Subject: Seek info re Spain//Offer info re Central Europe
My wife and I have been planning a trip to Spain for October and then suddenly I got hit with a diagnosis of Bladder Cancer! I am now getting treatments and it seems that I am likely to be in good shape (quiesent at least) when my current treatments finish at the end of Sept. I say the above because we are now back on the track of planning a month more or less in Spain in Oct/Nov but need to be a bit more conservative than we might have been otherwise. We are thinking about maybe buying an Iberia ticket (They should be discounted for Oct travel, No?) and a booklet of for in Spain trips. That way we can fly to Madrid or Barcelona, and then using our in Spain tickets visit the above two cities, Bilbao, and one or two others. We would love to stay in a small number of Posadas but I am a bit worried about driving and my virtually no existent Spanish. Maybe for a first trip to Spain we may be best to stay a week in each of our four cities and take daytrips from them.

We are interested in any suggestions. We are young seniors and except for the medical shock mentioned above are in good shape and very comfortable traveling on our own. Two years ago we spend a month traveling via trains on our own to Berlin, Prague, Budapest and Vienna. It was glorious.

We created an account of our trip mostly for our own memories # which increasingly need help # but we hope it might be of some interest. This was a major trip for us, undertaken partly to see the lauded rebirth of Prague (which we had never seen) along with Budapest (which we had seen still under Communist rule) and Vienna, which was still under tri-partite occupation when we were last there. We looked forward to the vast amounts of wonderful art and superb pastries and to a revisiting of our cultural roots # Jewish and Hungarian, as well as Viennese, which of course influenced so much of the rest of Central Europe # and certainly much of Eve#s (My Wife) family background. We spent months reading, planning and studying German, and Berlin was added to the itinerary in the course of this planning, on the advice of Israeli friends, for which we are very grateful. And, of course, it fits well into the cultural and historic gestalt of the other three cities. We also added a brief weekend in Bratislava, which was essentially en route between Budapest and Vienna, and which allowed us to meet a cousin of our recently discovered, and also # incidentally # to see the capital of the country in which Eve was born. We were fortunate in the places we stayed # two apartments, in Vienna and Budapest, having been arranged by friends and a cousin.

If there is interest in the 10 page account we produced, we will gladly email it if you contact us directly.

Eve and Len Gottesman