camera and each night I downloaded the photos into Picsa.
To protect my journal entries and photos, I saved them daily to a finger
drive which I carried with me in case something happened to the computer.
It pays to be careful with photos and data.
We
visited 39 cathedrals and churches, several castles and palaces and took 2237
photos. As always, I keep a list of the photos that I take each day. I
highly recommend this practice.
We had a great trip. It was a
fascinating part of the world, with much history, beautiful churches and other
buildings, and delicious food.
Below is the list of each day of this
Cathedral Quest. I hope that you will enjoy reading about our
adventures. As in the other trips, we have included not only the churches
that we visiting, but something of their history and architecture. We have
photos, histories, and stories of other historic sights that we visited plus
where we stayed, ate, and what we had for dinner.
I have made models of a number of
places that we visited. Please click on the included links to see the
models. I still have a number of models to make of other churches and
buildings. Under "Church Models" there is link to all the models
I have made and kits of models that I will make in the future.
