The summer of 2026 is almost over, and I hope it’s been a good one for all of you and your families. Despite the heavy rains and the smothering wildfire smoke, I hope you’ve found it to be relaxing and rejuvenating, and you’ve been able to do some fun things with your kids, grandkids and friends. As for me, the summer of 2026 will always be remembered as my European summer.
For most of the last six weeks, beginning the first week of July, my husband Jack and I were traveling in Western Europe. Unless you knew about my plans, you probably didn’t even notice that I was gone (I hope so, anyway) because before I left, I’d written and scheduled more than a dozen blogs to post automatically. And, of course, I kept getting emails when I was traveling, many of which I turned into blogs, taking advantage of train wifi as we rode between cities.
When I’m on extended trips like that, I don’t like publicizing the fact on Facebook, so I didn’t post any photos while I was gone. But of course I took hundreds, which I really want to share with you all. So if you’re interested in seeing any (or all) of them, please keep reading. There’s so much to tell you, I’m going to split it into two blogs.
The background
Back in January our eldest daughter Sara said she was planning a trip to Valencia in mid-August to view the total solar eclipse. Would we like to come along? We of course said yes. A week or so later, our son Sean texted that he and his girlfriend were heading to Salzburg in early July for some music workshops, followed by a side trip to Ireland. Would we like to come along?
We briefly considered choosing between the two options, but soon realized that we needed to do both. And of course we weren’t going to fly home in between. Thus, the three-week tour of Europe in between. Jack took on the challenge of planning out everything from the plane and train tickets to the hotels and Air B&Bs.
We like to fly out of Toronto for our European trips, but didn’t like the idea of leaving our car there for six weeks. So we decided to take a train to Toronto, stay overnight, and catch a flight to Vienna the next evening.
Our itinerary after Toronto covered 15 cities and towns, including, in order: Salzburg, Ennis (Ireland), Galway, Limerick, Vienna, Munich, Heidelberg, Cologne, Utrecht (Amsterdam), Bayeux (Normandy), Paris, Madrid and Valencia. We took trains everywhere (except to Ireland); I’ve sketched out the route on the map.
So strap in, and I’ll take you through the whole trip, city by city. For each city, I’ll include a link to a bunch of photos. Read as much as you’d like, and check out as many pictures as you want. If you’re really not interested, rest assured that my regular blogging schedule will resume in a few days!
(To see the photos I took in each locale, click the hyperlinks.)
We officially flew into the European continent on July 8, when we landed in Vienna and immediately hopped a train to Salzburg to meet up with Sean and Chelsey.
There are two things you really need to do in Salzburg: go up an Alp and check out some shooting locations from The Sound of Music. We did a little bit of both. The mountain we went up was called Untersberg, which is almost 6,000 feet at the tippy top point we stood on. The mountain was featured at the beginning and end of Sound of Music, but she did her iconic title song on the opposite side.
Among other things we did in Salzburg:
- We toured Mirabell Gardens, part of a palace built by some prince for his mistress. Several scenes from the movie were filmed here, so you might recognize the arbor archway, the Pegasus statue and the steps, all of which were featured in the Do-Re-Mi song.
- We took a funicular up to Fortress Hohensalzburg, the imposing fortress on the hill in some of my photos.
- Started our beer tour of Europe at Augustiner Brau, the largest beer garden in Austria. The convention is you choose your mug size from a shelf and they fill it directly from a keg. No choices. One kind of beer.
- Wandered through Hellbrunn Palace and St. Peter’s Abbey. Hellbrunn is famous for its “trick” fountains which will spurt randomly, often spraying unsuspecting passersby, and lots of mechanical figures powered by water. It’s also the current home of the gazebo from the Sound of Music.
Three stops in Ireland
After a few days in Salzburg, we took a train back to Vienna, where we spent the night before flying to Ireland to meet up with Sean and Chelsey again. That was a long travel day; it started with a tram to the train station, a train to the airport, a 3-hour flight to Dublin, then a 4-hour bus trip to Ennis.
Our time in Ireland was basically a traditional Irish session tour. Sean and Chelsey are both music teachers and Irish trad musicians, so we followed them around from one session to another and immersed ourselves in trad music and Irish beer.
Ennis is considered the heart of the Irish music scene. Lots of great music, cute rabbit-warren village streets and alleys. From there we took a bus to Galway, which is one of my favorite cities. More music, more cute streets. But a LOT more tourists.
One of the Galway sessions was led by Enda Scahill, widely considered one of the best banjo players in the world. And since the banjo is currently Sean’s favorite instrument to play in sessions, sitting in on a session with Enda was a real treat. And the tunes were rocking. (There’s a video in the Galway gallery.)
Our next stop in Ireland was Limerick, which is a much more working-class city than Galway. We wandered along the river walk and listened to more music. The following day we headed back to Ennis where we watched the most unusual session I’ve ever seen. It’s run by a guy named Blackie, and only uilleann pipes players are invited (except for his “backer,” who strummed a bouzouki). Blackie calls the session “Piping Heaven, Piping Hell,” alluding to the session being “heaven for pipers, hell for listeners.”
I’m not a fan of pipes, so I expected it to be annoying, but it was actually rather tuneful and even a bit enjoyable. It helped that the session was held in an outdoor beer garden at the back of the pub. If it were inside, my ears might have been bleeding.
We said goodbye to Sean and Chelsey in Limerick and took one more bus trip back to Galway, which as I said is one of our favorite cities. We enjoyed wandering the packed-with-tourists streets, and visited a few of our favorite pubs. There was an arts festival in town, and that night it featured a rather unusual event: a mini-parade with two monstrous set pieces — a huge whale, chased by a huge ship, both ridden by musicians and actors and accompanied by blaring music and pyrotechnics. It was a real sight. (There’s a video of this, too, in the Galway gallery.)
Leaving Ireland marked the end of the first chapter of our European adventure. We flew back to Vienna to begin our exploration of the heart of Western Europe.
We managed to pack a lot in the few days we had there:
- We visited the Sisi Museum at the Hofburg Palace, a very interesting exploration of the life of Elisabeth, Empress of Austria, a rather tragic figure who struggled with depression and was assassinated in 1898.
- Grabbed some street food at the Naschmarkt, an almost one-mile long market with farm vendors, food stands and restaurants. Came across the first set of stumbling stones we’ve seen on this trip — and we would see many more.
(Stumbling stones are are small, brass plaques embedded in sidewalks to commemorate individual victims of Nazi persecution during World War II. They mark the last place an individual lived before being arrested, and include their date of birth, date of arrest, where they were sent — many indicate Auschwitz — when they died and how they died.)
- Checked out the Museum of Military History, which held a real surprise: the actual car in which Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was riding when he was assassinated in June of 1914, the event which directly sparked World War I. They also had the uniform he was wearing and the lounge on which he was lying when he died.
- Explored the Vienna Prater, a massive two–square mile amusement park established in 1766. Think Seabreeze on steroids. It’s packed with roller coasters, fun houses and fright houses and towering thrill rides. Plus, the rides and common areas are adorned with sometimes macabre sculptures of people and animals, which made our exploration of the sprawling park very entertaining indeed.
- Visited Vienna’s Central Cemetery, where we saw the graves of Beethoven, Franz Schubert, Johannes Brahms and Johann Strauss.
Hopped a train to Munich the next day, and had time in the afternoon for some beer-gardening and sightseeing.
Our first stop was the Chinese Tower Beer Garden in English Garden, a huge Central Park-like green space in the middle of Munich. It’s a beautiful place with ponds and creeks and lots of walking paths. After having a pint and a snack there, we walked through the garden towards Old Town, admiring the scenery and incredible architecture along the way.
We did a lot of sightseeing:
- The Nymphenburg Palace, where we walked through gardens and along tree-lined paths.
- Olympic Park, site of the 1972 Summer Olympics. You may remember this was where 11 Israeli athletes were abducted and ultimately killed. There was a very informational and moving memorial to the athletes, which overlooks the Olympic Village where it all happened.
- Old Town, where we saw some very pretty and ornate churches (we saw a lot of pretty and ornate churches in Europe).
- A memorial to Michael Jackson — almost like an ofrenda — surrounding a statue in a pocket park. There are a few photos of that in the gallery.
- The Devil’s Footprint, which can be seen just inside the front door of the Munich Cathedral. As the myth goes, when the 15th-century builder ran out of money, he made a deal with the devil to fund the project on the condition it would have no windows to let in light. When the devil came to inspect the building, he stood near the entrance and saw no windows because it had been designed so the massive columns would block his view of them. He stomped his foot in triumph, leaving the charred mark. But when he stepped forward and saw the bright, stained-glass windows, he fled in fury. Photos in the gallery.
During our stay we also made sure to visit the very traditional Hofbrau Haus. The first time we were there, a few years ago, we fell into a conversation with a couple from Argentina. We were hoping to have a similar experience this time around, so we were pleased when a young man named Thierry from Quebec asked to join us. For the next two hours we laughed and drank and talked politics and listened to the oompah band. Then, after we’d had enough to eat and drink there, we walked over to the Viktualmarket beer garden for one last pint before heading our separate ways.
It was a terrific experience.
Unlike many of the places we’d been to up to this point, we had never visited Heidelberg, so I was looking forward to it.
Heidelberg’s biggest tourist attractions are the “Old Bridge” (which reminded me a lot of the Charles Bridge in Prague) and the Heidelberg Castle. It’s reached by a two-funicular ride up the 1,000-foot tall maintain and offers great views of the city. (We saw a lot of old castles on our trip).
We explored Old Town Heidelberg, which is rather quaint and attractive and has some gorgeous architecture, and walked up Philosopher’s Way, a roughly 2-km walk along a path on the opposite side of the river from the castle. It begins and ends with steep inclines (including a challenging, snake-like, brick-covered path) but the view from the top was worth it.
Our next stop was Cologne, Germany, a city we visited two years ago during our Viking Rhine Cruise.
Aside from its magnificent cathedral, Cologne is known for its Kolsch, served cold and crisp in .2-liter glasses. Much of the three-hour train trip from Heidelberg was along the Rhine, so we enjoyed seeing many of the castles on the hills which we saw on the cruise, and traveling through the center of many of the cute small towns.
Jack’s a big war history nerd, so on Wednesday we did the first day of our World War II history tour. We took a train and bus to Bastogne, Belgium, a key location in the Battle of the Bulge and featured prominently in Band of Brothers.
When we got back into town we enjoyed a dinner of bratwurst and Kolsch.
Stay tuned for Part 2 tomorrow.
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(posted 8/18/2026)
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