A DREAM JOURNEY
Writer takes his mother to destinations of her dreams
Mom joins in on European road trip
I had long considered taking my parents to Europe. I knew they’d appreciate the history and grandeur of some of Europe’s great cities. I also knew they wouldn’t go on their own, but circumstance got in the way, and we never went.
My father passed on three years ago, and it make me realize that time moves at an unrelenting pace. Life is not long.
The opportunity for my mother to experience Europe — places that she had only dreamed of — was narrowing.
One added challenge is that my mother has mobility issues and uses a wheelchair to get around. Knowing that many parts of the world aren’t as accessible for people with disabilities as Canada is, I wondered if we’d be able to navigate the cobblestone streets and sidewalks, and if we’d be able to find accommodation that would meet her needs.
With a bit of work, the answer was, yes. And so the planning started.
My mom’s only request was to go to Switzerland.
I mapped out a route, that over two weeks, would take us from Frankfurt to Prague, Vienna and Switzerland. I decided that it would probably be easier to rent a car than to try getting a wheelchair on and off trains.
Besides, a car would give us the flexibility to go where and when we wanted.
When we drove across the Vltava River and my mother got her first look of Prague her first word was “wow.” (It was a word she would use several more times on the trip.) Poking above the city and sitting atop Hradcany, or Castle Hill was the 9th century Prague Castle and St. Vitus Cathedral.
It was 26 years since I was last in Prague, and it was still very much the fairy-tale-like city I remembered. Even the crowds of visitors didn’t tarnish the city’s charm.
We followed the stream of people flowing through the maze of narrow streets leading toward Prague’s beloved Charles Bridge.
This 600-year old pedestrian-only bridge was once the only one spanning the Vltava River. Today, it connects the city’s Old Town with the Little Quarter.
With architectural wonders in every direction, Prague is strikingly beautiful. It’s easy to see why people fall in love with this city. It enticed me from bed early one morning at about 5 a.m.
I let my feet guide me through the quiet streets. Like the colour of honey, the sun had painted a delicious sweetness across colourful buildings. Halfway across the Charles Bridge, two young guys with a bottle of Coke and rum caught my interest. I stopped to talk to them. They were visiting from France.
“Yes, it’s five in the morning and we’re drunk, but we’re happy.” I couldn’t think of a better place to be drunk and happy. After three days, we reluctantly left Prague and drove south to Vienna. The grandeur of some cities becomes faded with the passing of time; not Vienna. Once lording over one of Europe’s largest empires, Austria today is a shadow of its former glory, yet the buildings in its capital are grand and stately. Monuments to an imperial past.
At the Spanish Riding School, a richly ornate building, we took in a show of the Lipizzaner Stallions. The school is part of the centuries old Hofburg Palace. Hundreds of years ago, the ancestors of these graceful white horses would have paraded in this very place for Austria’s kings and queens.
My mother likes antiques and old things, so I took her to the Schönbrunn Palace that Queen Maria Theresa had built in the 1740s. It was the royal family’s summer residence. I knew there would be lots of old things in the 1,440-room, ornate Rococo-style palace. And while we only visited a small number of those rooms, my mom was thrilled.
How do you visit four countries in one day?
You go to Liechtenstein for lunch. We left Germany in the morning, fuelled up with gas in Austria, stopped in Liechtenstein, the world’s sixth smallest country, then continued into Switzerland. Here, we drove up high-mountain passes and threaded our car through narrow valleys. We enjoyed watching streams of water hurtling off hillsides, coloured in vibrant greens, becoming waterfalls. When my mother said she wanted to go to Switzerland, I knew exactly where to go. Locarno on the shores of Lake Maggiore. While the northern part of the lake is in Switzerland, most of it is in Italy. My mother knew of this place only from the stories I shared after I spent two weeks here with a Dutch friend and his family 35 years ago. Now she’d have stories of her own and see for herself the mountains, blanketed with forest, towering above the lake, the palm trees (yes, there are palm trees in Switzerland) lining the lakeside promenade, and historic churches built precipitously on the cliffsides.
Under a blue sky, we drove south along the two-lane road that winds its way along the lake. With Italian-pop songs filling the car, I let the road lead us to Italy.
We stopped in Stresa, and sitting beneath a collection of colourful patio umbrellas we enjoyed lunch. Stresa, with a population of 5,000, is the kind of quaint lakeside town that begs you to stay longer, but new experiences were tempting us: Milan, Italy’s second largest city, was just an hour’s drive away.
The afternoon was warm, as we trailed after the crowds to the city’s biggest site, the imposing Duomo, the world’s largest Gothic cathedral.
“Now, that deserves a wow!” my mother cried out, as we joined hundreds of other people marvelling at this architectural treasure. With our Italian day trip over, we returned to Switzerland. On our final day, driving back to the airport in Frankfurt, I was replaying in my mind everything we had seen over the past two weeks. Breaking the silence, my mom turned to me and said, “Thanks.”