(Virtual) East Bay (SF area) Travel Group Meeting - Sat, August 8, 2020

Looking forward to it.
Lauri and Ed

We also plan to be there (here:).

I have a 5-minute highlight I could do of a spot in Spain that's easy for people to find.

Laura B and Carol - I will send the meeting invite. Looking forward to seeing you!

Avi, your highlight of a place in Spain sounds great, you're on! And thank you for setting up the meeting for us all.

I'm in Southern California but would like to join in if possible. Your topics sound very interesting.

roxasamonte10, we would love to have you join us!

I gather from some of your past posts that you've been on the RS Sicily tour. We have quite a few others who have also been to Sicily. We may have to do a Sicily-themed meeting one month!

I'll send you a pm with the link for the meeting. "See" you on August 8th!

Count me in! Avi's Spain highlight sounds interesting!

Great, Christine! I just sent you the meeting link.

I can’t make the meeting on the 8/8 but would love to be included for the September one if possible. This is so nice of you to open your meetings to everyone. Except for my husband, cousin and her husband, none of my friends like to talk about travel. One friend even asked me why we go to Europe so often. Anyway, thanks again.

Barbara, we understand exactly what you're saying. Fortunately, we all can talk about (and hear others talk about) travel for hours. So please join us in September and any month that you can make it! We'd love to hear about where you've been and where you're going next.

The meeting links are unique each month, so please watch for our announcement early in September (approx Sept 1st or 2nd) to get the link for that meeting.

Looking forward to meeting you in September!

Edit: I just read your profile. Wow, can't wait to hear about your travels in Croatia and beyond!

Thanks, will keep an eye out

I would like to participate as a first timeR but from east bay. I have traveled extensively however due to pandemic had to sadly cancel Austria and N. Spain this year. Kindly send link. Many thanks.

We'll be there! And (if there's time), my husband can talk a bit about our river cruise through Eastern Europe.

Looking forward to hearing about Spain and France. I think my brother visited the gorge many years ago.

Oh, count me in! This will be fun.

JS - sorry to hear about your trips to Austria and Spain; but glad you'll join us for our armchair travels, which have been a welcome escape while our trips are on hold!

Laura - yes, there will be time! You are on the schedule for August to take us to the destinations of your river cruise through Eastern Europe.

Anne - so glad you'll join us!

I've sent you each the meeting link. I was having some trouble getting messages to send, so if you did not receive it, please let me know and I will resend.

I should be able to join in as well.
Thanks, as always, for hosting these get-togethers.
SharYn

Yay, this sounds like so much fun! Thanks for the link! I’ve been on 3 Rick Steves tours so far (VFR, Greece and Sicily) and would love to attend a Sicily meeting, if you decide to have one in the future. :)

Hi SharYn, I think I just sent you the meeting link via pm. I'm suspicious because I'm still getting the "application errors." But I think it went through the 2nd time. Please let me know if you need me to resend it.

I'll join too... I can also do a short presentation about an off-beat museum in Vienna. Actually, there are two I can talk about.

Jeff

Hi JeffWilbur, an off-beat museum in Vienna sounds terrific! I'm hoping to go back there, so I'd love to hear about it. We'll see how time goes - keeping the meeting in the 90 minutes to, at most, 2 hour range. If we run out of time, you're up first for next meeting.

You should have the meeting link in your messages.

Thanks!

Count me in!

Hi diveloonie aka Tammy, I just sent you the meeting link. See you Saturday!

I’d like to join in this meeting. Thanks for including those from other states. There isn’t a travel group in my area.

Hi Valerie - it will be great to meet you. At this point, I think we may be a mix of more "out of town" than local participants. It's fun to meet people from around the country and hear about your travels!

I just sent you a private message with the meeting link. See you online on Saturday!

Hi. Thanks so much. Yes, I did receive the link which you sent. I’m looking forward to this meeting.

I would like to join this Sat. if you will have me.

We would love to have you join us, Ms. Jo!

I just sent you the link for this Saturday. See you online!

Please add me for tomorrow. I have enjoyed the last two.
Robin (jobeck52)

Hi Robin (jobeck52) - you should have a message with the meeting link.

So glad you'll be joining, see you online tomorrow!

Hello Catherine

I probably cannot attend this meeting as I am hosting an artist chat at 11. If we finish early, I will try to join your call, so please send me the information.

Thank you!

Catherine Hensiek

Hi catrinatravels, I've just sent you a message with the meeting link. If you can join us after your artist chat ends, we'd love to have you!

Today's meeting was fun - great to see everyone, and the presenters made a good case for judicious use of a rental car and a riverboat :-)

do you take the car on the riverboat?

or put a little boat on the car roof?

Agree, today's meeting was fun. Interesting locations. great pictures, good conversations!

I really enjoyed everyone's presentations! We traveled to a lot of countries today. Thank you to Barbara, Avi and Dave and Laura for taking us to Europe!

Afterwards, I watched a few Rick Steves episodes and made shelf space for my new $5 RS guidebooks. I guess I was in a traveling mood.

Please give me your input for destinations for upcoming meetings. From today's conversation and chat log, there was interest in Sicily, Swiss/Italian Alps and Bulgaria+Romania, with various travelers willing to present each of them.

Which destinations would you like to hear about?
Which destinations would you be interested in sharing?

Feel free to mention destinations other than those above. If you include a list, please give some indication of priority.

Which destinations would you like to hear about?
1. I would love to hear about Bulgaria and Romania
2. I would enjoy a theme day with presentations on the Alps

Which destinations would you be interested in sharing?
Sicily: Baroque towns of Ragusa, Modica, Noto
Dresden
Wroclaw, Poland (could be combined with Church of Peace)

I can do a spotlight presentation:
day trip to the Church of Peace, Swidnica, Poland

CWsocial, if there's interest I can do an overview of Romania and Bulgaria (we stayed in four towns), or Romania only.

Would love to see your presentation on Sicily. It's so interesting to see what others took from the same towns we have visited. Poland would also be great. We'll see what we are missing and likewise what we have to look forward to. The Alps would be great, too. Who knew it would be so interesting to see the travels and fun of others 😀?

CWSocial, I’d like to hear about Poland, Romania, Bulgaria and Sicily. I’ve been to the last two but I’d still like to learn more about them and see others’ photos. I haven’t been to Romania and mainly to just Kraków in Poland so I’m particularly interested in those two countries.

Thanks.

I've not been to Sicily so put those presentations at the top of the line, please :-)
The Eastern Europe cities are interesting, too.

Which destinations would you like to hear about?

All of the above – Sicily, Bulgaria and Romania, Poland, Jeff's off-beat museum in Vienna, etc.

Which destinations would you be interested in sharing?

1. We can do a short presentation on Bulgaria and Transylvania – sounds like there are plenty of others who also love & have visited this part of the world, so we can keep it short!

1a. Also we can talk about the logistics of the river cruise.
2. We lived in Switzerland and did many hikes, so we can share a few photos from the Swiss Alps (if we can digitize them – they're all on film or slides) from our hikes. On one of our more adventurous hikes we walked over a glacier to a mountain hut – I certainly hope I can find those photos ...
3. We are crowd-phobic, so we could share some "back door" or, as Avi put it in his wonderful presentation, non-Tourist-Trap places. Maybe the "High Line" (Promenade Plantée; Coulée Verte) and Canal Saint-Martin in Paris (unless everyone knows about these!), and other places as we think of them ... :-)

I can do a spotlight presentation: day trip to the Church of Peace,
Swidnica, Poland

CWsocial – I'd love to hear about Poland. I was there back when it was communist and loved it. We visited Warsaw, Kraków, and Częstochowa, but if I have any pictures they are too grainy to use :-)

I'd love to learn more about Sicily! It's on my radar for future travels.

As I mentioned on Sat., I'm happy to present anytime on two of my favorite destinations: Swiss Alps (Berner Oberland) and Italian Alps (Dolomites). Perhaps a compare and contrast?

The level of interest proves that we all love to travel - and hear about travels - everywhere!

Sicily appears to have a slight edge, so let's go to Sicily in September. It's a good time of year for it - not as hot. We will line up presentations on Bulgaria, Romania & Transylvania, the Alps and Poland for future months. I'm also hoping we can arrange a Christmas markets presentation in December, so please be thinking about that.

Our Sicily format will be short presentations (10-15 minutes each) on a town, a sight, or a theme.

I'll volunteer to present any of these, depending on time and interest:
- one of the Baroque towns - Ragusa - because I think not as many people have been there or think of going there
- a few slides on a "fatto a mano" (hand made) chocolate "factory" in nearby Modica

Jeff has volunteered a few ideas that will be very exciting! (surprises for now)

Carol - do you have a town or sight in Sicily that you'd like to share?

Who else would like to share something from Sicily?
A favorite restaurant or sight?
A favorite town or island?

CWsocial - let me think about it - went to several towns/sights, including Ragusa Ibla. I'll try to pick one or two for a 10 min presentation. Maybe Palermo and some place else but will get back to you.

Carol, you're welcome to share Ragusa Ibla. I can pick another town: Ortigia, ruins in Siracusa, Mt Etna.

Avi is a guy??

I'm interested in your meetings, but we can't seem to get Zoom to work properly. We suspect it's because we use Linux as our operating system. We can connect to a meeting, then our link immediately shuts down. Stan was able to hook up (so to speak) with a friend here who hosted a meeting just for the two of them, but although we didn't lose the connection, neither Stan nor our friend could see each other. And it was way more trouble than it was worth; we could have walked backwards to her house in the time it took them to connect online. Although that was probably because it was her first time hosting, and Stan's first time joining.

Anybody have any similar issues?

Avi is a guy?? yep!

Jane - I've not had such issues, but would be glad to hold a test session with you to see if we can get it to work. Maybe this evening?

Added: some people have been successful joining with their phones.

We'd love to have you join us in Sicily in September!

CWsocial, I'll leave it up to you. If you prefer, I can do Ragusa Ibla but maybe you should, too. We probably have different favorite sights and it might be interesting to compare.

Christmas markets -- if we can figure out how to get photos from two phones and a tablet into one slide presentation, we have stuff to share from multiple trips. (That is to say, if we can get our Millennial daughters to guide us through it.) Show-and-tell from our collection of glühwein mugs.

CW, I didn't see your post last night.

I'll get back with you - we're in the middle of several things going on right now, including changing our internet provider.

Thanks for the offer; I'd love to join you in September.

Laura B - thank you, that would be terrific! If your millennial daughters can't help, perhaps I can remotely. And if it's a few different sets of pictures - not all in a single presentation - that's just fine. In any case, I think we would all still enjoy seeing the glühwein mugs!

Jane - perhaps after you change your internet provider, we can give the technology a try. In any case, please watch for the September meeting invite to be published early in the month, at which time I'll be able to send out the September meeting link.

So glad you'll be joining us!