TURKEY AND GREECE 2026: A MIRACULOUS TRIP

 June 2026

In 2025, after our trip to Uganda with our granddaughter, we planned a return trip to Uganda in July 2026 with one of Bob's law partners and his wife with the specific purpose of going gorilla trekking. We set up our tours, purchased our flights, and were ready to go.

My brother and his wife and my sister and her husband had planned a trip together--a Viking ocean cruise from Instanbul to Athens in late June 2026. One day in spring during a family chat my sister-in-law shared their travel plans and said, "Anyone who wants to come along is welcome to join us." Within days my other two sisters and their spouses had joined the cruise. At that time our Uganda plans were set and we could not afford the time nor the money to do two large trips in one summer. I was feeling really sad to be the only sibling left out of all the family fun.

HOWEVER . . . 

The ebola virus hit the Democratic Republic of the Congo early in the year, the country bordering the area of Uganda we had planned to visit, and a few cases spread into Uganda. We watched and waited, and even though the risk to us would be low, we were pretty sure the outbreak would affect our trip.

Map of Ebola outbreak. The Democratic Republic of the
Congo, where most of the ebola outbreaks have
occurred, is the large country to the west of Uganda.

Then the wars in the Middle East sealed the deal. We were going to have a 14-hour layover in Dubai on our way to Uganda, and the Dubai airport was occasionally being threatened by the conflict in the Middle East. Also, the U.S. began to impose crazy travel restrictions for anyone traveling to the Middle East and Uganda or the DRC, and so when the Dubai Airport kept closing because of  bombing threats, when Qatar Airlines made a rather substantial change to our flight in late May, and when other routes really were not feasible, it gave us an out. While we didn't get refunds, we were able to postpone the trip to 2027. (Unfortunately, none of the issues that caused us to postpone the trip have really changed, and ebola outbreaks continue, so stayed tuned!)

HOWEVER . . . 

Our trip had blown up about three weeks before my siblings' cruise. Once we were sure we weren't going to be able to go to Uganda, I called my siblings' contact at Viking to see if there were any open spots on the ship. He told me it had sold out long ago and that it was very rare that anything would open up this close to the embarkation date. Darn. So close.

One of the reasons this trip was so important to me is that my sister-in-law had been battling cancer for two years and was not doing well. It was on all of our minds that this trip could be the last time we spent together as a group of ten--the five siblings and the five spouses.

HOWEVER . . .

Three days later the Viking rep called  me to tell me someone HAD cancelled and if I could pay in full in the next hour, the spot was ours. At the end of an hour he would have to release the spot to the internet. I couldn't get in touch with Bob, but I was sure he would be fine with it, so I paid the full amount. We were in! We scrambled to make necessary changes in our schedules as this trip was three weeks earlier than our Uganda trip, but miraculously, it all worked out perfectly.

AND SO . . .

We had an uneventful 13-hour direct flight from LAX to Istanbul on June 20-21, arriving at 7:15 PM Turkey time. (Three of my four siblings and their spouses had already arrived earlier in the day.) We took a taxi to the Erboy Hotel and ate dinner at the hotel's roof top restaurant, where I had a delicious vegetable soup with lemon and an okay seafood salad, and Bob had fantastic roast lamb.

We returned to our room and crawled into bed around 11:00 PM, but not for too long, at least for Bob, who had booked a 5:00 AM birding tour. Yes, he is that crazy about birds, and no, it did not tempt me even a little bit. I slept until 7:00 and had a wonderful buffet breakfast at 8:00. I was ready for the fun to begin.

And that is how our trip to Uganda turned into a cruise from Istanbul to Greece. Not what we were planning, but definitely a miracle.

GERMANY: AN OLD POST, A NEW FRIEND, AND MANY LITTLE MIRACLES

 May 2025

And now I come to the part of the story of this trip to Germany that is nothing short of a miracle.

The very beginning of the story (if there is such a thing as a beginning of any story) was 85 years ago near a castle on the top of a rather remote hill in Southern Germany, but my part of it began just 25 years ago in December 2000 when Bob and I took our two sons, ages 15 and 12, to Europe with two objectives in mind: pick up our daughter from her study abroad program in France and spend time with my mother in Germany. 

Mom, our daughter, our sons, and I in the
Pforzheim cemetery, December 2000

My mother grew up in Pforzheim, a city that was bombed on February 23, 1945, killing 17,600 people, which was over 30% of the town's population. We met up with her in her hometown, spent the day seeing places that had been important to her, and then moved on to other cities in Southern Germany. 

NAMIBIA: ETOSHA NATIONAL PARK, DAY 2, OKAUKEUJO CAMP TO HALILI CAMP

After a good night's sleep in our Etosha National Park cabin, we got in a line of cars at the gate that were waiting to leave the lodge area and start driving around the national park. Visitors are not allowed outside the lodge fences at night unless they are in a national park vehicle. Our plan was to leave as early as possible, drive around for an hour or two, and then come back for breakfast and to check out before resuming our safari drive.

The gate opened at 7:15 AM, just in time for us to watch a beautiful African sunrise:

Dawn is a great time to see wildlife. Our first sighting was a pair of greater kestrels:

FAREWELL DINNER IN THE STANS AND TWO MIRACULOUS CONNECTIONS

Our tour group of 90 people (divided into three groups of 30) had been together for three weeks. We had traveled through six countries together, ridden buses, trains, camels, and planes together, consumed thousands of cans of Coke Zero together--and the time had come to bid each other farewell. Most of the group was heading home, but we and another couple still had one more three-day stop in Azerbaijan to go.

The tour leaders said their good-byes, including the two representatives from the German train company and the four members of the Tyndall family, owners of Fun for Less Tours, who had been on the tour with us:

We shared our last dinner while enjoying entertainment provided by local musicians and dancers.

Gotta love the dramatic gestures:

The "This Bread's for You" and "London Bridges" dance:

Turkmeni guitar music:

The Turkmeni Lady Gaga:

We really grew to love the Central Asian drum, a skin stretched over a frame and played mostly with the finger tips:

I wish I had taken more pictures of our traditional Turkmenistan dinner, but all I have is this cup of squash soup, a couple of meat-filled pastries, and a glass of Coke Zero (the Honorable Beverage of the Trip):

There were so many wonderful things about this journey--I learned so much and many of my perceptions and attitudes were re-shaped by our experiences. However, one of the absolute highlights of the trip did not really have anything to do with the Silk Road. Rather, it was a pair of unexpected and miraculous encounters with fellow travelers.

The first day I got on the bus, someone called out my name.  Pearl Anderson introduced herself to me, and then told me a story about having met my oldest sister at church in Utah a few months previous (both of them live in other states), and figuring out that her family and ours were connected. Her father, an American GI, befriended my mother, a German girl in her early 20s, during the occupation of Germany by allied forces after World War II. His family ended up sponsoring my mother's immigration to the US in 1952, and my mother lived with Pearl's grandparents for nine months when she first arrived in the US. Truly, without their help, Mom never would have been able to get out of Germany. She wouldn't have met my dad a few months after she arrived. She wouldn't have married him and had five children with him, with me being the last. My family's existence hinged on the friendship offered to my mother by this woman's father.

Pearl had told my sister she was taking this trip, and my sister told her she thought we were going on the same trip. The 90 tourists on this trip were divided into three sub-groups, and miraculously, the Cannons and Andersons were in the same sub-group. Pearl had seen my name on the sub-group roster and had been watching for me.

During our long journey west, we spent hours together on the bus talking about the stories our parents, all of whom are now dead, had told us about those war years, the immigration process, and my mom's first year in the States. We shared stories of what we knew about our parents' marriages and what our family lives had been like. I think I learned as much about my mother during this trip as I learned about the Silk Road! 

The other little miracle relates to one of the other passengers--a man named Hans Bobsin who is one of the chief travel managers of the German company that owns the Silk Road Express train. He accompanied our group during all of the train travel. Hans is an intelligent, lively, friendly fellow with a great sense of humor who got along well with everyone. As I listened to the soft German accent behind his impeccable English (he speaks something like six languages), it sounded so familiar. The train company is based in Berlin, but Hans did not seem like a typical northern German to me. He was way too much fun. I finally got up the courage to ask him what part of Germany he was from. I told him he did not seem like a typical Berliner to me, a group of people I have stereotyped as a little dour and not particularly friendly. 

"I'm not from Berlin," he said. "I'm from southern Germany."  

"Where in southern Germany?" I asked. 

"Pforzheim."  

That single word took my breath away. No wonder his accent sounded familiar! My mother was from Pforzheim, and lived there most of her life before she immigrated!

What are the chances that a member of the family who sponsored my mother's immigration and a man from her hometown would both be on this trip with me? (Mom, did you orchestrate this?)

I shared my mother's stories of the war in Pforzheim with Hans, who teared up when I told him the story of Oma and my uncle fleeing to the river during the lethal bombing raid on February 23, 1945, which killed almost 18,000 people, and of my mother stuck on a farm in the country, not knowing for two weeks if her mother and brother had survived. Hans is my age, and as he told me about growing up in Pforzheim, I could almost imagine what it would have been like to move there had Mom made the decision to return to Germany after my father died in 1964 , something she seriously considered. Hans and I could have been classmates! It gave me new perspective into her difficult decision to stay in the United States for the sake of her American-born children.

After three weeks of travel, in the end it was hard to say good-bye to these and the other wonderful people we had journeyed with.

It didn't help that we were facing a 3:30 AM flight. The airport opened in 1994 and used to be called the Saparmurat Turkmenbashy Airport. (What else would you expect from Turkmenistan?) However, it had many design flaws, and so the second president, Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow, redesigned and rebuilt the airport at a cost of $2.3 billion, and this version, the Ashgabat International Airport, opened in 2016. It is bizarre (the word I have used again and again in my posts about this country) so spend this much money TWICE on an airport as Turkmenistan has almost no tourism and tightly controls the movements of its own citizens.

The terminal's very distinctive design (in white marble and blue glass, duh) looks like a bird in flight:

Photo from Wikipedia

The interior is also quite distinctive:

It had all the regular Duty Free shops, which were either empty or locked up. Of course, it was the wee hours of the morning.

Good-bye, Turkmenistan. I wonder what you'll be like in twenty years?

For that matter, I wonder what ALL of the five Stans will be like in twenty years. This seems like a region of the world that is ripe for change--be it revolution, annexation by China or Russia, collapse, or (by some miracle) a belated entry into world politics and trade.