The Greener Grass...
Un Voyage
durch die Alpen
in Three Languages
Lennart Lövstrand
19 July - 10 August, 1995.
Hi. Welcome to my story. This is the journal from a trip I did to central Europe in the
summer of 1995. Before you start diving into the text, I want to give you a little bit of
a background to myself and the trip. I love to travel and what generally attracts me to
traveling is the opportunity to widen my horizons and see new and wonderful things that I
never even knew existed before. At the age of 32, I’ve visited about as many
countries on four continents and lived in three of them for four years each or more.
Still, everything has its price and the emotional cost of constantly moving about can
easily become a weary sense of displacement. You might know what I mean. In simple terms,
you could call it home sickness, although in my case, I’m not even sure where
home is.
I moved to California from England in 1991, but it wasn’t until recently that I
started wondering what I’m doing here and, more importantly, what I’m doing with
my life. Having grown up in Sweden and spent many vacations all over Europe, I have many
sweet memories of that continent. To help me decide on where I belong and to see if all
those memories were real or just romantic illusions, I decided to do a pilgrimage back to
the mountains I love more than any others: the Alps.
This is the story of that trip. To ensure that I wouldn’t immediately forget my
impressions and reflections, I wrote them down in a blow-by-blow travel journal. They were
written at the time and place noted using a little Psion 3a palmtop computer, no bigger
than your hand. The 3A is a great little tool, and I ended up with some 50+ pages worth of
typeset notes. Although they primarily are personal to their nature, I thought other might
enjoy reading them too. In any case, it’s been a good exercise for me to put my
thoughts to print. If you have any feedback or comments, feel free to send me them by
Internet e-mail to lennart@vix.com, but most of all,
enjoy!
Lennart Lövstrand
Palo Alto, California.
Now, onwards to Day 1: Wednesday, July 19, 1995!
