This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. Without cookies your experience may not be seamless. I shall never for my part wish to do so. Now they would fill those gaps in shared experience. After revisiting Paris and Heidelberg, which by now Julia had nearly forgotten, and exploring the Low Countries, familiar only to him, he would guide his family and his niece Estelle Ives across Switzerland and France to the Pyrenees and into Spain.
Although their four-week sea voyage was occasionally rough, Bryant escaped seasickness for the first time, and they all enjoyed shipboard diversionsβshuffleboard and whist, guidebooks and novels, conundrums, and desultory conversations.
Their fellow-passengers were congenial; Bryant particularly enjoyed long conversations in French with a Catholic priest, Father Cenas, who had seen much of South America and was especially enthusiastic in his appraisal of Chileans, red and white. Reaching Le Havre at the end of May, the Bryants followed this itinerary:. Leaving Paris, the party made short visits to the chief cities of Belgium and the Netherlands, and after crossing northern Holland by steamer, carriage, and canal boat, entered Germany at Emden and went by rail to Cologne and up the Rhine and the Neckar to Heidelberg.
Along the way Bryant dutifully escorted his charges into the principal museums and churches, and passed a day in a pauper colony, but most of their time was spent in outdoor sightseeing. At Brussels they saw the zoo and the botanical garden and listened to a band concert; they drove around the Antwerp docks and the Harmonce Gardens; from the Hague they went to the seashore at Scheveningen, where they caught the queen stepping from a bathing-machine for her morning bath, and dined at the fashionable bathhouse restaurant; in Amsterdam they wandered through the Brook Garden and the most absorbing zoo Bryant had ever seen.
Crossing the Ems estuary into Hanover, their little steamer ran on a sandbar, causing them to miss the Cologne train at Emden.
