Just arrived from Europe, now off to Palawan
We are still on jet lag from that very hectic 25-day travel to 17 European countries on a religious pilgrimage. Now, we are off to Palawan for the island sunset wedding of our youngest son. This kind of hectic life is quite taxing on our seniors' health and extremely hazardous to our pockets. But life, they say, is really a series of travels from one point to another, in search of happiness and truth, a constant quest for wisdom and joy. My bucket list indicates that I have been to 188 countries as a tourist or travelling professor and lecturer, I lived in four countries outside the Philippines as a diplomat, and I intend to complete my goal of visiting 200 countries. I already did 188, and so, I have 12 more. I already visited 49 of the 50 US states. My remaining target is Wyoming.
To capsulize my European sojourn in almost the whole month of October, we started in Doha, Qatar, for a few hours to change planes and proceeded to Lisbon, Portugal. From there, we started our land journey to Fatima and after a few days, crossed the border to Spain. We spent two days in Burgos and then proceeded to the Catalan region of Barcelona. This is the land where the people want to secede from Spain. It’s a very enchanting and vibrant city, with a lot of history, culture, art, and sports. From there, we traveled for nine hours across the Pyrenees mountain ranges and crossed more than fifty tunnels, some measuring ten kilometers, until we reached southern France.
Lourdes is a remote hinterland of mountains and lakes, and if not for the Virgin Mother and for Bernadette, it would have been an unknown dot in so big a country as France. From Lourdes, we traveled to Paris, to Lyon, and to many other cities and towns where castles, museums, monasteries, and churches stand as living testament of human history and culture. We stayed longer in Paris visited the Eiffel Towner and the Bastille as well as a thousand more sights, too many to mention. Then we crossed the border to Switzerland, which, to me, is the cleanest, the most environmentally pristine and beautiful of all, followed only by its neighbor, Austria. There, the hills are alive and full of edelweiss, reminiscent of Julie Andrews' Sound of Music.
We went to Germany, Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxemburg. And then to Italy, where we traveled the longest, from Forli, to Assisi, to Milan, to Lascano, and to San Giovanni Rotondo of St. Padre Pio. Of course, we went to Rome, the city of seven hills founded by the brothers Romulus and Remus, and to the Vatican and saw, for the third time, St. Peter’s Basilica, and the Sistine Chapel with the Vatican museums and the St. Peter’s Square where every day some fifty thousand pilgrims line up to see the tomb of St. Peter, John Paul II, and many other popes who were buried there.
Now, we are going to Palawan, fourteen of us in the family, to witness the wedding of my son, Jeremiah, who is marrying the love of his life, the beauteous Lara, an international flight stewardess of Qatar airlines. It will be a momentous island sunset wedding and only a hundred or so selected guests have been invited. I think that I will never stop traveling until the last remaining days of my life. And I like it.
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