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.

Photos of Meteora in Greece, 1985, reclaimed from slides via a nifty scanner.

From 1985 through 1994, a period comprising six trips to Europe, some of them quite lengthy, most of the 2,500-plus photos I took while on the road were committed to slide film.

This seemed like a good idea at the time.

The 1970s-vintage slide projector that sufficed for viewing into the 1990s ceased functioning two decades ago, so after all these years of not being able to see these images, I finally purchased a decent quality scanner for Saturnalia.

The process of digitizing these images (and a few thousand more non-slide photos) probably will last the remainder of my life. Short term goals are more modest, as it has come time to write the narrative of the 1987 trip, something currently existing in fragments only. Being able to see the photos will be of tremendous value when it comes to collating memories.

The photos here are of Meteora, monasteries and rock formations.

The first was Kalambaka, itself a nondescript modern town, but the functional gateway to the spectacular, otherworldly monasteries of Meteora, which are man-made complexes of Orthodox holiness and isolation perched like Technicolor mushrooms atop tall shafts of sheer volcanic rock – accessible by local bus thanks to the wonders of 20th-century roadway engineering, but previously reached exclusively by rope and basket conveyances, pulleys and profuse prayers.

I'm a dismal photographer. Here's the lowdown about the up-high.

The Metéora (Greek: Μετέωρα, pronounced [mɛˈtɛoɾɐ], literally "middle of the sky", "suspended in the air" or "in the heavens above" — etymologically related to meteorology) - is a formation of immense monolithic pillars and hills like huge rounded boulders which dominate the local area.

It is also associated with one of the largest and most precipitously built complexes of Eastern Orthodox monasteries in Greece, second in importance only to Mount Athos.^[1] The six monasteries are built on natural conglomerate pillars, at the northwestern edge of the Plain of Thessaly near the Pineios river and Pindus Mountains, in central Greece.

Metéora is included on the UNESCO World Heritage List under criteria^[2] I, II, IV, V and VII.^[3]

The nearest town is Kalambaka.