Travel Series: LUXEMBOURG, GERMANY

Here we are for another Globetrotters post, and this time we're bringing the 1998 world trip to a close at last. Before I get on with that, just one quick little note - I started this series back on September 1st, 2011. For the most part I've managed to post a travel "snippet" once a month since then, but next year posts may become a little more sparse. Then again, maybe they won't!

Okay, let's get on with today's post.

Luxembourg & Germany

I'm completely serious when I say these are the only two photos I appear to have from this leg of the journey. Either I lost a film somewhere (highly likely), or I was just too over it all to take more than two photos (unlikely, despite the fact that I was very over it all). I do have a travel journal entry or two from this time, so I thought I'd share some of that writing:

We travelled to Germany overland from France and via Luxembourg. Dad and I spent about ten minutes in that little country [Luxembourg], just so we could say when asked that we’d been there. Then we moved on, Germany in our sights.

We travelled beside the great river, heading steadily north. It was wine country and we tried to find out where we could sample some wines, but nothing was free, so we forgot about it.

Germany struck me as being very green and lush. I guess that’s what generally colder weather will do for a nation. I was no longer used to the browns, reds, yellows and dead grasses of Australia, since I had just travelled through America in the tail-end of winter — places like Oregon and Washington State were what I had in mind as I looked around me [in Germany] — but I still took note of the landscape as decidedly German.

I must tell you now, in hindsight, that I really don't know what a "decidedly German" landscape is like. I guess when I wrote that, I just felt influenced by the knowledge of where I was or something.

Anyway, I am going to wrap this post up now, and admit that I'm feeling a little bit bittersweet about the 1998 trip reminiscence ending! But I have plenty more travel stories to tell, and I will be moving onto those sometime, somehow. Maybe even next month? I'm going to leave you with a couple of photos my dad took during our trip in 1998. They're less landscape and more us (okay, mostly me):

Not sure where this was, but I like the look of dry amusement on my face.

New Zealand - North Island. It really is beautiful. You should go!

In the middle of nowhere, in Australia, trying to figure out where to go next.

With family in New Zealand - I'm on the far left.

This was after my breakdown in Europe, once I had decided to go home early.

Me and a glacier, I'm pretty sure. Probably Switzerland.

Italy, I think. There was an art exhibition with free wine and snacks (of course we were there), a bridge over water, and this photo.

Airport, early on in the trip. Probably Sydney, on our way to NZ.