Dear Folks, This evening while mentioning to you my 1979 trip to Switzerland, many of the details of it came flooding back to me. As a result I checked out my storage cabinet to see if I had kept a journal of the trip. No I hadn't. The only thing I have are the many slides I took at the time and my basic descriptions of the slides after I had returned. The trip was a most unusual and exciting one in which Fred drove me/us all over Switzerland showing me just about everything there is to see in the small country. As I considered writing down the story as well as I can remember it, I also recalled Fred's typical impatience and total insensitivity and didn't know how to get around that without telling the whole story of some of the more depressing aspects of the trip that drove me up the wall or sent me into tears. But hopefully after 25 years, I can tell the story without all of the nit-picking details that made my life a living hell on several particular occasions. And who knows but what even if I do bring up a few of them, I can now see the humor of how I found myself totally abandoned by Fred and his son and his son's girlfriend in Austria (or was it Liechtenstein?), I didn't have a clue where they had disappeared to and I found myself all alone, not knowing but a few words of the language and going around to the local restaurants trying to ask them if they had recently seen three Americanas in there. The best I could do was to hold up three fingers (thumb and two fingers) and say the word Americanas. Note: when I eventually found them I could have easily killed all three of them and no jury would have ever convicted me! To tell the whole story will be a difficult one to put together but maybe with a bit of imagination and a bit of a challenge I'll be able to put it all together even if I have to add a bit of imaginary whimsy about it. Heaven knows but what after all of these years I've needed to think back on that 1979 trip with a bit of whimsy. In the long run it was a trip that a tour agency would never have put together to any tourist's satisfaction. How do you deal with a snotty French waiter in southwestern Switzerland who pretends not to understand a word of Swiss-German that you're speaking and how in the world to you try to get across to a simple bartender across the border into Italy who you want to point out where the Ladies' Room is? Well, in spite of my being in the middle of everything else right now, with a bit of encouragement I might be able to write down a suitable story about my 1979 tour of Switzerland. Frankly, if not for my family, for me. What with the slides I have and the extensive tape recordings I made at the time, I need to put the two of them together to tell of all of the pageantry and scenery I experienced in Switzerland. It was more my personal experience than it was my experience with Fred and his son Michael and Michael's girlfriend Cheri at the time. Did you ever lie flat on your stomach on a high Swiss alpine hill in the fall with a close-up lens on your camera and snap the perfect picture of an unknown alpine flower and snap the picture at just the moment that a chubby bee chose to land on it to sip it's nectar? Well I did and the resulting picture still thrills me. Have picture. Will send. vee