Travel Maven Blog ...... David Molyneaux posts from TheTravelMavens.com

My year without travel: Reflecting on the pandemic and staying close to home

Fran Golden and David G. Molyneaux, Sitka, Alaska 2017

'I miss connecting with fellow travelers, even simple smiles and nods of recognition ... I miss the kindness of strangers that appears naturally on the road — and from locals I encounter along the way'

By David G. Molyneaux, TheTravelMavens.com, republished from The Plain Dealer and Cleveland.com

 

Without a building or human in sight, we arrived at a fork on a woodsy trail with no idea where we were going, for which we were grateful.

A serendipitous choice passed through a patch of red and yellow leaves still dangling in November, perhaps just waiting for these two world travelers who were thankful even for the slightest sense of being lost in Berlin.

No, not that Berlin. Germany and all the other countries of the world are off the discovery charts in this self-protective year of 2020. Instead, we were exploring a ridge of trails about an hour’s drive west of Cleveland in Edison Woods MetroPark in Berlin Township, Erie County.

Poland? No, Cleveland. The bust of Frédéric Chopin, composer and virtuoso pianist, is in the Polish Garden on East Boulevard in Rockefeller Park (Photos by David G. Molyneaux, TheTravelMavens.com)

What a lifestyle change this year has been, without travel.

Once a busy trade route, the Upper Rhine now offers history without crowds

River cruising in Germany and France 

By David G. Molyneaux, editor, TheTravelMavens.com

Outside the walls of the fortified city of Neuf-Brisach, France, with a design of the octagon-shaped city laid out in the grass.(Photos by David G. Molyneaux, TheTravelMavens.com)

NEUF-BRISACH, France — On a pleasant morning before the summer vacation season was in full swing, the bicycle shop in the Rhine River port city of Breisach, Germany, was closed. So my wife and I walked into France. We crossed the wide river bridge and trekked about three miles of quiet country roads to Neuf-Brisach.

 

Neuf means “new” in French (except when neuf means nine), and Neuf-Brisach was new in the late 1600s. Today, it is one of the few remaining fortified towns built during the reign of Louis XIV to guard the eastern border of France.

 

The town, which is on the list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites, is sleepy but still alive, surrounded by towering brick walls that seem impenetrable. In the Alsace, fortification was essential to surviving a seemingly endless stream of invading armies.

 

After a simple sidewalk café lunch, we visited the museum (10 euros) dedicated to Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban, a French engineer who built 150 citadels and strongholds along France’s vulnerable borders. Their defensive designs are still considered masterpieces of military architecture.

A vintage vessel with a fresh makeover, this ship is cruising the world for Azamara

 Cruise line pursues upscale, bespoke-style on its boutique ships

BY DAVID G. MOLYNEAUX

On the new Azamara Pursuit, docked for the day at Cherbourg, France, an engaging breakfast waiter brought me coffee, placing a cup and saucer at the table. After sipping, I set the cup directly onto the table. Later, when I asked for a refill, the waiter lifted my cup, filled it, and placed it back onto the saucer.

Azamara Pursuit

“Yes,” she said, laughing, when I asked whether most Americans set their cups on the table, while most European passengers would take a more formal approach, using the saucer.

She said that I was free to do whatever I wanted with the cup, but that the ship’s policy for her was always to use the saucer.

“More sophisticated?” I asked. She nodded agreement.

That simple moment of style fits the atmosphere of Azamara Club Cruises, one of the world’s smaller cruise lines that nonetheless sails to hundreds of ports around the world. Azamara’s fleet of two — 690-passenger sister ships Azamara Journey and Azamara Quest — grew in August to three with the addition of the 702-passenger Azamara Pursuit.

Ocean-going Crystal Cruises slides smoothly into the luxury niche on Europe’s rivers

 

Spacious and comfy top deck of Crystal Bach, cruising on the River Rhine (Photo by David G. Molyneaux, TheTravelMavens.com)

BY DAVID G. MOLYNEAUX

We were new passengers, my wife and I, when we boarded the Crystal Bach, docked at Mainz, Germany, on the River Rhine near Frankfurt. As we walked into the Palm Court lounge, fellow passengers made no secret of their curiosity. Most of them were at the midpoint of a two-week cruise from Amsterdam.

Warm and friendly, they acted as if we were new members of their private club.

“Welcome.” “You’re new, we haven’t seen you before.” “Just get onboard?” “Come join us.”

The cruise line could not have planned a better welcome.

When Crystal, which is known for its country club atmosphere on two luxury-style ocean ships, took an expensive plunge into the world of river cruising, I wondered how well the ocean product would translate when plopped onto a much smaller, less endowed river vessel.

To make it work, Crystal has built four of its own river ships that are warm, airy, and spacious with only 53 suites on vessels that could hold 90 cabins or more.

Joie de Vivre brings a French effervescence to Uniworld’s Seine cruises from Paris into Normandy

 

Dessert selection at Le Pigalle, the main restaurant on Joie de Vivre. (Article and photo by David G. Molyneaux, TheTravelMavens.com)

PARIS

You don’t need to speak French to sail on the new Joie de Vivre, cruising the Seine out of Paris. But you will know from your first step aboard, at the dock about a 20-minute walk from the Eiffel Tower, that you are in France.

With its French fabrics, foie gras, daily arrays of local cheeses, and its hallways dressed in early 1900s caricatures by artist George Goursat (known as Sem), the Joie de Vivre is true to its French intentions. It was designed by Uniworld Boutique River Cruises as a floating Paris boutique hotel.

I especially like the concept of a Paris vacation that starts and ends at a hotel docked in the middle of the city and cruises the Seine for a week in high Paris style. The ship stops for excursions to some of France’s travel favorites: Palace of Versailles, Monet’s home and garden at Giverny, the old town and Gothic cathedral of Rouen, the port at Honfleur, and the memorials on Normandy’s Atlantic Coast, scene of the invasion of Europe by Allied Forces in 1944.

River cruise excursion to Normandy links WWII memorials, and my Great-Grandmother Pearl’s 1944 diary

Of all the war monuments and cemeteries dedicated to North Americans, the beaches and plots at Normandy are perhaps the most haunting 

In Normandy, France, 9,387 graves are marked at the American Cemetery that overlooks Omaha Beach (Photos by David G. Molyneaux, TheTravelMavens.com)

Colleville-sur-Mer, Normandy, France

On an early June day in 1944, Pearl Molyneaux wondered where her boys and daughter were, as World War II charged toward deadly climaxes in Europe and in the Pacific.

As my great-grandmother wrote in her diary at home in western New York State, her son Silas, a bomber pilot, was in the Army Air Corp; son Max was in the Navy; daughter Roberta was serving in the Women’s Army Corps (WAC) somewhere in England; her oldest grandson Glenn, my father (from Oberlin, Ohio), was in the Navy, training with Marines for future amphibious landings in the Pacific; and her son Evan, an Army doctor, had left a month earlier to cross the Atlantic for Europe. Evan was headed for Normandy.

Their lives, their courage and my great-grandmother’s diary were in my thoughts when I returned to Normandy earlier this year to walk the beaches and visit the American Cemetery with a group from Uniworld’s new river vessel, Joie de Vivre.

An emotional visit to Normandy

Among the excursions on Seine River cruises that start in Paris, a day at World War II memorials on the Normandy coast is the most popular, and for many the most emotional.