I recently completed my fourth trip to the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. I was in Ireland in 2012 for Notre Dame football. I was in England in 2013 for Pete and Katie’s wedding. I was in Italy and the Vatican in 2024 because I had always wanted to see Rome and the Vatican. And this year I went to France, Spain, and Portugal. Going to France made me think of what my friend Bobby once said about Canada: “I have no desire to ever go to Canada, but I hope that I do someday.” I had no desire to ever go to France. I’m not a particularly big fan of France. Sure, they helped us win the Revolutionary War, but we’ve more than repaid that debt. Groundskeeper Willie referring to the French as “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” is one of my favorite Simpsons lines ever. But I’m glad I went to France. There are two places in France that I have wanted to see. One is Normandy. As a student and teacher of history, I think that’s the number one historical site in the world that I haven’t been to that I would want to see. I didn’t get there on this trip. Paris is a city I don’t care about. If I went there on my way to Normandy, that’s fine, but I don’t care if I never get to Paris. I’m sure it would be cool to go to the Louvre, but I’ll be fine if I don’t ever do that. Besides Normandy, the other place in France I wanted to get to was Lourdes (which was featured on Unsolved Mysteries). That is pretty much why I went on this trip. As a Catholic and a Notre Dame alumnus, Lourdes was the next place in Europe I wanted to visit. The diocese put together this trip for teachers to France, Spain, and Portugal at a very reasonable price. Lourdes was the first stop so I knew I wanted to go. Spain and Portugal were added bonuses.
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| I took a walk down to the Grotto early in the morning and Mass was going on. |
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| When I think of the Grotto at Notre Dame, I think of it being lit up in the dark on a cold winter night. But I also think of lots of people there on a football weekend. My experience at the real Grotto was a little bit like the Notre Dame football weekend experience at the Grotto. |
The trip started with a long travel adventure. It took about 22 hours from the time I left home to the time I got to my hotel in Lourdes. We flew from JFK to Lisbon. After a long layover in Lisbon, we flew to Toulouse. Then it was a two hour bus ride to Lourdes. I think the only single travel experience that took longer to get from where I started to where I finished was coming home from Australia (I think that took at least 24 hours). It was late when we got to Lourdes so we had dinner at the hotel and that was pretty much it for the day. I had a goal to have a beer from each country even though I was in the part of Europe that prefers wine. I drank zero wine in each country and I was able to get a beer from each country. With that first dinner, I had a Kronenbourg. The Kronenbourg Brewery opened in Strasbourg, France, in 1664. I don’t know how easy that beer is to get in the US, but I know I’ve seen it before. Maybe it was common in England. Anyway, the first picture I took in France was of my glass of Kronenbourg. |
| This was my first beer of the trip. |
The second day in France was a lot of walking around Lourdes. We participated in the rosary procession that night. It was hot the first three days in France. Fortunately we were staying in a French hotel that had discovered air conditioning. The high temperatures in Lourdes those first three days were 90, 91, and 97. It definitely wasn’t as bad as the heat in Rome, but it was hot (I had to wear long pants most of the time in Rome to visit the churches that we were going to). On the third day (the hottest day), most people went to the baths in the morning and then we went up the Pic du Jer on a little train in the afternoon. The train took us up most of the way up the mountain and then we could walk the rest of the way to the top. I think it’s the first time I’ve ever been at the top of a mountain. It’s definitely not a huge mountain, but there were some really good views. Wikipedia says the highest point is 3,120 feet, but the map when we got off the train said 3,110 feet (actually it said 948 m, but I converted it because the metric system is stupid). I was able to get a Pic du Jer beer that was locally made. Drinking a beer on top of a mountain on a hot day was fun. We went to the rosary procession that night with the intent of watching the procession from the ramps that go up to the Basilica of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, but it started raining and we went back to the hotel (we got back to the hotel before the heavy rain started). On the fourth day, we did the Stations of the Cross on the Hill of Espelugues. Apparently it gets to an altitude of 1,565 feet, but you start at an altitude of about 1,200 feet. You start at the bottom of the hill and keep going up the hill until you get to the twelfth station (Jesus Dies Upon the Cross) and then you start going down the hill. That night, it was drizzling again so most people didn’t do the rosary procession, but it wasn’t as bad as the night before and I wanted to watch it since it was our last night so I watched from above.
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| There are two different basilicas in this picture (the Basilica of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception on top and the Rosary Basilica on the bottom). |
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| This is the view of Lourdes from the Pic du Jer. |
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| Here’s the 12th Station. |
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| I had to wear my Notre Dame stuff at the Grotto. |
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| This is the rosary procession from our final night in Lourdes. There would have been a whole lot more people there if the weather had been better. |
The following day was my Sunday in Europe. We had two priests with us and they did Mass for us almost every day. They were supposed to do Mass for us at a chapel by our hotel, but we got invited by a big group from the Archdiocese of Liverpool to Mass with their Archbishop at the Grotto. So that was cool. The Grotto was the highlight of the trip. Of course, that’s where Mary appeared to St. Bernadette in 1858. Many replica grottos have been built all over the world. Wikipedia lists 47 in the United States. Probably the most famous one is the Grotto at Notre Dame, which was built in 1896 is about one-third of the size of the Grotto in Lourdes. The Grotto is one of my favorite places on campus. The original Grotto reminded me of the Notre Dame Grotto during a football weekend because there were always so many people there.
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| This was Sunday Mass at the Grotto. |
After Mass, we were on our way to Saint-Jean-de-Luz on the Atlantic coast near the Spanish border. We had some free time for lunch. I went with a group of people to get crepes. I had a crepe with ham, cheese, and egg and then a dessert crepe with chocolate. The food made me think of the food in Italy two years ago. It was good, but it wasn’t amazing (but there was good cheese that was widely available). It’s not like I need to go back to France to have more authentic French crepes. Then we continued to our hotel in San Sebastián, Spain. That afternoon we walked down to the beach. I had an 18/70 beer, which comes from LaRubia Cervezas. I had a beer on a mountain in France and on a beach in Spain. It was a good beer, but it turns out that it was from a Spanish brewery owned by Heineken. I feel like that’s like getting a beer from an American brewery owned by Anheuser-Busch InBev.
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| This was the most Frenchy thing I ate. |
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| This was my first beer in Spain. |
We only had one full day in Spain. We went to Loyola, where St. Ignatius of Loyola was from. We saw where he was born and had Mass in the room where he recovered from injuries in battle and had his conversion. St. Ignatius founded the Jesuits. St. Ignatius certainly seems like a good guy, but when it comes to the Jesuits, I’ll just say that I liked Pope Francis a lot more than most modern American Jesuits. After Loyola, we were back in San Sebastián for some free time. We did Spanish tapas. I got scrambled eggs with cod and ham and cheese croquettes. I had some beer that the bartender told me was from Spain, but I have no idea what beer it was. The beer was good. Again, the food was good, but nothing that I need to go back to Spain for.
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| We had Mass in here. You can see the statue of St. Ignatius on the right. |
The following day, we were flying to Lisbon late in the day. We had free time until then. This was the only day that we didn’t have Mass as a group. So I walked to Good Shepherd Cathedral for Mass. They had several Masses and most of them were in Spanish. I purposely went to the Mass in Basque. Two years ago, I went to a Mass in Italian and I was able to figure out what one of the readings was. If I had gone to Mass in Spanish, I would have been able to understand some things. But Basque is not close to Spanish at all. It has no relation to any other known languages. It uses the letter K a lot, which isn’t used in Spanish and it uses the combination of tx a lot (which makes a ch sound in Basque). I wanted to see what it was like going to Mass in a language that I wouldn’t understand at all. Of course, I knew what was happening, but I didn’t understand what was being said other than names like Jesus Christ, Holy Spirit, and Leo, which were similar to Spanish. One thing that I did not see a lot of was the Spanish flag. I think the only place I saw it was at the city hall building. San Sebastián is in Basque Country, which is a mostly autonomous region of Spain. So I saw the Basque flag a lot, but not the Spanish flag. Later we were off to Portugal for our final country of the trip. We got in late and had dinner at the hotel and that was it for the day.
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| There were definitely some good views walking around San Sebastián. |
On our first full day in Portugal, we went to Fatima (also featured on Unsolved Mysteries). We saw the houses where Lucia Santos and her cousins, Sts. Francisco and Jacinta Marto lived. We stopped for lunch at a place that had a cafeteria upstairs and then everything you could ever want to buy from Fatima downstairs. I had duck rice (recommended by our Portuguese tour guide, it was good) and a Super Bock (we saw ads for Super Bock everywhere, it seemed like the mass produced Portuguese beer). Then we went to the Sanctuary of Fatima. It is where Mary appeared to Lucia, Francisco, and Jacinta in 1917. The Chapel of the Apparitions is built where five of the six apparitions happened (they happened on the 13th of the month, another one happened in a different location on a different day because the kids had been kidnapped by the government). One nice thing about Fatima was that it was not nearly as crowded as the Vatican or Lourdes. Lourdes was crowded, but manageable, the Vatican was just crowded (and I was there in August, when the crowds aren’t supposed to be too big so they’re probably worse at other times of the year).
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| The Chapel of the Apparitions is nice enough, but it’s not the Grotto. |
There’s a lot of history connected with the apparitions. They happened during World War I. Mary predicted the end of World War I, but warned of a worse war that would follow. She requested the consecration of Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary to prevent Russia from spreading its errors. Of course, World War II came and Russia was not consecrated to the Immaculate Heart of Mary at the time (I’ll come back to that in a minute). Russia became communist and spread atheistic communism wherever they could. There was a vision of a pope being killed. This turned out to be the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II on May 13, 1981 (the anniversary of the first apparition). John Paul II credited Our Lady of Fatima with saving his life (apparently he saw somebody holding the statue and turned to look at it right before he was shot, which prevented the shot from being fatal). As for the consecration of Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, there is debate about whether or not it has happened. John Paul II consecrated the whole world to the Immaculate Heart of Mary in 1984. Pope Francis consecrated Russia and Ukraine to the Immaculate Heart of Mary in 2022. So both of those include Russia, but the first one didn’t name Russia specifically and the second one didn’t set Russia apart on its own.
There are two basilicas in the Sanctuary of Fatima. On one side is the Basilica of Our Lady of the Rosary. We had Mass in a chapel inside the basilica.
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| This basilica was built from 1928-1953. Lucia Santos and Sts. Francisco and Jacinta Marto are buried inside. |
And then on the other side is the Basilica of the Most Holy Trinity.
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| This basilica was built from 2004-2007. It is the sixth largest Catholic church in the word. Besides being very ugly, it has no tabernacle. They had a beautiful basilica in Fatima and they were adding another one. How did they come up with this? |
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| The inside of the basilica isn’t terrible (besides the lack of a tabernacle). |
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| My favorite part of the Basilica of the Most Holy Trinity was that it had a statue of St. John Paul II outside. There was also a statue of St. Paul VI because those two popes visited Fatima. |
Our last full day in Europe was in Lisbon. We had Mass in the church built above where St. Anthony was born. Apparently the Portuguese don’t like it when people refer to him as St. Anthony of Padua because he was born in Lisbon and spent most of his life in Portugal. We went out to a fancy dinner and I finished my night by stopping at Cerveja Canil, a craft brewery across the street from my hotel.
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| This is where St. Anthony of Lisbon/Padua was born. My parish growing up was St. Anthony of Padua and I have a several friends who went to and/or taught at St. Anthony’s High School. I have some very good former students who went to St. Anthony’s as well. |
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| This would have been my final picture in Europe, but then we went to another nice church on our last morning in Portugal. These two beers were both about half the size of a normal beer. |
I have some random thoughts about things Europe does better than the United States. Europe does prices for goods better than the United States. If something costs €8.50, you’re going to pay €8.50. In the United States, if something costs $8.50, you might pay like $9.24 or something like that. If Europeans can figure out how to include taxes in prices, why can’t we? Another thing we should take from Europe is different options on beer sizes. When I went to the craft brewery, I tried two beers that were 20 centiliters each (40 centiliters is a little bit less than a pint). At lunch one day, I got a small beer (it was cheaper than a bottle of water). Baseball stadiums should definitely do this with draft beers. At Dodger Stadium, if you get a craft beer on tap, it’s probably a pint and a half (or maybe even more than that) and you’re going to pay like $18 (or possibly more). Give me the option to get a pint for $14 or something. I go to a lot of baseball games. With no size options and just a big beer at an absurd price, I might just not get a beer. But if I had a smaller option and a lower (but still absurd price), I’d be more likely to get the smaller option. And finally, European churches are usually much more beautiful than American churches. Of course, the Basilica of the Most Holy Trinity is an exception here.
As a patriotic American, I have to point out things that we do better than Europe. Europeans don’t know how to count. According to my hotel in Spain, my room was on the fourth floor. In reality, I was on the sixth floor (but most Europeans probably would have thought I was on the fifth floor, which would still be wrong). Europeans do time wrong. They said my flight home from Portugal was at 17:05. We’re not in the military, it was 5:05. I really don’t get why they do this. I don’t think people in Europe actually talk like that. They would say it was 5:05 also. Speaking of flights, European airports are stupid. When we were in the airports in Lisbon and Bilbao, they would wait way too long to tell you what gate your flight was leaving from. And then when you knew what the gate was, there weren’t nearly enough seats by the gate. There are plenty of bad American airports, but I would take the American airport experience over the European airport experience. As for beverages, I like the option to get small beers, but I definitely missed ice water. What is it about Europeans that they don’t like making things colder when colder is better? Fortunately all of my hotels had air conditioning, but I was definitely missing ice in my water. Although my hotels had air conditioning, the churches did not. It wasn’t too hot for most of the trip so that wasn’t a big deal. But the other problem with the churches is the kneelers. The churches may be beautiful (not the Basilica of the Most Holy Trinity), but the kneelers were almost always just an uncomfortable slab of wood. And of course, Europe uses the metric system, which is very stupid. And it’s annoying when my phone knows I’m in Europe and I google Lourdes weather and the temperatures come up in Celsius (if I google Lourdes weather when I’m in the US, it will give me temperatures in Fahrenheit).
So that was my trip to Europe. I had a busy July with trips to four different time zones. I don’t have much planned for August. I might have one more trip, but it would be a short one that won’t involve flying. I might not have a flight again until 2027. When I get to 2027, I’ll try to get to at least one of the states where I haven’t seen a sporting event yet (West Virginia, Mississippi, and Hawaii). I don’t know what my next international trip will be. There’s a good chance that it will be Canada. I’ve thought about combining Vancouver with one of my trips out west because it’s the only Canadian city with an affiliated minor league team. Toronto is always a possibility because it’s an easy trip and they have renovated the Rogers Center since I was there 12 years ago. Besides Canada, Poland is pretty much the last country that I haven’t been to yet that I really want to go to (because of John Paul the Great). After visiting Italy and the Vatican two years ago, they became the countries that I’d most want to revisit. And my desire to revisit them only increased last year with the election of the first American pope. So hopefully I’ll get back to those countries at some point. And after visiting Lourdes and Fatima, I kind of want to go to Mexico because of Our Lady of Guadalupe. So I definitely hope another international trip will happen at some point in the not too distant future, but I have no idea when that will be. I definitely wouldn't be opposed to something like this trip again where I’m with a bunch of people who speak English and I don’t have to plan anything. It was a nice, easy way to get to three countries.
