Eastern Odyssey: A Family Journal of our Trek through Japan and Russia in 1973

Consider the year 1973: Vietnam war still winding down; the cold war is going strong; the Nixon presidency is falling apart. It is also the year that a family of six traveled to Japan, across Russia, and spent half a year in Europe before returning home from this trip all the way around the world.

It Was the Adventure of a Lifetime.

In 1973 Don Swenson decided to use his one-year sabbatical from the Los Alamos National Laboratory to visit some of the leading laboratories around the world -- particularly in Japan, Russia, and Geneva. It would be not only a professional visit, but also a trip for his wife Barbara and 4 children to see the world. Barbara insisted that she and the children keep a journal to record their experiences along the way.

The first stop was Japan in Tsukuba about 30 minutes north of Tokyo by train. They visited Nikko, Hakone, Kamakura, Kyoto, Hiroshima, while just trying to hold the family together.

The second stop was Russia, boarding the Trans-Siberian Railway in Nakhodka and on to Khabarovsk, Irkutsk, Novosibirsk, Moscow, Kiev, Leningrad, and ending up in Helsinki, Finland.

This book is the compilation of those four different journals. For each of 146 days, there are up to four entries, one from each of the contributors. Each entry giving a different viewpoint of what happened; telling the same story in a different way.