We recently bought our plane tickets, which now makes the trip all the more real.  I've been joking with John that last year we went on the trip that he's wanted to go on since high school, and now, this year we're going on the trip I have wanted to go on since high school.

We are flying into Berlin.  We'll be spending a couple of days seeing the sites.  Kara couldn't say enough wonderful things about Berlin, which makes me look forward to it even more.  Furthermore, Esther said it's so amazing to see how different from each other the western and eastern sides of the city look.  My "pen pal" from Germany recommended that we try Berliner Weiße mit Schuß.

Next we'll move on to Dresden, which is a city I've wanted to wander around since reading Slaughterhouse Five.  From there we'll go to Prague and look at panels upon panels of stained glass.  Yes!

From there we'll head to Krakow to explore as many churches as possible.  We'll also be making day trips to Oswiecim and Czestochowa.  Oswiecim is near the site of Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.  In Czestochowa is the monastery of Jasna Gora, which is one of the holiest places in the country.  I have a copy of a photograph from when my relatives made a pilgrimage there in the 1920s.  It'll be so cool to walk the same path they did!

From Krakow I nearly positive we'll head to Lviv (Lvov) in Ukraine.  Then we'll go to Warsaw and hopefully stop briefly in Zamosc.  I'm super excited about the Warsaw Rising museum, and it sounds like there will be lots of cool "city" things to do.

After a few days in Warsaw, we'll move on to Torun: birthplace of Copernicus!  Nearby are the cities of Bydgoszcz, Chelmno, and Swiecie, which are where my ancestors came from.  Once we've wandered a bit in those cities, we'll start making our way back to Berlin, and then back to Seattle.

So that's the itinerary.  We've started to put together our to-do list to get ready for our November 8 departure.  More to come....

Trina (and John)