Four days ago we entered Canada. No big hoopla, but we needed not just our passports, I remember the days when we didn’t even need those, but also proof that we were vaccinated and held proof of a negative Covid-19 test. Good for you Canada. I wouldn’t trust us either. We entered just north of Detroit and after a long day of driving, departure time from Madison, 4:00 AM, we arrived at Niagara Falls, Ontario. Yes, the Falls were spectacular. And Eh, the Canadians are as friendly as everyone says, They actually let you in gracefully when you need to change lanes, of course maybe they have heard so many stories about American drivers that it is just safer to let us cut in. Second day of travel took us to Toronto and the CN Tower. Much to be said about dinner at 1800 feet above the city, or as the Canadian’s measure it, 533 meters. They don’t realize that when you measure it in feet, it’s a lot taller. At least it sounds like it to us “size is everything” Americans. Needless to say it was a very moving experience, maybe in part to the fact that the restaurant was rotating.

That brings us to Quebec and Quebec City. I was fully aware that the province’s official language is French, but who knew they are actually French? First stop at a gas station, or should I say station-essence, left me believing I WAS in France. Now I may be exaggerating just a bit, I do understand geography, but it is surprising. It is also culturally stimulating. It is, in fact, the next best thing to being there.

Not that Quebec isn’t naturally beautiful sitting gracefully on the St Lawrence Seaway, but it’s when you pass through the gates of the Old City that Quebec’s charm, they pronounce it K’ebek, and her Old World beauty strikes you. You are transported in time and space to the culture of France. The architecture of the buildings, the beautiful artwork, and the sumptuous restaurants awaken your senses. Close your eyes and you are not just in Canada, you are in France.

I choose to travel for many reasons. Sometimes for business, other times for pleasure, often just to satisfy my restlessness, but I also travel to experience a different culture. We can all too often assume that everyone everywhere is just like us. Until you travel, you will never appreciate how different we can be. This trip has shown me an aspect of Canada I had never experienced. It showed me France.

Bon jour fellow travelers and merci for taking the time to read my blog.

PS: Big shout out to Larry Landsness for the incredible job of research and planning that went into this trip and it’s making it a success.

Yesterday dawned cloudy and downright cold for the season. The skies gave way to rain to further dampen our spirits. Several weeks ago, my wife and I had purchased tickets to attend the Talking Spirits Walk in Forest Hills Cemetery sponsored by the Wisconsin Veterans Museum. The walk was to begin later in the evening and the rain and cold were definitely testing our resolve. Eventually, we decided we should go. We bundled up, donned rain gear and grabbed our umbrellas.

The walk, guided by a volunteer from the Veteran’s Museum, began just inside the main gates to the cemetery. The now light drizzle and darkness actually added to the mystery of the stroll through the Civil War sections of the cemetery. The cemetery was founded in the 1850’s and replaced the existing city cemetery located of all places on Bascom Hill located in the center of the University of Wisconsin. As we walked up the drive, softly lit by the hundreds of luminaries lining its edges, we were treated to the history of this famous cemetery and its peaceful residents now interred throughout the grounds.

We eventually reached the first vignette and waited, anticipating the arrival of our spirits. We were standing in front of what is called Soldiers Rest. Before us lay softly illuminated, the graves of some 140 Union soldiers. Before long, Mrs. Cordelia Harvey emerged from the graves and took her seat on the bench. She spoke of her husband, the late Governor Louis Harvey, who had perished by drowning during the Civil War. Her grave side soliloquize laid out the history of the era and the story of her husband’s untimely death while visiting the Union soldiers fighting down in Tennessee. As her story unfolded, another spirit emerged from the dark recesses of the graves. It was her husband, Louis Harvey. As their conversation evolved, we were drawn into their unrequited love for each other and the story of their lives cut short by his death. We were hooked. Rain and cold be damned, this was worth the effort.

Our walk through the cemetery last night afforded us three more opportunities to hear the stories, told by their spirits, of several very influential Madisonians and their impact on the city in its early period of growth. We met Benjamin Butts, an adopted Tennessee slave who became the barber of the Governors of Wisconsin. We chatted with Napoleon Bonaparte Van Slyke, a New York immigrant who became a prominent Madison businessman, Alderman and UW Regent. Among his accomplishments were the founding of the Forest Hills Cemetery and the Dane County Bank. We finished our walk with the specter of William Vilas, father of Henry Vilas Jr and founder of the park and zoo dedicated as a memorial to his son. Of the four vignettes, William Vilas’ was definitely the most moving. We felt his pride and grief and were pulled back in time as his story unfolded.

As we left the cemetery, we knew how sorry we would have been had we left the weather keep us away. We had a new understanding and respect for the role these people played in a tragic and yet exciting period in Madison’s history. In our hour and a half journey through the cemetery, we had been enlightened, moved and entertained by the spirits we met. We will soon be paying a daytime visit to Forest Hills to view and touch the grave stones of these famous people with a new found respect for their history.

This piece is meant to be a big shout out to the organizers of this event and an invitation to my readers to experience it for yourself. Even if not through another similar event, find time to just visit the cemetery and take a stroll through its beautiful and peaceful setting. Napoleon Van Slyke will certainly be pleased and maybe, if you are very quiet and the timing is right, you might just meet his spirit there beneath the trees surrounding his final resting place.

We have been in the St Louis area for the past three days visiting friends in Edwardsville on the Illinois side of the Mississippi River. The company has been fun and gracious as we caught up and spent time doing some good sightseeing and dining, and yes, some good refreshment times. Yesterday we took a drive into St Louis and though I have been there countless times, we took in the newly redone St Louis Arch Memorial. Where one had to try to navigate an insane highway crossing to get to the Arch, it has been replaced with a much larger park area running over the top of the busy highways running underneath.

That is just the beginning of the refurbishing. The museum entrance has been relocated to the middle of the Arch and leads down to a very expanded museum with far more history to offer. But that is not necessarily my point. What surprised us, no shocked us, was the detail in the exhibits. In the past the history of the western expansion was pretty much told from the American perspective. We needed space, no one really seemed to be there and after all, we had discovered it and manifest destiny ruled. The exhibit on the Mexican War, the US name for it versus the Mexican version, Yankee Invasion, told a different story of how we had for the only time in our history, declared a war to seize land. I do not mean to disparage the memory of those great American heroes of the Alamo, or Louis and Clark setting out from St Louis to survey our new territories west of the Mississippi, but it really shed a different light on our motivation. With Texas, it turns out slavery played a big role since the South needed more slave holding territories for their cause and then consider that neither Spanish or French law allowed for slave ownership. There was also a display that counted, through a moving time line, the number of acres the US has seized since it’s birth in 1776, roughly 1,600,000,000 acres. Most of this taken from the Native Americans through 510 treaties, all broken in time.

As surprising as these revelations were, none impacted me more than this one. Prior to 1804, when the western lands held by the French and Spanish came under US ownership and thus US laws, women were allowed full rights to ownership, representation, and legal status in all counts and courts. In one day, as the US flag was raised over the new territories, women lost all of those rights as they came under US law. Not until the 1900’s, over one hundred years later, would we begin to acknowledge those rights. I’ll leave that for you to chew on.

All of this is food for thought. I am not trying to burn the American Flag for heaven knows, we have for the most part apologized and in some small way recompensed many of our past deeds, but it was shocking to have it put into perspective. It is of course a testament to our country that a National Monument has put these exhibits there for all who would seize the opportunity to truly discover the history of our western expansion.

I feel a need to end on a positive note. Deb and I are having a great time on this road trip adventure, visiting old friends and new ones and discovering little things that we would never see from the air.

We have arrived in Switzerland and tonight we dine in Lucerne.  The Alps form the backdrop of most of our pictures and rise straight up out of the flat plains that surround them.

But let’s go back to yesterday and our farewell to the crew, the boat and new dear friends.  We have spent the last seven days doing pretty much everything together and saying goodbye last night was very difficult.  We have promised to stay in touch and have made some preliminary plans to visit each other’s homes.  Our friends are from Atlanta so this will take some dedication to make the journey either way.

When you travel in a group as we have these last seven days, it becomes quite easy to share our stories and suddenly find ourselves becoming bonded over common likes and plans.  This is a side effect of the travel but really one of the most important aspects of it.  There are river ships and ocena ships but the greatest are the friendships.

So this morning, we left the boat headed for our stay in Lucerne, without our Georgia friends.  They had left much earlier and caught their flight for home.  Though strange, we were still looking forward to our extended stay in Switzerland.

After our city tour and a quick lunch of local cuisine, we were on a bus headed for Stanserhorn and the long ride to its summit.  We start with a cog railroad ride for the first leg.  The train is the original train from 1893.  As we climb up the open meadow flank of the mountain, we see Lucerne and the surrounding villages drop away below us.  But this is just the first leg and the real climb waits at the end of the rail line.  At about 1/6 of the way up the mountain, we switch over to the cable car.

I have been on cable cars before.  I have been higher up on mountains out west, but this was clearly different.  Not sure whether it was the steepness or just the seeming singleness of this peak, but the sense of vertigo was overwhelming.  One can only wish the pictures could adequately display the view and somehow create the same sensation of floating, but only being there can have you truly appreciating the majesty of the Alps.

As if the sheer power and magnitude of the mountain and our precarious ride up its face were not impressive enough, there was a surprise.  Nearing the top, in a clearing hanging on the side of the mountain, we could see the switchbacks of a trail and then, to our surprise, the appearance of cows grazing at an incredibly impossible angle.  And where there were cows, there were farm buildings perched on the terraces of the mountain.

Switzerland has, by law, no corporate farms.  The average farm in Switzerland is a postage stamp fifty acres.  What shocked me, was that even here, high on this mountain side, farmers and their families were harvesting meadow hay for the cattle.

After a white knuckle hike to the final summit and a cliff walk back to the top of the cable car, we were headed back down.  Our cameras were full of the shots we could only hope told the story but the views and the sensations we experienced were etched in our memories and would travel down the mountain with us and then back to our homes as our journey was coming to an end.

We are comfortably seated at our restaurant on the edge of the canal.  Our waiter is bringing us more drinks and food as we listen to an impromptu concert break out across the canal.  The Alps are bathed in the waning sunlight as evening closes in on us.

One more day in Switzerland.  One more chance to record the memories of a country I never thought I’d see.  One more day to be the traveler.