GaryOsberg.com

The trip of a lifetime.  Three years ago the art teacher at Upsala High School started working on a tour of Europe.  Miss P (Kara Poissant) pulled it off.  Twenty students, age 15 to 18, and 12 adults including myself did it.  We visited seven cities in five countries in 11 days.  London, Paris, Zurich, Lucerne, Munich, Salzburg and Vienna.  When my daughter Kerry showed me the brochure, I noticed that the last day before returning home included Weiner Schnitzel dinner in Vienna.  I booked it that day.

I did get back to the apartment that we lived in from 1951 to 1953.  I took a cab from downtown Vienna and asked the cab driver to wait for 15 minutes.  No problem.  As I approached the front door, a man asked if he could help me.  Markus pointed out which button was for the owner and said, “push it”.  The buzzer rang and I was admitted to the lobby and was transported back 66 years.  The old elevator had been replaced, but the water faucet in the lobby, which was to be used to water flowers, was still there.  The owner lives in the same apartment that we used.  The owner, a granddaughter of the owner that we displaced in 1951, was not home, but her room mate let me in.  He would not let me take pictures, but he did give me a tour.  He let me take a photo of the view from the balcony.   I would like to return to Vienna and take them out for dinner sometime.

It is never too late to “make time for what you can dream”.  Now I have to find a photo album that will hold 392 pictures taken with an iPhone 6.

Live from Here this week is a rebroadcast of an old show.  You can check the tour by visiting livefromhere.org  

“Trust your crazy ideas”  Dan Zadra