My First Slovak Trip - 1
I love my Uncle Bob. I really do. My dad’s family was about
as close as I’ve seen most brothers and sisters (I’m an only child) at least as
far as I could tell. I mean all families have their little things that they
don’t talk about, but Dad, the oldest, Bob, the middle, and Charlotte, the
“baby”, have always been very loving and supportive as far as I can tell.
With all that said, my dad had always wanted to go visit
Slovakia, because that’s where his mother was born. And every year or so, he’d
start making plans with Uncle Bob, and something would come up. Sometimes it
was financial, or something with one of the kids, or because he had promised to
take Aunt Bev on a train trip across Canada, but it was always something, and
Dad was getting a little frustrated.
I have mentioned that he had this weird ability to just pick
up languages, having lived in Italy and traveling much of Europe when he was
younger. Well, even though Grandma spoke English with an accent to her dying
day, she really didn’t speak Slovak much around the house when Dad was growing
up. So, while he heard it a little, he was never bi-lingual in Slovak at all.
So, he bought some Slovak-English dictionaries, and found some local friends
(he was living in Dallas at the time) who spoke Slovak and just started
speaking Slovak. It wasn’t perfect, but to my unknowing ear, it sounded pretty
good.
Anyway, he called me and was really down in the dumps.
“Bob can’t go this year… he promised Bev a train trip
through Canada and I’m not getting any younger.”
It just so happened that I hadn’t burned any of my vacation
time yet, and after working for years as an airline manager, I had some favors
I could call in. Working for the airlines used to be an incredible opportunity,
because you could fly for nearly nothing on other carriers, get deeply
discounted rates on hotels – it was amazing. It still is to a point, but after
9/11, most of those perks (and 150,000 jobs in the travel industry) sort of
vaporized.
“So let’s go. You and me. I have two weeks I can take, and
if you’ll help me pay for my part of the trip, I can make it work for 80% less
than you’ve budgeted anyway.”
It took a little while for me to convince him I was serious,
but once I started laying out the flights, he started to get as excited as a
five-year-old on Christmas morning.
I guess it makes a lot of people crazy - it certainly did my
wife and his – but we would probably talk two or three times a day, making
plans, changing things around, exploring options. Like what if we took an
earlier flight into London, then stayed overnight? Or what if we left the
family a day early and explored one more city in Europe? Which one? Prague?
Copenhagen? The possibilities were endless, and we wanted to make sure we
debated each one.
“Would you guys GO already?” my wife would ask after about
the 32nd time I queried her about a possible minute change in the
itinerary. We collected maps, Dad worked on his Slovak, and I worried about the
travel arrangements. Finally, we had it set in stone.
We would fly into London, stay overnight at Heathrow where
the hotels were exceptionally cheap, get a good night’s sleep, then fly to
Vienna. We would rent a car and drive over the Carpathian mountains to the town
my grandmother was born, Dlha Luka. We would stay with the family for three or
four days, then drive back to Vienna through Hungary, staying overnight in
Budapest. Dad wanted to see Budapest
again, because he remembered it as being unspeakably beautiful. But the last
time he saw it was shortly after the Hungarian Revolution, and he hadn’t been
allowed to see much.
We finally settled on Copenhagen as our final stop. I really
don’t remember why. I think he had traveled through quite a bit of Europe as a
younger man, but hadn’t ever seen Denmark or the Scandinavian countries. I, of
course, had been through Norway, Sweden, and part of Estonia when I was
travelling with the Russian mob guy.
Ultimately, we decided we would stay three days in
Copenhagen, then return home via a quick connection in London - piece of cake.
Well, sort of.
