Oh the Places I'll Go

  In 1970, the US and Russia were still in the throes of the Cold War.   Americans were fighting and dying in Vietnam ostensibly to prevent the spread of Communism in Southeast Asia.   Travel to the Eastern Bloc (Communist) countries was generally ill-advised if not prohibited.   Traveling across East Germany we had witnessed the barbed wire fences, the guards with machine guns at the ready, and the dogs sniffing under trains and around compartments.   But we had heard that Yugoslavia’s leader, General Tito, was more tolerant and that tourists would not be bothered.   We decided to try our luck at hitchhiking through that country in order to reach Greece.   It was much harder than we had imagined it would be, but we were rewarded with a unique view of life behind the Iron Curtain where time seemed to have stopped decades earlier. Traversing the country that dreary, rainy November took us seven days.   According to my travel journal, we spent the...

  I love to travel.   Perhaps the itch to be on the move is something I was born with (my mother wrote in my baby book that I wanted to go with anyone who was “going bye-bye”), or perhaps it developed through childhood experiences.   My family moved every few years when I was growing up, and Dad always took two-weeks off for an annual family vacation.   We went to national parks, camped in the mountains, or visited relatives who lived across the country (from California to Connecticut).   The most memorable of those family vacations was a road trip from Texas, across the southern states, through the Smoky Mountains, to Washington, D.C., and then on to New York City for the 1964 World’s Fair.   We returned via a more northerly route.   By the time we got back to Texas, we had traveled through at least sixteen states. An even grander adventure was the three month excursion around Europe that I undertook in the fall of 1970.   I was only twenty but...