My Brother-in-Law and Other Stories
By Johnny Novera

Our secret

Hi, everyone! We were not able to let you know earlier that we were going away for  about a month starting July 14 th .  We joined a tour group with an itinerary that took  us to visit  the Vatican, the City of Rome, Venice and the canals, the Italian  lakes at Varese near the  Swiss border, Lucerne, Switzerland, also  with its lakes and high mountains like Mt. Pilatus, near Zurich,  the City of Paris, and we  ended  at London, England on July 23 rd .    We extended our stay for 16 days  and, on our own, we were able to tour more of downtown London and the U.K countryside, including University of Oxford City. Finally, from U.K., we flew  to Germany and visited  Weisloch county, the  City of Heidelberg,  where Jose Rizal once studied as  eye surgeon, and then the ancient city of Speyer,  before we returned home to Manila.

Now we would like to share with you some of our experiences in this trip, sometimes hilarious and embarrassing because of  the language barrier  in most of the cities we visited, but we had fun.  And maybe, you will ask how,  with our modest means, were we able to make the tour?  Now, we  would like to  reveal to you our secret.

As you know we have seven children.  It was our wedding anniversary in July, and they surprised us with this tour as a gift.

Therefore, the moral of our story, especially to young married couples, is: “Have many children, someday will travel!”. (Read continuation of travel notes in next issue).