Just like "Finding your Roots" on PBS (Hey Sally!)

Michael, drinking espresso and watching the world pass by...

Saturday, February 17

Watching the flight map was my favorite thing to pass the time, as I could read and not be distracted by movies I didn't really want to watch (The whole plane seemed to be watching Thor Ragnarok!)

Flying over our mother's family homelands

As we flew over central Europe, and passed Vienna and Bratislava, we followed the Danube - much like my mother's family. For my sister Sally:  on this map you can see the locations of Grandpa and Grandma's towns.  Grandpa's (Mariaholn/Kirva) is just above Budapest on the south side of the Danube.  Grandma's town (Csavos/Granicerii) is in Romania, right on the border of Hungary near Timisoara.  Both our grandparents families were Swabian, from near Stuttgart, Germany and both families emigrated to their respective locations in the late 1700's when Habsburg Empress Maria Teresa offered land for resettlement in the Danube valley.  Even though where they lived as children is now in different countries today, they both retained their Swabian/German cultural heritage and ended up together in Detroit after the turn of the last century.  Been having lots of fun with my sister as we have been tracing our ancestry - she's a sleuth like the "Finding your Roots" show on PBS.

The clouds over the European continent finally parted somewhere over Romania and Bulgaria.  You can see the Danube on our flight path map, and the same tracing of the real river as we looked out the windows.

Path of the Danube River as shown on our flight path map

And here it is, as we traverse it, following the same tracing as the map

Can you tell by my smile that I'm SO ready for vacation and the adventures of the trip?