Just a few days to go now before we depart for the long haul to Stockholm with Qantas and Emirates for the first long flight.
I think the idea for this particular trip came together when we were having dinner at a little place in Portugal called Vilharinho when we were on our walking tour of the Duoro Valley on our last trip. Ann has done lots of work setting up all the itinerary and ensuring we have good eating, drinking and sleeping spots. And we have scheduled some walking too, in the Yorkshire Dales and in South Wales.
This is the Heritage Tour and we will be visiting the places that our great-grandparents (and sometimes great-great-grandparents) came from. So we will be visiting Sweden, then the UK and then France. France has very little to do with our ancestry apart from some forebears who fought in WW1, so to be true to the theme we will visit the Somme and the Normandy landing beaches. The main driver for this leg though is more the scenery, food and wine.
We will be fitting in some canal boating again with Wayne and Vikki. We'll meet them in Paris on October 2 and travel to Epernay for a look at the Champagne area and then we'll start our canal boating week from nearby Hesse. Both Choco and I have a birthday to celebrate in Epernay.
Lots of people have been really helpful with heritage information on both sides of the family, and that help is appreciated. So we will be looking at the areas where our forebears, farmed, market gardened, made lace, made shoes, plumbed, laboured, sailed, operated lifeboats and lighthouses, or field ambulances and ran laundry businesses.
We will see some flesh and blood relatives, some churches and graveyards, but mostly we're just expecting to be walking some of the streets and areas that they did. Ireland got the short straw this time. Both Ann and I have forebears from there, but time got a bit short this time around so there will be a Heritage Tour Part 2 later on at some stage to correct that omission.
Our next post is likely to be after the stay in Sweden, which promises some real highlights including a trip across the inland sea to a Viking island, Birka, the ABBA museum, the village where Carl Erik was born and the tale of Lunkentuss, which sailed from Sundsvall some time after Carl Erik Olaf left.
