A Sick Boy’s Travel Photo Highlight Reel

Sidelined and remembering some great travel experiences

David Conte
4 min readJun 3, 2024
Berlin Cathedral

Before I developed a life-altering chronic illness in 2015 and became housebound, my wife and I did a fair amount of traveling. With no children then, any extra money we earned from working was set aside for our next travel adventure.

My wife is German and Germans are world-class travelers. That is to say they travel far and widely.

Twenty years ago, before I met Kathleen, my travel life had basically consisted of going on vacation to Florida an ungodly number of times. But that would change when I visited her family in Berlin, Germany, for the first time after our first year of dating.

We took a boat tour of the city and visited all the noteworthy sites on foot afterward. I like this photo Kathleen took above of the Berlin Cathedral, which aside from church services, is used for state ceremonies, concerts, and other events.

We also visited the Baltic Sea, Germany’s coast that stretches almost 1,500 miles, for a few days on that first visit. The Germans have beach chairs lined up along the sand, like this on the island of Rügen.

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