Excerpts from the diary of Alma’s son Granville, age 10, during their 5 month trip to Europe. “None of our family was to breakfast but lay in our berths all day.” “Mama is the sickest one of all and the baby ran way and was lost for half-a-day. Papa didn’t dare tell Mama until after they had found him over in the first-call barber shop. Mama made sailor suits for him. We are in second class, and he had squeezed through the fence into first-class.” “Mama was sick again and a man told her that he had a sure cure for sea sickness ‘to lie under a tree for an hour.’” “May 4th: After unpacking what little we needed for the few days in Naples, we set out again by carriages, and then by train, to see Pompeii.” “From here we decided to drive by carriages to Mount Vesuvius… We drove to the Half-Way house where we had to change to horse-back. Baby was asleep… So Mr. G hired one guide to carry Ernest, he rode to the top of Vesuvius on the man’s shoulders. The guides said he was the youngest child ever to go to the top. The eight of us had a picture taken on the very edge of the crater. All the pictures of our trip were later packed into the steamer-trunk, but it was stolen from the dock in Norway, and we have no pictures left.” “Today, we went to see St. Peter’s Church. We climbed 435 steps to the top of the dome and we could look down into the Vatican gardens.” “If we get home before papa and mama do, we watch a man in a shop make mosaic jewelry. Mama don’t care what we do if we don’t get into any carriage. She says she knows we’ll always come back to the hotel when we get hungry.” “After a few days in Florence, we came to Venice, each hotel sent its gondola, and the owners called out and coaxed customers to come to their hotels.” “We started to the Eiffel Tower, not quite sure that we would all go up, as we had hear that it cost .60 a piece, and Papa reminded us that 8 times .60 is $4.80. But we found that it only cost .40, so we all went up.” “The guide found that Papa could talk Swedish, so he told us to wait until the other tourists had gone, and he would show us children a wonderful invention. It was a flush toilet, and we had one at home, but we didn’t tell him so.” “Oslo: We saw King Haakon ride out to meet him at the dock, and, soon they returned in the open carriage, bowing to all of the crowd along the way.” Alma reflects on the 5 month journey through Europe. “How could 8 people travel five months in a foreign land? I washed clothes almost every evening in the hotels. We often had hotel rooms with several beds in one room, or the little ones slept on a blanket on the floor. We traveled 2nd class and once Alvin and Myrtle tried even 3rd class to see what it was like. We left our home on April 19th 1907 and returned on September 15th 1907.”
Posted on: Fri, 07 Mar 2014 15:00:02 +0000
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