Europe on Next-to-Nothing a Day

My handsome honey was stationed in Germany when he was in the Army.  It was a fine place for an artist to be, and he took advantage of the opportunity to see much of Europe.  (He'd been there a couple of years earlier as a college student so he took some of his GI friends to places he'd discovered earlier and explored many new places as well.)

Lately he's been scanning the slides of his Army days and telling me the stories behind them.  Here are a few we wanted to share with you.

Here he is, Sergeant Tom, pressed and polished, showing off his new stripes.

Sergeant Tom

One day some American tourists stopped Tom and his buddies and told them that they were going home and needed to get rid of their Combi.  Would the guys like to buy it for $1.00?  Why, of course!  They gave the tourists a dollar and transferred the title and became the proud owners of Mordicai, their transportation through Europe!

Sometimes they ventured a little too far, such as the time they were on on the Czech-German border.  Looking down from the guard tower at them were two guards, one holding a pair of binoculars and the other a gun, trained on Tom and his friends.

But mostly he enjoyed the enchanting sites of life in the cities and countryside of Europe.  In Amsterdam he spotted this woman fishing from her back yard.

Here his friends are trying to get a glimpse into the eternal flame torch stand at the stadium in Berlin where Jesse Owens won a Gold Medal in the 1938 Olympics.

In Munich, he toured the Neuschwanstein Castle, which Walt Disney used as the prototype for his Disneyland Castle.  The second photo shows the view from the castle window.

One day he and his friend had so little money that, when they looked over the menu in the restaurant they had so little cash that they had to ask if they could just have a plate of noodles.

When you're 22, it doesn't matter to you at all if you are long on adventure and short on cash!