What is a road trip you would love to take?

Today’s WordPress blogging prompt could take me many places.

If I have to pick just one, it would be to follow in the footsteps of my grandfather, Marinus Sorensen, in the opening days of World War 2 in Scandinavia.  Not just any ordinary road trip, as there were a number of modes of transportation involved. It was a real adventure.

He was a Dane, who had emigrated to Canada in the days before the WW1.  Following some time in Canada, and World War 1 services in the Canadian Army, he returned to Europe and worked as an Immigration Agent for the Canadian Pacific Railway.  His job was to travel through parts of Poland and the Baltic countries to recruit individuals and families to come to Canada to help settle the country.  (For those who do not know the story, how it is that a Canadian railway company came to run an immigration service is for another day)

Having got his family out of the Denmark in 1939 (he saw the war coming) he returned to Europe in January 1940 to continue his work, helping immigrants and the ever-increasing number of refugees find a means to escape Europe.  This would be his final travel in Europe for a while.

My grandfather would have made a great blogger. He kept a detailed diary, kept copies of all his official correspondence and reports as well as all his letters home.  We have a real treasure trove in these papers, and several historians have found them useful as source material.  What they describe is a 6-month voyage from Canada, via convoy, to London, Rotterdam, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Riga, Abo, up to Petsamo via the Arctic Ocean Highway and finally back to England and then, via convoy again, to Canada.  Mode of travel included ships (individual freighters and small liners as well as convoys with naval escort to avoid submarines and mines), trains, aircraft, military vehicles, and finally a cart.  It took him from some of the grand cities of Europe, through the still smoking battlefields of the First Finland-Russia War, to the Arctic Circle and the midnight sun. 

He spent his days working to get as many prospective immigrants as possible out of harm’s way, all the time railing against the bureaucrats in the Canadian Government immigration service who, in his view, were not only doing nothing to help, but were actively keeping deserving people out of Canada.

I would love to re-visit the places he passed through, with all his notes and descriptions, and compare his impressions of a Scandinavia on the brink of war, with the Scandinavia that has emerged today.