My paternal grandmother went by a few names to friends and family depending on who you talked to - Goldie, Rose, or Peg - and Oma to me.
To me, Oma was an intrepid woman. Born in Millinocket, Maine she moved to Brooklyn to be a nurse before moving with her family to Kingston, Ontario, Canada.
She endured a lot. Losing her first husband to a freak car accident, she was charged with raising her two traumatized teenage boys under the scornful eye of her cruel mother-in-law.
But it was after her sons left home - one for the Canadian Navy, the other, my father, to Royal Military College - that her life began to pivot.
Enter Murray Walton, the man who would marry Peg in the autumn of their lives and begin a whirlwind series of adventures near and far.
Oma was an avid writer in the old-school style that doesn't exist much these days. Letters, recipe cards, essays, newsletters...she did it all, all the time. But it wasn't until after her death in 1997 that I discovered her grandest work of all. Her travelogues.
These travelogues - type-written essays combined with photos, postcards, and menus - were her masterpieces, no doubt taking weeks to compose, compile and curate.
She had also left me a number of letters, photos, and notes, one of which was addressed to me, asking me to take care of her work and maybe do something with it, as she assumed I was the best in our small family to take on this labour of love.
It was upon rediscovering this family treasure trove recently that I decided to resume this rather large endeavour - transcribing her quaint, funny, detailed essays for the digital world. And her travelogues seemed like the perfect place to start sharing her travels with the modern world.
Her first essay, documenting a trip to Holland, England, Switzerland and to Germany to meet my maternal grandmother - my other Oma - was just under 8,000 words, but is rich with great stories and people.
I hope you enjoy them. I left them as close to their original state as possible and left in her little quirks - she liked to use 'altho' instead of 'although' and seemed to dislike paragraphs. But the beauty of the writing makes those imperfections all the more endearing.
Remember, she made these journeys in the 1960s and '70s in her '70s, which I find remarkable.
You can find her travel essays here in a book I am pulling together called Peg's Travels - The Adventures of an Intrepid Lady.
Each week I will add a new adventure/essay and hope to publish them one day in paper book format in the style of The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady by Edith Holden - what I hope will be just one of the legacies this amazing woman leaves behind.
I hope you enjoy it.
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