The second issue of Ms. Magazine was in the mail, militant nuns were being arrested in New York and Watergate was starting to sizzle.
It was the summer of 1972. I was a college student in Canada with a serious case of wanderlust. “Maybe I’ll go to Amsterdam, maybe I’ll go to Rome,” Joni Mitchell was singing at the time. The world beyond home was beckoning and wouldn’t wait another minute, so like thousands of other young Canadians and Americans, I took off for a summer with my boyfriend, to camp for three liberating, parent-free months in Europe.
It was a rite of passage back then, this ambitious college-age journey. Even those of us without much money could pull it off, thanks to cheap student air fares, economical rail passes and a high threshold for discomfort. Europe was probably the biggest draw, though many stayed closer to home and explored the United States and Canada. More adventurous flower child types were drawn to exotic destinations like Marrakech, Istanbul or Crete (inspired, no doubt, by Mitchell, who’d hung out in the natural caves in Mattala and romanticized them in her song “Carey”).
But whatever the destination or mode of travel (in our case, a rented Renault and two-person tent), there was something we had in common. We felt safe, we felt omnipotent. And for many of us that trip was more than just a vacation, it was a kind of political statement–a means of fleeing the constraints of home, a way to “find ourselves,” to discover a life beyond the mundane and the bourgeois.
From our heady vantage point (I was 18, he was 19), the world was ours and the future a straight shot. Life was an adventure, and this trip was just the beginning of it; we swore we’d do it again very soon, lots of times.
Of course, things don’t always work out that way, though I wouldn’t have believed it then. Life, like any long road trip, turns out to be dotted with detours and roadblocks and roundabouts. There are other people’s agendas to consider, career setbacks and compromises, kids who have a habit of nudging us off the express lanes for a significant period of time and onto quieter side roads.
For me and for David–that boyfriend who is now my husband–it took 25 years to pick up the trail. This summer, as Watergate at 25 was front page news and Poland was invited to join NATO, we finally went back.
The goal was to retrace our first trip, to see what had changed about Europe, and whether there is still a culture of young people who feel compelled to answer the call to travel. The hope was to recapture that feeling of adventure, if at all possible for middle-age parents who no longer had the luxury of calling home when the traveler’s checks ran low. (“It was so nice to talk to you . . . I hope you don’t think I phoned just to ask for money,” I wrote my parents in a letter from Denmark that I’m sure fooled no one.)
Obviously, it wasn’t going to be the same. Now we had two children–ages 8 and 12–to consider, and one month to travel, not three. Last trip, we drove a peppy little Renault; this time we had a family-friendly motor home that guzzled diesel and kept us on the major auto routes and away from big cities we’d visited the first time, including Paris, Rome, Madrid and Amsterdam. And we didn’t want to travel in the same way. I’d grown accustomed to some of the comforts of life–and had about as much desire to eat corn flakes for supper or wear the same clothes four days in a row as I did to pierce my nose like all those frightfully young-looking girls I saw all over Europe this summer.
Still, the four of us covered more than 4,000 kilometers (2,500 miles) from Italy to Denmark. Along the way, we explored Switzerland, Germany, England, France and Belgium. We climbed in the Alps, took a double-decker bus tour in London, saw Omaha Beach on the Normandy coast, rode a gondola in Venice.
And yes, there are still those wide-eyed young Americans in Europe who do major summer blitzes of the Continent–more of them than ever, tourism officials report.
They’re still unfazed by the challenge of touring 10 countries in eight weeks in one pair of jeans. They are still resourceful and frugal. Twenty-five years ago we survived on $5 a day by eating a lot of spaghetti; these days, many do it on $20 a day by eating a lot of spaghetti, though $40 or $50 may be more typical and allows for the occasional fast-food meal.
With their oversize backpacks and bedrolls, their mess kits and rail passes, they seem to be living proof of a travel time warp. Only the hair has changed (green streaks, crimson spikes); the jewelry (silver toe rings, not macrame chains); and the budget travel guides. (The Harvard students’ “Let’s Go: Europe,” a bible in the ’70s, is still lugged around, though by now Let’s Go has become a series of books. There are also the Rough, Berkeley and Lonely Planet guides, plus the hip eponymous books authored by Rick Steves, PBS host and self-described “Travelin’ Trotsky.”) Though the Vietnam War is long over and anti-Americanism a minor concern, the Canadians are still wearing precautionary red maple leafs on their packs to distinguish themselves from Americans.
You see young Americans everywhere (except at the side of the road: I saw exactly one hitchhiker on our trip). They’re sprawled sleepily on train station platforms, with their breakfast spread out in front of them; queuing up for a bed at youth hostels; in tiny tents in city campgrounds; doing currency calculations in the food markets. They’re the ones with the money belt bulge under their jeans, the ones having sponge baths in McDonald’s bathrooms and wearing their day packs on their chests like a baby pouch–a new fashion statement, apparently. They may now eat junk food instead of embracing “health food” and use their pin numbers to call home instead of waiting three hours at a public telephone in a post office, as I did in 1972, for the operator to get a line to Canada. They may hang out at cybercafes where they can send e-mail to friends they’ve made along the way instead of picking up mail at American Express.
But there is still a strong contingent sharing the intrinsic belief that “traveling involves some sense of hardship, like not having hot water or having to drink unpasteurized milk or not being able to be understood by the locals,” says Ruth Halikman, Eastern European editor for “Let’s Go: Europe.”
And they still radiate that earnestness and exhilaration that comes with foreign travel, especially first-time foreign travel. They are still so impressionable, eager to soak up experience and understand their place in the world.
“It’s very eye-opening to see how much more there is in the world than just the U.S.,” exuded Jim D’Andrea, a 22-year-old student from Wayne, Pa., as he sat on the stairs with his girlfriend outside the Uffizi gallery in Florence, Italy. “I think Europe has broadened me. I want to explore new things. I want to learn German and Italian. I want to study history and mythology and photography.”
“You really can’t understand what you’re learning about (at school) until you’ve seen it for yourself,” asserted David Eisenstark, 21, a history major from Burlington, Vt., who was backpacking for nine weeks and staying at a Copenhagen youth hostel.
“But I’ve also learned what it means to be American, and part of it is the ability to never have trouble with your passport. I was on a train in Poland next to some people from Bulgaria, and (their luggage was) completely taken apart. But when I flash my gold eagle on the front of my blue passport, nobody says a word to me. It’s crazy, when you think about how powerful it is to be American. It’s this enormous, omnipotent force.”
To be sure, it’s a different Europe now. In 1972, when the Berlin Wall was still standing, a trip to Europe implied western Europe. London, Paris, Rome, Amsterdam were the hot spots for young travelers, and it was a serious adventure to travel to the East, reserved for the brave or the foolhardy.
“It was the heyday of the Cold War, and you could get a visa for a day to go to East Berlin,” recalled Peter Wilk, who was associate editor of the 1972 edition of “Let’s Go: Europe” when he was a Harvard student and is now a psychiatrist in Sebago, Maine.
“It was a pretty creepy kind of feeling. You got searched. East Berlin was all bleak, and everyone had their head down. There was no food in the stores.” Even in Yugoslavia, “you had the sense you were on the fringe, in enemy territory.”
But now that the Soviet Bloc has gone, Eastern Europe is on many itineraries, facilitated by the forces of capitalism. Last year, for example, Rail Pass Express, an Ohio-based company that sells rail passes to Britain and western Europe, introduced its “Balkan Flexipass” with unlimited rail travel in such countries as Bulgaria, the former Yugoslavia, Montenegro, Romania and Serbia.
Prague, considered relatively inexpensive for students, is now a huge draw. “A lot of people from my school did Budapest and Prague. They were all, `I want to go to eastern Europe,’ ” said Alyssa Holmquist, 23, a student from San Francisco who was staying at a Copenhagen youth hostel. Holmquist visited Prague last summer, “and it was so neat. I was thinking, `Oh, I’m going to this ex-communist country!’ “
It’s also a more traveler-friendly Europe, laced ever-tighter by an amazing infrastructure of bridges, high-speed trains and efficient roads. “Europe sees no limit to how well-organized it can be,” said travel guide writer Steves in a telephone interview from London. “You can get from Paris to Milan in five hours on the train, when it used to be 12 hours.”
Twenty-five years ago, it took us a half day to get from England to France–a two-hour ride on a car ferry from Dover to Calais, plus time wasted in queues. This summer, it took all of 35 minutes to drive our car on, and off, Le Shuttle, a train that runs under the English Channel. (Passengers can also now take the Eurostar train from the center of Paris to the center of London in just three hours.) And in Denmark, a luxurious new high-speed passenger train whisked us through a tunnel between the islands of Funen and Sealand in just 7 minutes: When we did it in 1972, the trip was a one-hour ferry ride.
Almost as dramatic–and somewhat discouraging–is how Europe seems to have lost some of its cultural vividness. Yes, the Brits are still unfailingly polite, the French still elegant, the Danes as helpful and good-natured as I’d remembered.
But the boundaries have blurred between the European countries and the rest of the world, and certainly the United States. Commercialism is rampant, the American influence pervasive. We saw Starbucks in Copenhagen and Seattle Coffee in London; even Minsk in Belarus–the last bastion of communism–now has a McDonald’s, students report. Trends and cultural icons are spreading at the speed of a Eurostar train: “The Dilbert Principle” is a bestseller in Switzerland, there is an outlet mall in western England, and we saw a nature store in Denmark that bore a suspicious resemblance to the Nature Company in Boston. English jargon is heard everywhere: A Swiss store clerk who spoke only German still managed a “No problem” when I thanked her.
Can you go back, 25 years later, and relive the experience? Yes, though it won’t be the same.
“Although we have long since learned to expect it, we still are very much awed by the instant change in scenery that occurs upon crossing a border in Europe,” David wrote in the 1972 journal we kept, after we’d crossed the Swiss-Italian border. It wasn’t as striking the second time.
But in many ways, we appreciated this trip more. I’d forgotten how magical European traveling can be, and how it has the power to lift you out of the tedium of life (not much of a concern when you’re 18). The simple mechanics of being on the road, of navigating from point A to point B with no particular destination in mind concentrates the mind in a very different way. The bigger worries of life recede quickly.
Of course, not every moment is wonderful. Living out of a suitcase stops being romantic the first time you’ve run out of socks. There are lots of destinations that don’t deliver what they’d promised.
Then there are the disasters, inevitable when you leave familiar surroundings behind. In 1972, we came within a hair’s breadth of being arrested by Franco’s Spanish police because we passed a car on the right instead of the left and had no money to pay the fine. (My sobbing got us out of that one.) I nearly burned our tent down, with me in it, when the map I was reading by lamplight ignited in the flame. I got locked inside an Italian gas station bathroom and attempted to unscrew the door lock with my car keys, until someone rescued me.
This trip had its share of mishaps too. The first day in the motor home we crunched into a cement block at a gas station. We ran out of lira in Italy and went without dinner, got so lost in Turin we finally gave up at midnight and spent the night parked on a busy street. On a midnight train from Germany to Denmark, the kids and I spent a miserable ride in a smoky cabin with two hostile nose-ringed punks who swore at us for being there.
But it’s rejuvenating to court disaster once in a while, to lose the control that we grown-ups covet and be reminded that “life is an abyss,” as essayist Edward Hoagland has written. You can’t be in control when you are lost and when you are forced, like Blanche Dubois, to be dependent on the kindness of strangers–like the sweet German woman who pressed a deutschemark in my hand at the Frankfurt train station because I didn’t have a coin for a luggage cart, or the Belgium campsite owner who winked and let us spend an afternoon there for free because we didn’t have enough Belgian francs.
Once the trip is finished, you forget the bad stuff. It makes for good stories later on, and you can feel rejuvenated all over again. I can’t say this trip made me feel 18 again (especially when I discovered I couldn’t read any of the road maps and would need my first pair of bifocals). But it shaved off a decade or two, at least for now.
DETAILS ON BUDGET EUROPE
Summer may be over, but for those students–and others traveling on a shoestring–thinking about next year, here are some tips to clip from young American travelers:
– When you can’t find a place to stay for the night, turn to your train pass. Hop on a train and go somewhere–anywhere–at night: You can sleep on it and in the morning can turn around and go back.
– Bring half as much stuff as you think you’ll need. “Less is best,” young travelers say.
– If you need plates or containers for storage, “McDonald’s is very useful,” says Ann-marie Pucillo, from Woburn, Mass., who has found fast food salad dishes perfect for storing food.
– Take a portable clothesline with you–the elastic kind that doesn’t need clothespins. You will probably be doing laundry by hand, since you never know where you’ll find the next washing machine.
– “Watch your karma,” warns David Eisenstark of Burlington, Vt. “If you don’t, it will come back to haunt you. Like if you’re on a train and don’t punch your train ticket, eventually someone will ask you for it and you’ll have to pay a fine that’s 15 or 20 times the price of the ticket.”
