HOME AGAIN

"No one realizes how good it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow."  

~Lyn Yutang

However, I will miss turn-down service and chocolates on my pillow.  Bob, could you continue that? Oh, and fresh towels every day. That would also be nice.

"The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land." 

 ~G.K. Chesterton

You mean a soda costs ONE DOLLAR?  Not FIVE DOLLARS, as it did in Norway and Sweden?  Wow, the USA is not so bad after all!  Now if we could just get Orangina Rouge and Bitter Lemon at our local grocery store.

"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime." 

 ~Mark Twain

"To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries." 

 ~Aldous Huxley

Our favorite destination on this trip?  Moscow, Russia. We were stunned by the scenery and we loved the people and the history.  As our guide said, "Russia has had some of the worst governing in history, yet they still managed to  create a Tolstoy, a Dostoyevsky, a Pushkin, a Chekhov, a Baryshnikov, a Rachmaninoff, a Tchaikovsky, and many others.  The Russians know how to overcome."

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” 

~ Mark Twain

"Spend your money on experiences, not on things."
~ Doris Kenison