Our Excellent European Adventure, 1970 Style

 

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 had graduated early from Baylor University.  I couldn't think of a better way to celebrate that "free" year.  The US was bogged down in a war in Vietnam, there was massive unrest across the country, and, as Bob Dylan reminded us, the times, they were a’changin’.  Going to Europe was something of a rite of passage for my generation, both as a way to see the world and to escape the craziness of America for a while.  It sounded like a good idea to me and several of my friends.

I have many memories of that trip that are as clear as if it were last year rather more than fifty years ago, but other details have been lost over time.  To refresh my memory, I recently pulled my “Europe” scrapbook off the shelf and started looking through it.  The photos are mostly unremarkable—small, poorly framed, and faded—but the maps and memorabilia pasted onto the scrapbook pages are well preserved.  I kept a travel journal throughout that trip that I typed onto erasable bond paper when I returned, and pasted into the scrapbook.  While those pages have also faded, they are still readable.

Recently I came across photos that my father had taken of me and my friends Cecelia Hawkins and Jill Ward for our passports.  I spent the summer of 1970 working several jobs to save the money for the trip but only managed to put aside $700.  Mother let me cash in the life insurance policy my parents had on me for another $300, on the promise that I wouldn’t die while I was gone.

Jill Ward, Cecelia Hawkins, and Me

On the first page of my scrapbook is a list of my pre-trip expenses: youth hostel card $10, two-month Eurail Pass $32, passport $14, “boots, dress, coat, film, and make-up” $34, and Western Girl $25.  This last was a fee paid to a temporary office-worker agency with which Cecelia and I had registered, planning to work in London and save more money.  Jill and another friend, Kay Peterson (known as Kay P) weren’t interested in working so decided to travel together with vague promises that we would meet up somewhere.

Cecelia and I flew from New York City to Luxembourg on Icelandic Air, a new airline that had the cheapest seats at the time.  We paid $273 for our round-trip tickets.  (The price in today’s dollars would be equivalent to over $2,000.)  I had a little more than three hundred dollars to live on when we boarded our flight.  My return flight from Luxembourg was open-ended.  I would fly back when my money ran out.  All Icelandic Air flights stopped in Reykjavik.  We were allowed off the plane but not out of the airport, so all we saw of Iceland is what I glimpsed through the airport window.  All I recall seeing, however, was blackness.  We continued on to Luxembourg, and from there to London.

We had a wonderful few days of sight-seeing in London.  I remember being awed by the gravestones in Westminster Abbey:  so many of the authors we had read in English literature classes and the historic figures I had studied in Dr. Vardaman’s British history class were laid to rest here.  We walked around slowly, exclaiming over a name and recalling a bit of poetry or an accomplishment.  The most disappointing moment came while watching the changing of the guards outside Buckingham Palace as the band played music from “Paint Your Wagon.”  “They Call the Wind Maria” just didn’t seem to fit the solemnity of the occasion.  I have no memory of the pageantry we were there to witness, only the awful music.

We loved riding the tube and walking through London’s many beautiful parks, sitting quietly by a pond, or listening to someone preaching the Word to passers-by who turned a deaf ear.  We thought of all the wonderful neighborhoods—Chelsea, King’s Crossing—where we might live and of all the things we could do during our months in London.  But then we went with an agent to look at flats.  With what we would be making, we could afford little, and the “bedsits” we were shown were dismal.  The final nail in the coffin of our working-girl dreams was the gas meter that would control our heat and our cooking.  We learned we would have to feed it coins if we wanted to stay warm or have a hot meal.  As we calculated the costs of the flat and the gas meter, we became more and more discouraged about our plans. 

Why stay in London where everything we earned would be eaten up by living expenses, if our pay was even enough to cover those?  Why not chuck the jobs and take the money we had saved for this trip and start our travels immediately?  We packed the work clothes we had brought along—dresses, nice shoes, and pantyhose—and went to an American Express office to mail them home.  We packed our travel clothing into our backpacks, and we were set.

In those pre-credit card days, travelers primarily carried American Express travelers’ checks.  We had converted our cash to travelers checks before leaving home and had left a list of their serial numbers with our parents.  If the checks were lost or stolen, American Express would reissue checks to cover those that had not yet been cashed.  There were American Express offices all over the world.  In addition to providing travel planning and financial services, these offices also served as post offices for traveling Americans.  For the next four months, we wrote our parents, you can write to us at these American Express offices:  September in London, October in Munich, November in Paris, and December in Rome.  That was the extent of our travel planning.  I left my nice big suitcase in the London American Express office, hoping someone might be able to use it, and we walked to the bus station.

“Where is the next bus going?” we asked the ticket agent.

“Swansea, Wales,” he replied.

“Fine,” we told him.  “Give us two tickets to Swansea.”

And so, our adventures began.

Me, shivering in the wind and rain at Port Eynon

Arriving in Swansea, we found our way to the youth hostel, an old house on the beach at Port Eynon.  I remember little of this visit except for trying to rush out the next morning to catch the bus.  We were called back because we hadn’t done our chores.  Since this was our first youth hostel experience, we were unaware that chores were a required part of each stay.  We put our backpacks down and sighed deeply.

“But we’ll miss our bus.”

“Too bad.  Here’s the broom, sweep the floors.”

“How will we get to our next stop if we miss the bus?”

“Hitchhike.”

As luck would have it, as we finished our chores and hoisted our packs onto our backs, a delivery man was leaving the hostel.  He gave us our first ride.  Our route north through Wales and England and then Scotland was determined largely by where whoever picked us up was going.

I remember one of those rides well.  We were walking through the beautiful hilly countryside known as The Lake Country on a Sunday afternoon when a skinny, balding man picked us up in his small sporty red coupe.  Cecelia gamely crawled into the space behind the two bucket seats.  I sat in the front.  Taped to the glove box in front of me was a sign: “Seeking female between the ages of . . .”

I read it and tried to surreptitiously point it out to Cecelia as we casually conversed with our driver.  At a high spot on the road, he pulled over and stopped.  We climbed out to look at the vista below us, wondering if our lives were in danger.  They weren't.  The man went to his trunk and took out a folding table, a table cloth, a thermos of tea, and a basket of treats.  On the side of the road, he set up afternoon tea and invited us to partake.  As we ate and drank our tea, he asked if we had seen his notice.  Yes, we had.  Were we interested?  No thank you, we told him, we had places to go and things to see.

The caption on back says Me and John Rogers looking at the view.

After we had finished our tea, he packed everything up.  We climbed back into his little car, and he delivered us to the next town.  Poor man.  We had to feel sorry for him as we laughed at his method for wooing a young woman into companionship with him.  Little did I know that this was just the first of many offers to come, some issued gently like this but others with a bit more force and insistence.  Miraculously, we finished our lengthy journey unharmed.

We made it to Edinburgh before we headed back to London were we saw a marvelous stage production of "Hair."  We ventured out for one more hitchhiking excursion to Oxford and Stratford-on-Avon where we watched a Royal Shakespeare Company production of "King John."  

Having had enough of hitchhiking and the British Isles, Cecelia and I headed across the channel to France where we could begin using our pre-purchased Eurail Passes.  For the next three months we rode the trains and stayed in youth hostels.  We visited a total of fourteen countries, saw some amazing scenery, met a variety of people, explored museums, read books, and had a number of unplanned adventures.  There was a popular book that many were using that year, Europe on Five Dollars a Day by Arthur Frommer.  We had a copy.  While some of Frommer’s suggestions were useful (which museums were free on which days), in general, it was too expensive for our budgets.  Outside of our train passes, we managed to see Europe on five dollars a day for the two of us.

Our diet consisted mainly of loaves of bread, purchased almost daily from local bakeries, bricks of cheese and perhaps a local variation of salami, a jar of peanut butter, a few pieces of fresh fruit when available, a package of cookies (we were partial to custard cremes), and a bottle of wine.  We might eat while we traveled on the train or we might find a park for our picnic.  One beautiful fall day, we ate while sitting on a bench near the harbor in Oslo.  Our open jar of peanut butter sat on the bench between us as we talked.  A seagull flew over and shat, a direct hit into that nearly-full peanut butter jar.  We looked incredulously at one another, appetites gone for that lunch.

Cecelia saying goodbye to the white cliffs of Dover

When our youth hostels had kitchens, we might open and heat a can of soup or beans.  I can still hear the voice of a man at one of the English youth hostels looking at us and asking, “beeeans?!” as we opened our can for that night.

Youth hostel accommodations varied widely.  We might sleep on bunkbeds in a dormitory-style room with many others, usually separated by sex, or we might have private rooms in a small house.  In Koblenz, Germany the youth hostel was in a castle which sat on top of a very steep hill.  I don’t recall what our accommodations there were like, but I do remember how exhausted I was when I got to the top of that mountain.  Sometimes there were showers in these hostels, but not always, and hot water was rare.  I often washed my hair in a sink.  No way would I take a cold shower in an unheated room, but I couldn’t stand having dirty hair.  Somewhere along the way, I chopped it off with my fingernail scissors.

Sometimes we would take a long train trip so that we could save the cost of lodgings by sleeping on the train.  Every ten days or two weeks, we would splurge on an actual motel room with a bath or shower (often shared and down the hall).  We would find a laundromat where we washed our few clothes, and we would enjoy an actual restaurant meal.

I turned 21 while in Munich, Germany during Oktoberfest.  We happily drank liters of beer sitting on benches at long wooden tables surrounded by German men.  Unfortunately, we had not been able to get space at the local youth hostel that night.  We ended up trying to sleep in an alley, using cardboard boxes balanced between trash dumpsters to protect us somewhat from a driving rain.  A month later we celebrated Cecelia's birthday with a group of 16 from a hostel in Switzerland, "eating, drinking, laughing, and talking for four hours," according to my travel journal.  

We strolled through the gardens at Versailles and walked along the Seine in Paris, speculating on what it would be like to be students living on the Left Bank.  We hiked a snow-covered mountain in the Swiss Alps.  We marveled at the sculptures of Michelangelo and at the Roman ruins scattered throughout Rome.  We rode the train from Oslo to Bergen, in awe of the stunning mountains and fjords.  We ventured into northern Sweden and picnicked among tall pines in a forest before returning to Stockholm.  We toured breweries in Amsterdam and Copenhagen and drank as much free beer as possible.  We loved the art on display at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.  

Me with backpack and groceries, freezing the the snow on our trip to Bergen, and Cecelia and me enjoying fish and chips

We visited the somber grounds of the Dachau Concentration Camp where we talked with a man who had been imprisoned there for four years.  He challenged me to  "seriously consider what your engagement with life will be."  We crossed Eastern Germany by train to visit Berlin and passed through the wall separating the two Berlins at “Checkpoint Charlie” to visit a very depressing East Berlin. 

We made arrangements to meet our friends Kay P and Jill in Berne, Switzerland.  From there we traveled together to Paris (to check for mail), Milano, and Florence where we developed a plan to visit Greece.  Getting there would be something of a challenge, however, as it would require traveling through Yugoslavia, one of Eastern Europe’s Communist countries.  Kay P. decided she would rather go back to Switzerland than on to Greece—smart woman!—so she left us there.  Jill, Cecelia, and I rode the train to Trieste, the last stop in Italy before the Yugoslavian border.  Our adventures in Yugoslavia and Greece were beyond anything else we had experienced in Western Europe and are worthy of a detailed retelling, so stay tuned for the next installment of our very excellent adventure.