Two Year Report on the Road to 500

Two years after deciding to keep track of the World Heritage Sites, here I am trying to catch up… I should have done regular updates but never got to it. The previous blogpost has been at the top of this site, promising new posts but looking abandoned. How am I supposed to fix this? I should never let this happen again… How to summarize the extraordinary places we’ve seen or the things we learned? 

Stranded on Lord Howe Island, a remote and barely accessible world heritage site in May 2023

We Did It

We did it or we made it. However you want to put it we went around the world and we are back home in five whole pieces. We left Bucharest on Sunday afternoon, in the end of January. A short flight to Vienna, a change of planes to Berlin. A little adventure, I booked a hotel at the wrong airport, I realized at the last moment thanks to Ina. Overnight in Berlin, a short encounter with our friend in the hallway of the airport and we got on our last flight. At JFK we got a car and drove a couple of hours toward our house. We left the children to spend the night with a friend in New Jersey and we spend the last night in a hotel. Tuesday morning we drove a few more hours, stopped at Sam's club and Aldi for groceries. We spent $500 on supplies, for the first time in ages we didn't have to calculate how much we needed to buy, we just got everything that we could think of to resupply our pantry and fill our fridge. In the afternoon, we did the last few miles toward our house. It was epic. Unplanned, Louis Armstrong started to sing on the car stereo "What a Wonderful World". We did the last few miles singing and naming all the landmarks that we've learned so well on our way home. When we entered the house there was a lot of screaming and jumping. It took a few minutes of going through the house to recognize our home. In the evening friends joined us for pizza and champagne. It was epic. We did it, or we made it, however you want to put it, we went around the world!

At the airport in Berlin, AirBerlin carousel 

Our Country

Welcome to my country! Bun venit! (boon veh-NEAT)

What happened? Did I blink and miss it? When did six weeks pass? Though we lived every day, time flew, moving from house to house, from tables laden with homemade traditional food to another one, from conversation to discussion and so forth.

Every day was a celebration!

All Good Things Come To An End

We never got a surprise party. I never had a surprise party. We've never been part of one. We've seen some in Hollywood movies and more than once couldn't really understand how somebody can be so clueless to fall for it. I also couldn't understand what's the fun in it, but imagining how the others saw my face when they yelled "surprise!" was probably worth all the money and the trouble.

Summer Camp

So it's about time I confront the keyboard and my rapidly deteriorating ability to type and write a blog post. I figure summer camp is as good a thing to write about as any. Except for the fact that it will be heavily censored, as this took place at a church camp, and further censored as this is a family blog and swearing is not included, and censored even further because the participants will probably end up reading it. Maybe.

Friday, Aug 17: Fly to UAE, bid parents adieu, fly to JFK, reach Saturday somewhere over the ocean.

Saturday, Aug 18: Keep flying, fly to Pittsburg, wait around to be picked up by someone, we do not know who.

Nightmares

I woke up last night with a terrible nightmare: I already bought the first two tickets of our RTW trip, I spent almost $7000 and I got tickets to a J....-j.... place somewhere in a colony of Brazil and from there to Surinam. We already decided to skip South America for this trip and this had been hard to accept. I had to justify it somehow, but this became easy when we realized that these places were on a different continent that was somehow hidden from the others (that's why we missed it the first time). There was a major issue getting from the hidden continent to the not hidden ones but at least it wasn't my fault. Having resolved this I felt a bit better but then I came to the worst part of the nightmare when I realized that I spent all the money for these places without having read about them and without knowing the weather! Eventually I woke up, I was relieved to realize we don't yet have the tickets. We are on vacation in Romania spending Christmas and New Year, we are letting families and friends know about our plans and making our secret plans public.

So far so good, people take the news pretty well, there is no secret that it is kind of crazy, especially for the life in Romania. We told my parents, Ileana's mother and sister, other people that are close to us. Some cheered, some got scared, obviously scared, but most people took the news very lightly and polite and moved the conversation to more pressing matters (like the daily life issues).

I am writing a draft letter to Airtreks trying to summarize our plans and our questions so far. We are now 301 days away from the planned departure and we could even buy tickets if we want to! This is something I played with last night and this would fully explain my nightmare. If this is what it takes, I'll take it...

Thanksgiving 2009

Four months later we are in Oana's house in Cambridge. Luci went to work and the kids are not around. Ileana and Oana went to the gym. I was driving yesterday to Boston and we were talking about different scenarios for our trip and I got an idea. Maybe we can cross the Atlantic using a cruise ship. How much would it cost? To my surprise and pleasure last night I received an email from VacationsToGo recommending this website TransAtlantic Cruises . Did they send the email because of the Thanksgiving holiday and remembering the Mayflower transatlantic cruise of 1620, as they say, or did they read my mind and monitor my thoughts? They did this before a couple of months ago when I was thinking about the cruise on Yangtze.

Mont St Michel in a team of nine

It's been more than four months since my last update. We had a wonderful Europe vacation with time spent in Romania, France and a couple of days in London. We had the first 11 days together. Leaving Watkins Glen we arrived in Paris next morning and rented a car to Versailles. We spent the first night there, splitting the palace visit in the evening and next morning. We left at noon, stopped in Chartres for the cathedral visit and then arrived in Rennes in the evening. We were happy to see Ioana and her family. They suggested a trip to Mont Saint Michel for the next day.

Monday morning we returned to Paris, by way of Fontainebleau and Vaux le Vicomte. We returned the car and we spent 4 days in the middle of Paris with the kids visiting museums and parks and places where we haven't been before.
On September 12th we were in Bucharest and we celebrated my grandmother's 95th birthday a couple of days early. Next day we went to Campina, and we spend the next 3 days with Cristina and Tic in their beautiful new house. The house is 3 years old by now, but it was the first time I saw it. I was very impressed with all of it. I love it! On September 15th, Ileana and I went back to Paris for our vacation together. We had a delayed honeymoon in Paris in 1991 and in anticipation of our 20th anniversary we thought it would be the best place to spend some time alone. The kids had one week with their aunt and a couple of weeks with their grandparents. We had 18 days alone in Paris. We visited museums, churches, parks and other great places, we bought food at the market and ate baguettes on the street. Probably the best was with Sandra on the corner of some boulevard, a spiky baguette with fresh figs and goat cheese.
In the middle of our Paris vacation we took an overnight side-trip to London. We had a fantastic time, a little disappointed because they closed St. Paul just before we were to get in, but we saw Buckingham Palace and everything else we needed to see. We had a Rick Steve's 75 minutes tour of the National Gallery and a couple of nights at pubs. We saw Neville of Harry Potter on the Millennium Bridge and tested our limits in the Tate Modern. We had a great time at the British Museum, but even better we had the Crown Jewels to ourselves for a few minutes in the Tower of London. Returning to Paris we had a six day museum pass that we took advantage of, visiting everything. Everything! We have that kind of fun... We went to the Louvre another 4 times, spend many hours visiting every room and in the end we finished it. There were a couple rooms under renovation, we saw them in 2006, we really saw everything. We don't know anybody else who did this, but we also don't know anybody who would care about it. I learned a lot about modern art following some artists from place to place all over Paris. The highlight of out trip was the last day when we participated in the veneration of the Crown of Thorns. Just go and visit, I won't even try to describe the feeling.

We returned to Bucharest on the 3rd of October and had another trip to the country to visit Ileana's relatives before we returned home. We were back in our home shortly after midnight on October 13th. It was a great vacation, the longest so far, and we used it many times to imagine how it would be during our RTW trip. Renting a car and driving stick, going by train and plane and bus, even a boat on the Seine. Renting places on the Internet. We did this before, but this was more and it all worked out well. The kids had fun, despite their reluctance to admit it. My daughter Ileana was shocked to realize one day that we skipped lunch! When we skipped lunch the next day it wasn't a big deal anymore.