Sentimental Sunday: Cruising Along, Thanks to Photos and Diary

Scanning old photos -- pried up from the pages of a magnetic album with thin dental floss -- I found that my late father-in-law Edgar James Wood didn't just label the back of his photos, he typed the labels. (The grid marks on the label are from the glue of that awful magnetic album. Grrrrr.)

So this is Edgar and his wife, Marian Jane McClure Wood, on one of their many European trips. Edgar had worked his way across the Atlantic playing in a band while in college during the 1920s. When he married Marian and they had a family, they had to stay put. Later, with the children grown, they resumed their travels.

Because I have Edgar's diaries from 1959-1985, I can flip through his notes of this very trip.

They flew from Cleveland on Sept 2 to New York, visited with family, and sailed for Europe on Sept 5, arriving in Southampton on Sept 9. Met up with their sis-in-law Lindy and then flew to Paris, on to Lyon, Venice, Rome, Athens, Vienna, and finally to Trieste, where they boarded the Cristoforo Colombo for Halifax and then New York.

Edgar describes the day of November 5, 1969, this ways: "Sea calmer. Most of day on deck. Gala Farewell Dinner. Scrabble, then looked in on elaborate and good floor show 'Neapolitan Carousel.'"

He took Italian language lessons on the ship, something he continued on and off for years. And he passed his love of travel and foreign language down to his children.