The Grand Tour - how we got so lucky.

I don't if I can call us lucky - it seems in almost sacrilegious or at least disrespectful. But how this adventure came to be is the first chapter is a long family story.

My mom was born in 1928 in New York. When she was nine months old her mother, Liesl, shipped her to Germany to live with Liesl's parents and siblings. Mom got shipped back to New York in 1940, when the United States ordered American citizens to leave Germany. On the face of it, it would seem a fairly simple thing. But Mom was not a piece of porcelain, a Rosenthal china or a bronze candlelabra. The damage done to this tiny baby, this budding teenager was incalculable.

Mom always promised Glenn and I that one day she would take us to England to see the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace. She would show us the town she grew up in, the house that was her Oma and Opa's home. She would show us the grave where so many of our cousins and relatives were buried together when the American bomb fell on their air raid shelter on March 1, 1945. Mom never really forgave the United States for that bombing, coming so late in the war. "They were winning the war, it was only a matter of time. Bruchsal was so far from the front line, almost at the border of France. They did it to be cruel."

And now Glenn and I were two weeks away from taking this trip. Six weeks in all, we would be like a Jetson version of the Hearsts or the Roosevelts. Taking a jet instead of a trans-Atlantic crossing saved us almost four weeks right off the bat! And I'll let you in on a little secret - it wouldn't be just the two of us on this trip!