After checking and rechecking paperwork and clothing we are ready to leave home. Alan’s first stop is Dereham in Norfolk to attend Ministerial Synod, from there he will travel to Yorkshire where he will meet up with Dorothy. We are staying with our Yorkshire family for two nights before heading north to Lindisfarne (Holy Island) off the coast of Northumberland. Alan wanted to begin his sabbatical in an iconic place of retreat and what better place than Lindisfarne. We are staying in Bed and Breakfast accommodation on the island for three nights and are looking forward to a restful reflective time before travelling back down to Newcastle for our ferry across to Amsterdam. This is an overnight crossing so we should arrive in Holland refreshed ready to take the train to Berlin. We arrive in Berlin in the early evening so we won’t have much time for sightseeing. Our train next morning leaves fairly early so again no time to wander around the city. This train takes us all the way east across Germany and into Poland where we arrive in Krakow on Maundy Thursday. We are hoping to visit Auschwitz which we are expecting to be quite harrowing. In Krakow much is made of Easter so we are hoping to have a good time of celebration. We have self catering accommodation in Krakow very near the centre of the city. Apparently there are some very good restaurants in the city square so we will have some good meals in Poland.
The next stage of our journey is a very long train trek up to Latvia. We have four stops during the night and the next day, calling at Warsaw and Vilnius and a couple of other smaller towns. We arrive in Daugavpils in Latvia in the evening of the 16th April. Our next adventure is taking charge of a car and driving north to Riga where we are hoping to meet up with some Methodist people. During the 23rd April (St George’s Day and the anniversary of Richard and Emma’s wedding) we travel back to Daugavpils where we catch an overnight train to St Petersburg. I think I (Dorothy) will be in tears at this point. It has been a lifelong wish of mine to visit Russia and I have had to wait over 50 years, so I think that I may be a little overwhelmed.
We are booked into a hotel in St Petersburg for four nights, so we will have plenty of time to visit the Hermitage, Nevsky Prospekt and other tourist attractions. We have a tour guide for the next part of the journey south to Moscow. This is where we join the group who we are travelling with on the Trans Mongolian Railway. There are five people booked on the tour. A 73 yr old lady from Chicago, a 54yr old lady from Canada, a 24 yr old man from Switzerland and us. So we are not the oldest of the group. The tour leaves Moscow on the 28th April and our first stop is Yekaterinburg where Tsar Nicholas 2nd and his family were murdered in 1917, from there we spend two days travelling through the expanse of Siberia and then on to Lake Baikal where we will be staying with a Russian family for two nights. Back on the train and return to Irkutsk where we spend the night and then back on the train on to Ulan Bataar, the capital of Mongolia. We then travel by 4WD vehicles into the Mongolian Desert and visit Karakorum which is the capital built by Genghis Khan in the 13th century. We camp in a Mongolian Ghur for two nights. We then travel back to Ulan Bataar for our final leg of the journey on the Trans Mongolian Railway arriving in Beijing where we stay for three nights.
On the 21st May we leave Beijing at 12.00 noon and fly to San Francisco, arriving on 21st May at 8.30 a.m. We arrive in America 3 ½ hours before we leave China. Fortunately we have self catering accommodation in S F for four nights so we will be able to crash out for a while before we explore San Francisco. We are lo0king forward to a ride on one of the trams and visiting Alcatraz. Hopefully we will get a bit of a rest and then pick up our hire car for the 3000 mile trek across America. Our first stop will be Flagstaff where we stay for a couple of days and visit the Grand Canyon. Dorothy hopes to take a walk on the glass horseshoe. From Flagstaff we travel on to Albuquerque and then on to Oklahoma. The Cherokee Indians were forced out of Tennessee and had to walk all the way to Oklahoma so that is the link that we want to look at.
We call in at Memphis and want to revisit the Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel. We visited in 2003 but had to rush as we didn’t have much time. Our next port of call is Nashville and the Grand Ole Opry. Then on to
Alan’s sabbatical finishes at the Holston Conference in
Rachel, Peter, Megan, Charlotte and Lauren arrive on Friday 12th June and we are looking forward to a fortnight’s holiday.
