Travels

During our time in the Ministry we had many opportunities to travel. We began early. At Windsor Hills we heard about an exchange program with a minister in another country. It involved exchanging houses, church responsibilities, and cars. We chose to go to Toronto, Canada. The children were very young, I remember holding baby Sally in my lap and driving with an ammonia bucket in the back seat for dirty dippers. I also remember Neel riding down the parsonage sidewalk on a tricycle. David’s sister Frances and a friend joined us in Canada. The minister we exchanged with was a little anxious about coming to the South. “Do they do lynching in Lynchburg, Virginia?” he asked. We assured him that Lynch was an old Virginia family name. On that trip we also visited Niagara Falls.

When we moved to Charlottesville we had the opportunity to take the Grand Tour of Europe led by Jerry Spidel. A memory of that trip is of a group from our church carrying balloons and signs who came to the Greyhound Bus Station to see us off. The other passengers looked the other way and tried to ignore the clamor. How thrilling it was to see London, Paris, Amsterdam, Madrid and Rome – all the great capitols.

New York, our next assignment, was a trip in itself.

We did two more exchanges both in England, one in Nottingham and one in Cornwall. In Nottingham we were in Robin Hood country and in Cornwall we were on the Seacoast. We enjoyed trying to adjust to new ways of shopping, driving on the wrong side of the road, and using different words, for example “garden” instead of “yard”, “loo” instead of “bathroom”, “boot” instead of “trunk”, etc. We were in the Washington DC area when we took these trips (Epiphany and Walker Chapel) Mother went with us to Cornwall.

After our exchange in Cornwall we went to Germany and took a boat trip down the Rhine River, viewing castles and visiting wine cellars. Mother especially enjoyed the wine tasting!

It was while living in Lynchburg that the idea of going to Scotland emerged. Many of the Happy Hikers had been there and said it was a wonderful place to hike. We rented a car and drove through vivid green landscapes, stopping at a small hotel right on the shore of Loc Ness. Though I saw intriguing shadows in the water I never saw the Monster. In Edinburgh we visited the castle, took the Ghost tour, and met many locals named Gattis.

We made two trips to Greece, once while Neel was studying at Athens. Later David and I took a cruise around the Greek Isles ending in Ephesus. I marveled at the classic, white houses we saw on the cruise and regretted that I missed the land tour of Crete. I was not feeling well and at Rhodes a doctor in a tall hat, came to my cabin to check me out. “Pardon me, Madam” he said as he lifted my skirt and gave me a pain shot. On the second trip we (Neel, Candace, David and I) went to the Isle of Aegina and sat on the steps of an ancient temple looking down on a small fishing villiage.

Having the family with us on these trips made them especially meaningful.