I’ve made two trips to Hungary and both were fascinating, although in a couple of very different ways. The first time was in the mid-1980s when Hungary was still in the Russian sphere. We were traveling there by train, and had our first taste of a repressive society at the Austro-Hungarian border. Armed soldiers entered…
After concluding our first trip to Hungary in the mid-1980s, my wife and I continued our travels by taking a Czech train from Budapest to Prague—a magnificent city, of course, but just the train ride there was notable in several ways. We had lunch in the dining car on that train. I ordered a beer and, when…
My first trip to Europe was in the summer of 1954. The American Field Service ran an exchange-student program in those days, with American kids going to Europe to live with a local family for the summer and European kids coming to the U.S. for the full school year. I applied and requested that I be…
You have probably seen my earlier rants about how the US has fallen behind most of the rest of the world when it comes to train travel. In particular, the Europeans – specifically, the French, the Germans and the Spanish – have adopted high-speed trains as a way of life. Those trains are faster, cheaper…