Theme: The Journey Begins
in which our wandering minstrels travel from Connecticut, USA to Amsterdam, stumbling onto Hamburg while learning once again that they need angels to watch over them.
Couplet 1: Detlef Once Again Decides our Course as our minstrels meet old friends in Hamburg, miraculously return to Amsterdam and the further intervention of angels: Sammi the bhakta; and Veronika the costumemaker.
Couplet 2: France! Through the Eiffel Forest to Strasbourg, with Lionel to Fontaineblau; on to Auxerre and then Firminy to see Stan who built our Hurdy-Gurdies twenty-seven years ago; then busking and surviving in Aix-en-Provence, Nice and Cote d'Azure, and wonderful synchronicity with Dill and Molly in a hilltop village.
Couplet 3 part 1: Italia e Ticino.

Being a true but inadequate telling of first travels in Italy: Que Casino! on the Amalfi Coast, new friends in the mountains, across the Po Valley to the Italian Lakes and in Lugano on the Swiss side new friends.

Couplet 3 part 2: Italia Italia

Kata joins us in Bergamo, and for the next two weeks we have our new 17 year-old niece (and the daughter-we-always-wanted) to travel with us back to her home in the east of Hungary. Never before has any one shared our real daily Folia Intinerante so intimately! We are busted inVerona and Rimini, loved and saved (again!) by angels in Mantova and the Adriatic Coast.

Couplet 4 : Up to Graz and Hungary and Kata's family; we visit the village where Ani was just a little girl who walked along the roads over the hills, through the fields and woods; we visit Gyuszi and Judit
and Pityu and Agi!!

Couplet 5: Schnell Through Austria! Langsam in Bayern, und Brücken Brücken Brücken! No where to park in Vienna and Linz's (rhymes with blintzes) only street to play has really big noisey street cars; we follow the Danube and discover the Baroque cities of Bavaria; Regensburg's Steinere Brücke (Stone Bridge); the Bridge of saints in Würzberg.
Couplet 6: Animama goes to Boston while Gurdypapa does Bayern.
Couplet 7: Ani returns; Ruhrgebiet and up the Rhine to Basel, at last. Our new home for the winter: Hänner, our new friends and Dackel Himmelreich.

Prologue
in which Past is Prelude