Do they serve frankfurters onboard Condor Airlines to Frankfurt?
Maybe not, but Condor’s fast-track to Germany takes you to one of Europe’s most infinitely varied countries and a fascinating gateway city from which to explore the rest of Europe.
Rent a car and drive southeast over the river and through the Alps to Rome, cradle of Christianity and centre of an explosion of arts and culture that propelled Europe out of the Dark Ages, a time when the world was lit only by fire.
Or take the train southwest to Paris to take in the Louvre and stand in awe of the Eiffel Tower, one of the acknowledged engineering marvels of the modern world. (Any Yukoner can name another — our own White Pass & Yukon Railroad built between 1898 and 1900.)
Or head for Moscow, political seat of a Russia trying hard to re-invent itself. Board a river cruiser on Mother Volga and leisurely sail through the lands of the tsars to St. Petersburg, an incredible display of palatial architecture, mercifully intact after centuries of war, hardship and toil.
Dive through the Chunnel to England. London is one of the largest cities in the world and, with its fully integrated transportation system, one of the easiest to get around in. At the airport, for one fee, pick up a map and a three-day visitors transportation pass, leaving more time for the British Museum. The city that gave us both Shakespeare and the Beatles will take some time to explore.
A short distance on the motorway outside London is Stonehenge. Walk slowly around the perimeter and think about the men who built it, without a written language but possessing an intimate knowledge of the heavens to guide them as well as an innate sense of physics to leverage those giant stones into place.
Then think of our own ancestral First Nations, of about 12,000 years ago, were the first people to step onto an un-peopled continent, following herds across a newly grassed land bridge at the end of the Pleistocene.
Ponder the differences and similarities. Feel your imagination soar with wonder.
Splash across the North Sea to Bergen, Norway. Take the train across the spine of Norway to see the Viking ships in Oslo, discovered buried in peat and perfectly preserved, very much the same as the one that brought Eric the Red, the first European to visit our Western Hemisphere. (Take that, Columbus!)
Brygen, the old section of Bergen, is one of the famed Hanseatic cities, all members of an important trading league around the North Sea and Baltics during the middle ages and into the 17th century.
The best-preserved Hansa city, with its walls and cobbled streets still intact, is Tallinn, capital of Estonia. Hamburg and other cities in Germany, where the adventure began, were major Hansa partners.
Europe is a magical place.
A trip to Europe will answer a hundred questions and raise a thousand more; after the Condor Airlines flight to Frankfurt, your world will never seem quite the same again.
