Introduction Amazingly, this the 100th Blog post I have written and I would like to thank everyone who has come along on my journey and will use this milestone to reflect on the stories. This post highlights some of the family stories and other tour milestones. The map shows many of the post locations, the red markers are family stories and the blue markers are battlefield sites. Click on the interactive map to get an overview of the story and links to any posts you may have

Introduction My daughter Rachel was on a quest (since achieved) to visit 40 countries by the age of 40, so we visited Gdansk, Poland during the long weekend in May. I would like to take credit for choosing Gdansk because it was the location of the opening salvo of WW2, but since I thought we were going to Krakow until two weeks before the trip, I had no influence on the choice. Looking at old town Gdansk, you can see the Dutch and Flanders influence and are perfectly prepared

In addition to our battlefield and tiny country tours, we took the opportunity to explore the ancient cities of Rimini, Ravenna and Bologna during our visit to Italy. All of the cities have impressive structures that are thousands of years old. Rimini Rimini has been inhabited from ancient times but was created as a Roman city in 268 BC when 6,000 Romans were sent to Rimini to establish a base at the mouth of the Marecchia River to expand into the Po Valley. The beaches of

During our recent visit to Italy, my daughter Rachel and I negotiated a travel package, two days of battlefield tours in exchange for the tiny country of San Marino. Rachel has made it her mission to visit all of the countries of Europe that participate in The Games of the Small States of Europe during her four-year teaching assignment at the NATO school in the Netherlands. She has done very well so far with 9 of 10 visited to date. She is only missing the smallest, Vatican C