Locations, Reflections, Travel Stories

Early days of travel

An interviewer recently asked my what made me think I could paint a mural on the side of a farmhouse, working 30 feet up a wall on scaffolding. It was an excellent question for which I had no answer. After a brief reflection, the reply was simply this – I didn’t know I could but I wanted to and I knew I could figure it out.

That way of thinking pretty much sums up my approach to life. Both career and travel have been directed by this line of thinking.

The story below describes the year I spent living and traveling in Europe when I was 19 years old. As I was reflecting back on the events of that year, I asked the same question – what made me think I could…? I would not call it confidence; that would suggest I knew what I was doing. It is more a matter and curiosity and optimism coming together to create a willingness to try. This is the story of finding my love of travel.

When I was five, a neighbor decided that I was smart enough to start school early. She told my mother I should be tested to see if I qualified to start kindergarten in the fall. My mother wasn’t in a hurry to send her only daughter off to kindergarten but felt obligated, as a good mother, to at least ask the school for an opinion.

I remember only one detail of the hours of testing that followed. Using a ruler, I carefully drew a five-pointed star and colored each point with different colored crayon. I don’t know what the rest of the testing involved but apparently, I passed because that fall, a few weeks before my 6th birthday I started kindergarten.

Fast forward to 1975 and I am young freshman in college in Eugene, Oregon. Throughout the years between kindergarten and college, I was an excellent student with good grades who teachers liked having in class. I was socially awkward but the school part was never an issue. Now, I felt unprepared to be successful in college. Midway through my freshman year, I was looking for ways to take a year off and grow up.

A few doors down, my dorm-mate, Marcia, had just been accepted into an exchange program and would attend University of Stuttgart the following fall. Marcia wasn’t keen on going to Stuttgart alone. She was much more worldly than me, spoke German fluently and from what I could tell, was pretty comfortable traveling. That said, Marcia wanted someone to be with her, not to go to school but just to be a friend and hang out with. Marcia invited me to join her in Stuttgart in fall of 1975.

And thus began my journey as a wanderer.

Transatlantic journey

Looking back, I have no idea why this plan made sense to me. I didn’t know anyone who had been to Europe. It wasn’t common to take a gap year in the US, so it wasn’t that I had met other college students who had taken a year off. I had no notion of what Germany would be like and I had never dreamed of going abroad.

I finished the school year in Eugene and found three jobs to earn money before I left. I was concerned that the only money I would have in Germany was the money I had earned before I left October 1st. I said goodbye to my family at the Portland, Oregon airport, boarded my very first transatlantic flight that would take me to Stuttgart, Germany. Looking back now, as a mother, I realize how brave my mother was to watch her young daughter board a plane for Europe. There were no cell phones, letters took 3 months between locations and contact was limited to expensive emergency phone calls. I was excited and completely unaware of how hard that would have been for her.

For me, it was the beginning of an auspicious year. I did not speak German and was not able to get a job until I realized that there were seven US Army bases in the Stuttgart area at the time. NATO headquarters was about a 40-minute walk from student housing where we lived.

My first job was as a barmaid at the NCO club on the Böblingen army base, three train rides away from Vaihingen where we lived. At the time, I didn’t drink, didn’t know whiskey from white wine and was a terrible barmaid. I was fired three times in one night but managed to keep the job anyway and earned enough money to be ready to take my first trip. When three of the other exchange students invited me to join them on a trip, I was ready. By ready, I mean I had some money and I wanted to see more of Europe. I was so unprepared to travel in Europe where trains were the primary mode of transportation. My colleagues studied train schedules, set the itinerary and told me what tickets to buy and where to go.

After securing necessary visas, we took the train from Stuttgart, Germany to Budapest, Hungary where I had my first introduction to life in the Eastern Block – mandated hotels and travel schedule, grocery stores with almost nothing on the shelves and only one brand. The architecture was amazing and the tiny woman who had been assigned to be our host was so friendly and curious, in spite of us not having a common language.

A few days later, we took a train and a bus and then walked across the border into the Romanian customs office at midnight. The power went out just after they took our passports, adding to the drama. Because we had no transportation, we were put into the back of a container truck by the border guards and transported through Romania to our destination, the Black Sea, not knowing what we would encounter when we eventually arrived hours later. I remember having a keen sense that our travel choices were a bit irrational. I was enjoying the excitement of our strange adventure but started to wonder if maybe I wanted to be a little more involved in the decisions.

From Romania we took a train to Zagreb, Yugoslavia. En route, I was invited to drink schnapps with some soldiers but declined. Two of my colleagues did not decline and became really drunk on the train. The next morning, our too hung-over colleagues took our backpacks and left without us on a train heading to Split, thinking we were already on the train. We were left in the station with no belongings and no way of reaching colleagues at our destination. This was before cell phones. Absolute sheer luck reunited us hours later. I had had a four-hour train-ride to get over how angry I felt at their choice to leave without us. By the time we were reunited, there was no point in being agitated and we all just moved on.

Alone in Greece

We took a boat to Dubrovnik where I decided it was time for me to take control over my travel plans. I had asked the guys to include me in selecting routes. I was aware that my lack of knowledge was putting me at a disadvantage. My efforts to be an equal in the decision-making process were dismissed. I opted for the only approach I knew at the time – separate from the group and figure it out on my own. Interpersonal communication was very different in those days. Today, our little group would have much better skills and would most likely have addressed my concerns without the need to part ways.

I went on to Greece alone, through places I had never even heard of, in the hope of meeting up with other friends from Stuttgart. Wandering the streets of Athens where the street signs are all literally in Greek, I felt a little fear but was mostly curious about how I would even find the hostel we had talked about. There were so many people in the crowded, winding streets of the old town. It was so foreign. That said, I had grown up adapting to changing situations and had been raised to be open to possible adventures hidden in the unexpected. This was an adventure in the making.

I spent my first Christmas away from home staying in a cave on the southern side of the island of Crete. The two people I was traveling with were staying in a motel in the nearby town. I found the hotel to be colder than the cave. As I sat alone on the stark brown cliff overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, I wondered what my family was doing and felt smaller than I had ever felt in my entire life. I felt the distance between home and my family almost as a physical pain. It was the first time I wondered who I was in the world. I was 19 years old.

Morocco in a Beetle

I went back to Stuttgart to work for another six weeks and earned enough money to join a different group on a three-week trip to Morocco. Four of us, Khalid, Joe, Barbara and I loaded ourselves and our belongings into a Volkswagen beetle and drove south from Stuttgart. Khalid’s family lived in Casablanca. I don’t remember being uncomfortable as we made the 1800-mile trip (2730 KM, 28 hours) over several days. If you asked me today to join three other people for a road trip in a Beetle, I would question your sanity. Perspective is everything. The visit with Khalid’s family was incredible. They included us in a wedding celebration, fed us like royalty and demonstrated a level of hospitality that left a lasting impression on me.

At the end of the school year in July, the exchange students packed up and left. I still had two months before my return ticket date. Instead of changing the return date, I calculated that I would be able to extend my trip to the end of September another two months, if I was able to spend only $3 a day. Even today, I wonder how I came to the conclusion that hitching around Europe alone for two months was my best option. I wish I could remember what risks and rewards were placed on the scale to make the decision. Most likely, I didn’t want to waste being in Europe by not exploring. In spite of numerous uncomfortable encounters with strange men, I was still holding the opinion that I was safe doing what I was doing. At the very least, I was confident I was not doing anything that would get me into a situation I could not navigate out of. In other words, I was clueless at 19 and it worked in my favor.

I headed south from Stuttgart, intending to go to Morocco to visit Khalid’s family again. I met a wonderful woman, Tsafrir, from Israel and we traveled through Switzerland together. She taught me to not sleep in a pasture where cows were grazing because they would step on you in the night. Further south, we stayed with her uncle in Nice. Tsafrir only spoke English and Hebrew, her uncle only Yiddish and French. My job was to translate from English to German and hope that it was close enough to Yiddish to communicate. I am pretty sure it didn’t. Adding to the communication challenge was the fact that Tsafrir was Israeli but not Jewish while her uncle was a devout Jew and Zionist. Their attempts to discuss politics through my completely inadequate translations must have left both wondering. We cut the visit short and moved on.

I made it to Morocco and found out that the family that I knew were all in France and no one spoke anything but Arabic and French, which I did not speak. Wanting to see Marrakech, I ventured farther south, eventually taking a bus into the Atlas Mountains to a hotel on the edge of the Sahara Desert. It felt like being on the moon. The ride through the mountains was my first encounter with very narrow roads, old buses and drivers who appeared to have no real attachment to life. Thank goodness there were no cell phones to add to the distractions.

I eventually took the night train from Marrakech, back up to the Tangiers to return to Europe. The train was so old that every time it pulled into a station all the lights went out and I was the only foreigner on the train. It was an intense experience of trusting in the moment because I really had no options. I could sit in fear all night or caste my desire to be safe into the universe and wait it out. It was one of the early gifts from the universe, a lesson in mindfulness. When I took inventory of what was actually going on around me, I realized that the other people in the train were simply people, all traveling late at night, all just trying to get comfortable. After the initial curiosity about me wore off, I wasn’t all that interesting. Feeling scared morphed into feeling relaxed.

Once back in Spain I was so exhausted, I slept all the way across the country, only waking at the border to Portugal. Might as well go into Portugal since I was already there, right? The $8 entry free at the campground in Lisbon would have blown my budget for two days. Instead, I rolled out my sleeping bag, just outside the campground fence, thinking that it would be safest and cheapest to camp near the campground but not in the campground. I spent a couple days looking around Lisbon, then headed to Paris, one of the major European cities I and not visited. Then I took trains North all the way to Scotland to see the Highland games near Aberdeen. As the time for my return flight approached, I took the ferry from Dover to Calais, France and hitchhiked back to Stuttgart.

I don’t remember the flight home at all but I do remember getting back to university. Now, instead of feeling very young and immature I felt pretty old and worldly. I settled in for my second year of college but never lost the desire to be on the road. I would travel extensively years later for work. Retirement and creative low-cost travel strategies have allowed me to step back into the kind of travel that started, so many years earlier.