The 1989 travelogue has commenced with photos at Instagram and Facebook.

The time has come. Jeeebus knows I've been dropping hints for long enough.

REWIND to 30 years ago today: The aftermath of the 1987 European jaunt, and many changes on the road to 1989.

ON THE AVENUES: In 1989, six months of traveling fabulously in Europe.

Finally the process of scanning my slides from 1989 has resumed. Somewhere around 800 slides from my (almost) seven months in Europe that year are being manually processed, four at a time, and organized into a semblance of coherence.

(That's because I didn't want to pay the price for the more advanced model of scanners.)

Obviously this is going to take a while, so what I've decided to do is make public this gradual process of scanning, gathering information and note-taking. I'll be posting scanned slides and observations at Facebook and Instagram.

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thenewalbanian/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/roger.a.baylor

My Instagram posts also are copied to Twitter: https://twitter.com/newalbanian

It will be a rough draft in the making, because each picture tells a story (understandably some stories have been forgotten, or aren't worth repeating), and the small chunks will add up to a larger narrative, which will appear here at the blog periodically.

At some point I'll dive into the banker's box of trip artifacts and ephemera. The biggest difference between this undertaking and my 1987 revival is the absence of a day-to-day diary of places and events, which was lost when I was robbed in Spain in November of 1989. Consequently, the finished product should be a tad more impressionistic.

Phase One is West Berlin and Czechoslovakia, late May through late June of 1989. The trip began with three days in West Berlin before transferring across the formidable Berlin Wall to East Berlin with a transit visa, then heading for Prague, Czechoslovakia. I returned to both Berlins later that summer. The time in Czechoslovakia was spent with my friend George's family. He had defected and could not return without being arrested and jailed.

But as we know now, and couldn't know then, the Berlin Wall had only six months to live, with all the other European communist countries save Albania falling like dominoes in the wake of the wall's collapse.