Mate Szedlak's travel journal Sept 1 1966

Washington Sep. 1
Manger Hamilton Hotel.
Sight seeing. The City was over kroudet with tourists. We have seen The Capitol Hill, White house, the court palace of Justice, Lincoln Museum, the former Theater where Lincoln was shot and the house where he died. Mount Vernon, Washington’s birth place. The historical Church of Christ in Alexandria, The pentagon bldg. and the Arlington cemetery and the grove of President Kennedy.
On our tour, we had a delicious diner at the Hogotas Resturant in Alexandria.

Mate & Theresia Szedlak's trip around the world

This summer I enjoyed a family reunion with my Dad’s side of the family. I even got a story I wrote about it in the River Falls Journal.
I spent a lot of time in the last year prepping for this event by scanning old photos and slides. There was one photo I failed to find. It was a portrait Grandma Szedlak had taken of her and her three children during the war. Grandpa was off with the military and Grandma feared that they wouldn’t all make it through the war alive, so she had the picture taken. While at my folks for the reunion, I made a frantic search for the missing picture. We never did find it, but in the process I found my Grandfather’s travel log from the trip they took around the world in 1966. I was happily surprised to discover it was in English. My first scanning project had been photos taken during that trip—most of them of my Grandmother as Grandpa almost never let her use the camera. For my blog this year I’m going to transcribe his entries. My grandfather wrote with an accent. For me it’s part of the charm of his entries, so I don’t plan to do much, if any, editing. It was 45 years ago today that they left their home in River Falls to visit family in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. The journal ends before they got home and not every day has an entry but I hope you will enjoy the ride.


Mate Szedlak’s Journal from his trip around the world
After 6 months of preparing and planning our trip around the world, we leaved in God’s name, our home on 31 of August 1966 and went to the Minneapolis airport and at 17.50 we flyet with the Pan Am Jet to Washington DC. We arrived in Washington at 22.00