Starting on July 23, 2016, another volume yet of my SURFING A MAGICAL INTERNET series is available at Amazon's Kindle Store. Excerpts of Book 8, Exploring Western Europe, can also be found at my website at www.surfingamagicalinternet.com.

Over 250 pictures accompany captivating tales of a trip to Western Europe more than a century ago. As we join the author's grandmother to visit England, Scotland, and Wales, then Holland, Belgium, and France and, finally, Andorra and Portugal, we enter something like a time machine, which makes for an especially intriguing trip. When we find ourselves in Western Europe of, say, 1880, the white cliffs of Dover may look the same as they do now and so will, perhaps, mountain ranges and great rivers and lighthouses along the coast. But city streets with no automobiles in sight and people dressed in unfamiliar ways may well strike us as odd—not to mention their different customs, music, and dance. Likewise, we may marvel at grand structures from Europe’s Baroque, Gothic or Renaissance times—cathedrals, town halls, court houses, castles and palaces, and houses of parliament---but we certainly won’t be able to hail a cab or find a plane to fly home. Imagine visiting Paris without the Eiffel Tower! (It wasn’t there before 1889.) Imagine London without its famous Tower Bridge! (Construction began in 1886 and wasn’t completed until 1894.) In fact, as we will discover, grandmother’s Liebig cards can take us beyond her lifetime as well. We can visit medieval Flanders and Brabant at a time when fine Belgian lace first came into being or the England of 1750 when the first umbrella was put to use on London’s rainy streets. (Jonas Hanway, its inventor, was ridiculed by all!) And using grandmother’s Liebig-card time machine, we can even join the excitement in 1499 when Portugal’s Vasco da Gama returned home after having discovered a sea route to India!
Heinz Kohler

Exploring Western Europe