By Elizabeth Neville

With a 9-year-old, a trolley with three bags, including the cameras and film case, and our trolley-case, with (a month's) toiletries case atop, then our day backpacks, we needed to stroll. In Berlin Daniel had said, "Come on mamma, we'll walk to the youth hostel." I'd told him it was a fair way. The train had been late in, about 11am, having been over 2 hours late leaving Paris Nord. By the time we had our bearings, and set off, the midday sun was warming up. We walked and pulled, stopped for water, pulled some more, checking our map, and checking directions once, pulled some more and got their nigh on an hour later. Daniel uses that anecdote when he tells me to trust that he knows what he is doing and I doubt he knows as well as I, then he smiles, "Remember in Berlin and I said, 'Let's walk to the hostel'?" Yes, Daniel.

Europe's Past In The Present
Our walk took us past a hotel occupying the sight where Adolf Eichman thought up The Final Solution. We would not have passed that way otherwise. Opposite the entrance is a bus stop, the display on the shelter tells of this. Daniel remembers this too. That February we were in Amsterdam and at Anne Frank's House. I remember Daniel's expressions seeing the photographs of pits full of skeletal corpses were unforgettable, and the questions he asked me about it. Day-by-day he is learning about the world he has inherited. And here in Berlin, at an innocuous bus stop opposite an equally inoffensive hotel, was another lesson in "atrocities to humans, by humans".

Sunday 25th July 1999
Baths, breakfasts and finish packing.
Depart 07.45 for Waterloo.
Eurostar departs 08.53.

On board: Daniel sorts out his finances with me, getting the best exchange rates - FF10-£1; DM3-£1; 55Krone-£1(Czech) and Huf350-£1. He writes his first entry in his journal. We eat a snack and while Daniel plays, I have a deep and much needed sleep. I awake before the hour and finish writing notes to two friends back in the U.K., with itineraries so they can follow us on our travels.

Arrive Paris Gare Du Nord 13.00.

As expected, stepping onto the platform in Paris is enough to revitalise me with a burst of energy as I take my first breath of air from continental Europe. Which is our home for the next 24 days.

Later, as we cross the Tuileries Gardens Daniel looked around him at the giant carousel shimmering in the late afternoon sun, and a sparrow perched next to him on the fence. He turned to me and said, "This is the life, mamma," and I could not agree with him more.

Daniel's Moon
The Moon last filled out to bursting as we left Paris for Berlin - it was luminous orange above the high-rise blocks of the northern suburbs. A young German girl in the corridor noticed it and called to her mamma in the tiny washroom, "Mutter, mutter," when her mother eventually answered her daughter replied, "Die Luna;" but her mother didn't know what she was missing as she only grunted in response.

The night before, it had hung over the Eiffel Tower as we viewed the city from atop the Arc de Triomphe. We had watched the moon for almost a full cycle. The morning of the Grand Prix, 15th August, I caught it from the terrace of our hostel in the Danube, as it popped behind the Parliament building on the river bank facing us; just a tiny crescent slither.

And of course, it had been centrepiece of our tour all along - without it there would be no "giant caterpillar crunching away at the sun" (Daniel's journal description of its slow path across the sun that morning) and no eclipse.

At the outset of our voyage I told Daniel he would never see his moon in the same light, after seeing it creep across and blot out the sun. It is Daniel's Moon, because he believes it follows him everywhere he goes - when he's with me, as he doesn't see it when he's with his daddy. He says, "but it doesn't follow my daddy, only me and you."