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an hour. Gerry and I are both so tired that we stopped, despite our original plans to push onto Strasbourg, at a small town called Vitry-le-François. Singularly uninteresting! The only game in town was a weary looking “two bumper” called the Hotel de la Pose where we checked into an even wearier looking tiny room. We lunched at an open brasserie on Niçoise salad and bad Alsatian wine. When we sent the half carafe of wine back and asked for a bottle of Riesling instead, the smart alec waiter brought us an “open” bottle of Riesling which tasted exactly like the wine we had just returned. I scolded him and accused him of doing just that (pouring the carafe wine into an already open bottle) but he just shrugged and walked away. “We were took.” Went to bed early. Slept fitfully.

Two years later, Turkey let her down as well.

TURKEY, SAT. AP. 22, 1978

Dinner tonight was the usual slush: A tasteless soup, a gluggy beef and rice dish and a Turkish sweet (impossible to eat. It was doughy, wet baklava and totally inedible). I was so exhausted I had the tray of vile food sent to my room and here I am waiting. This afternoon I took off from the group and went walking on my own. I wasn’t feeling too badly then but the town nearby was nothing to see. Cheap little stores full of items from the everyday world. The hotel at Pamukkali was the worst one so far. It was unclean and bitterly cold and no heat was sent up. We went out poking around Cumhurryet Cadessi with its dinky doo shops. The national costume of Turkey seems to be flowered pantaloon pants and white scarves over their heads. The women over 30 are either too fat or these shapeless pants make them seem that way.

Lest it appear that my mother’s critiques were jingoistic, the country of her birth did not fare any better. This was a review from a two-week trip to the Southwest:

NEW MEXICO, SEPTEMBER 19, 1982

Our motel was “stashed” between 2 other ones, all jammed together. The 3 star AAA recommendation was anything but a find. We ate at the Red Lobster, across the street, and ordered King Crab legs. They were quite all right but the melted butter was salty as hell. And there was no getting sweet butter. Our waitress was very inexperienced. Just to get a small fork with which to pull out the crab meat was a reckoning that didn’t happen until meal’s end (along with a same time request for a nutcracker which also materialized after the need was gone). Turns out the Red Lobster is a chain. Never get a proper meal in a chain.

Finland took perhaps the biggest strafing of all. My mother shot the whole country down in flames.

HELSINKI, JUNE 30, 1985

Set out by car for the last leg of our Scandinavian journey. As usual, the scenery was unspectacular. Helsinki is a very commercial city with no particular beauty, at least so far. Finland is not really the sort of country that offers a great deal to a tourist in the way of interesting places, foods, customs, architecture, music, in fact it is a most boring country. For me, and I think I speak for Gerry, we’re just trying to find things to see and do to kill time for the Leningrad trip, and that may turn out to be something less than great since we couldn’t get on a deluxe tour and from what I gather, anything less than deluxe is really second rate.

And yet Leningrad actually made them nostalgic for Helsinki!

LENINGRAD, JULY 2, 1985

Leningrad is a city of 4 to 5 story high old buildings and giant apartment complexes, square and Soviet in style … the whole town could use a coat of paint. Lunch was too awful to describe, except for the large lump of fat on my plate covered with gravy which I almost ate because I thought it must be fish of some sort.… Then we ran back to the bus and drove to the Hermitage Museum. Well! It was Sunday and the crowds were horrendous. Never really got to see much except from a distance. Then back to the hotel and into a bus to take us to the circus … a one-tent affair on hard benches and no air. No dancing bear! Just some acrobats, illusions, clowns making jokes in Russian,