Stephen’s Travels

In the summer of 2005, I had the unique opportunity to travel throughout Germany, Poland, and Czech Republic with a tour called the “Holocaust Remembrance Tour”. Given that I had just studied the Holocaust the previous semester, the tour was a marvelous way to experience history and tragedy in a more personal and firsthand way. The tours were very draining physically and mentally, the most heavy hitting being the memorial at Lidice. Given the serious nature of this particular location, and the trip as a whole, one might expect a high level of tact, much more so than normal. This, however, was not the case on this occasion.

As I recall, we had just taken some time walking around the memorial grounds in Lidice. After a brief walk from the memorial to the temporary visitors center, we found ourselves waiting outside for several minutes in the cool mist while the previous tour group cleared out. I don’t even remember what the next comment was regarding, but one member of our group was a bit frustrated with the circumstances and compared our tour leader (Iain, bless his heart!) to Hitler. Sigh.

Perhaps I was just extra emotional that day, but I’d say that such a comment was out of line at that time or any other time. It really bummed me out.

Over the weekend I was able to make a trip up to Yosemite for some hiking with Chris (my old roommate). We set out from his house in Clovis around 7:30am and began hiking the Yosemite Falls trail at about 11:00am. Even though the hike was labeled as ‘very strenuous’, the selection of trails during winter is somewhat limited, so we decided to do it anyway.

We started off at a hare’s pace, but soon found out that speed was unnecessary. It rained most of the way up and was eventually replaced by snow, which was a real treat as Temecula doesn’t see snow. After ~2.5 hours of switchbacks we made it to the top. The view was not too great with all of the fog/clouds, but I was still able to enjoy it using a combination of the postcards from the visitor’s center and my imagination. I will most definitely be back in the summer or sometime with better weather.

Just to give an idea of the distance covered, take a look at the picture on the right. The trail began in the woods at bottom on the far left and ended at the peak on the top right. We also took a small detour at the upper falls to take in a nice view of the falls and valley. Though as mentioned above, the valley views were somewhat lacking. The total distance we hiked was 8.4 miles with an approximate 3000 foot elevation gain.

If you want to see any additional pictures, you can check them out here.

After my unfortunate experience in Romania it was about time to head west before my flight home from London. I left Bucharest around 5pm and ended up in Zurich, Switzerland about the same time the next day. I am over trainrides. I did some quick calculations and figured that I will spend over 1 week of time on trains this trip.

Anyways, I made a stop in Vienna for about an hour…which was just long enough to walk around in the blazing heat and get all sweaty. Luckily I found a grocery store so I could stock up on food, as I hadn’t eaten since I left Bucharest. Once my train left Vienna, it was non-stop beauty as the train zipped through western Austria and into eastern Switzerland. Zurich to be exact.

Zurich was/is one of my top five favorite cities. There was an amazing art museum, loads of shopping (though I had no money for that sort of thing), and great people watching. Most people spoke English which was nice. Actually, most people speak 3-4 languages. The city was really beautiful with a great public transport system. I really want to go back some time, you should try to get there.

No pictures of Zurich because of the whole camera incident in Romania. Oh well, at least I have a good story to tell now.

I apologise for the misleading title. They don’t. Well maybe they do, but that is a seperate issue. What some of them could use is a lesson in how to not steal cameras from travelers; namely myself. But I digress…

I decided to go to Bucharest after Budapest because one of my friends from school was going to be there and I thought it would be fun to meet up in her home country. So after my night train from Budapest, I walked the city until night time. The next day I went to the Parliamentary palace built by the ever so communist Nicolae CeauÅŸescu. The tour was nice, short and full of information. On my way back to my hostel via a delicious kebab place I found the day before, little children surrounded me and were successful in stealing my camera. What a shame. Luckily I had been removing the pictures every so often so I only lost a couple days of pictures. Sadly, I am currently unable to take pictures.

I cant remember if I let everyone know that I updated all of the pictures up through Prague, but I did. So go to http://www.flickr.com/photos/stevesearer to see them.