Memories of a European Vacation

By Marilyn L. Pinsky

 

On Sept. 5, 2024, the working title of this article was: “Upcoming Almost Month-Long Trip with Five Women I Hardly Know. What Could Possibly Go Wrong?”

On Sept. 25, 2024, the new title after the trip was: “Don’t Ask!”

For the past 14 years I have been traveling solo with group tours.

On the majority of the tours if there was not another single woman to hang out with, couples were usually welcoming to a woman traveling alone. Sometimes couples went out to dinner by themselves and I felt a little lonesome, but that’s to be expected.

Then a few trips back I met a woman whose husband didn’t want to travel anymore and we went on four interesting trips together. She was very adventurous and planned great side trips, like running from white water rafting to a helicopter ride over the mountains in one afternoon.

On one of these trips, to South America, we met a woman from Chicago who was also traveling solo. As we all seemed to get along so well, having bonded over shopping for pocketbooks in Medellin, Columbia, we decided to do other trips together.

Trying to find places that we all hadn’t gone to, or ones that we would revisit again, was a little challenging. Most recently, we had given a deposit for a trip to Saudi Arabia but I got cold feet when that part of the world seemed to become a little too dangerous. Three deposits down the drain.

Then came this trip to Central Europe.

Even though we had all been to some of the countries on the tour, it had been a while and we were willing to go back.

The first friend invited two other women she knew from her art class in New York City and said we’d love them. OK, I was prepared to love them.

The four East Coast people had all made our flights through a consolidator my friend recommended. The day before as we were checking in online, one of the women and I discovered we weren’t on the same flight as the other two women, which threw off our arrival plans. Slight panicky moment but the agent was responsive and worked it out. The other woman was not happy and was ready to cancel. She didn’t.

I met the three women in the Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey and we flew together to Amsterdam to spend a few days on our own before catching up with our Chicago friend and the tour company in Warsaw. As the rest of the women were much younger than me and all fast city walkers, I was concerned that I not hold them up. When we landed I grabbed my backpack and raced off the plane. I was making great progress fast walking down the concourse heading to immigration but thought I’d better touch base with the group as I didn’t see anyone around me. I reached for my phone in the fanny pack around my waist that also held my credit cards and passport. Panic moment number two — I had left it on my plane seat along with my hat and scarf.

So much for not holding them up.

I raced back to the gate arriving just when the crew was disembarking but the gate agents wouldn’t let me go back into the plane to retrieve my belongings. I begged them to go and look, told them my seat number and where I had left it and finally, after much discussion among themselves, in Dutch, someone went to look. The guy they sent came back and said nothing was there, after which I started to cry. By then my friend had found me and the two of us begged them to look again as without a passport I was a person without a country. Finally, after a lot more discussion among themselves, in Dutch, someone went back and found my fanny pack with my phone and passport; no hat and scarf, but at that point, who cared?

Finally we were on to our first stop, the hotel. One of the women, the one who was going to cancel because of the plane snafu which should have been a clue, was not happy with her first hotel room or, as it turned out, any of her subsequent rooms on the whole trip.

She didn’t like any of the restaurants that had been chosen — after much research. Between asking for the menu to be explained three times and discussing what appetizers we could share as none of us ate the same food, each meal took 20 minutes to order. I don’t know why the wait people didn’t just dump the food on our heads.

Every day on the bus the tour guide would give us three options for the next meal so she could call ahead to the restaurant and have everything ready when we arrived. Most everyone in our group of five changed their order two times before the guide even got back to her seat to make the call. For some reason we were not all that popular with the rest of the tour group.

After Poland we headed to Hungary. When we arrived in Budapest, the driver of our overly large bus realized a little too late that to get to the street our hotel was on required an extremely tight turn on a very steep hill. The bus got stuck halfway through the turn, holding up traffic in three directions. This resulted in our spending an hour in the bus which was at an angle, which felt like hanging off a cliff.

Finally a couple of drivers got out of their cars and cleared the streets by having the other cars back out down the hill so we could make the turn.

Having been in Budapest years ago, one of my best memories was going to the public baths. I had convinced four of the women to go with me but as the time got closer, one didn’t want to mess her hair, so she dropped out and the other two wanted to go shopping. So one adventurous woman went with me and we had a ball. Just maneuvering the steamy co-ed locker room with the wet floors while searching for a locker was a hoot. We went from the salt water pools to the thermal pools, to the sauna and then the steam room. We had great conversations with people from all over Europe who were in Budapest for various reasons but mostly because it was a beautiful city to visit.

As we were leaving Budapest and heading to Vienna, everyone’s cell phones were going off with emergency weather alerts but because they were in German we had no idea what was happening. Finally our guide, who had been on frantic phone calls with her home office, told us that Central Europe was having a 100-year flood and she had to rearrange our schedule.

Driving out of the city, the streets were closing all around us. Because of the risk of bursting dams, Black Hawk helicopters all around us were dumping sandbags on Budapest. The operative sentence from our guide, given possible road closures on our route to Vienna, became “we’ll see how it goes.”

There were really fascinating moments to this trip. In Prague we had been told we had to eat at this beautiful restaurant on the water and as it was hard to get reservations, our friend made them months in advance. When we arrived they looked at us a little too carefully but finally sat us at a beautiful table on the water. Two minutes later a group of Korean men sat down at the table near us and when we asked our waiter what was going on with all the security standing around, we found out we were eating next to the President of South Korea. (I’m not sure why they impeached him; he seemed like a lovely guy from where we were sitting.)

I have skipped over what a memorable trip this was in all respects. We visited the major Holocaust memorials that left us all feeling shaken as many of us had family who had been killed in those countries. I would do the trip again without hesitation just maybe not with all the same people.