Eating breakfast after two months of hotel breakfasts, Cameron, my co-author and travel buddy, asked if I get homesick. Sure I miss my family. But living on the road — even if I don’t like the cheese pastry that is today’s breakfast — puts a curve in my road, a little syncopation in life’s beat. It makes the mundane memorable. Then a chimney sweep walks by.
I like this minimalist aspect of travel. Light bag, open mind, a humble room with heavy shutters — ready to be pushed open to greet a new morning — is all I need for a springboard into the world.
At the airport ready to fly home, I survey my luggage. My mind flies back to early trans-Asian trips when you’d routinely comb through your bags at each border crossing looking for drugs planted on you by people working with corrupt police.
I remembered a backpacker who discovered a hunk of hash in his heavy army coat three people short of the Pakistani border guard. Panic on his face, he looked around, considered his options…and just ate it like the last bite of a Mars bar.
Today, the only edible I had was a Ziploc bag of sunflower seeds I carried from Seattle through the entire trip and never used — an edible security blanket I never needed. I’ve been on the road 60 days in a row (120 out of the last 150). My body is lean but tired. My brain is still spinning — yet tired.
At Heathrow, I met Jake from Toledo, Ohio. He ran to me, abandoning his parents at the exchange desk. Wow! He watched all my shows. He and his family we’re going to “do Europe.” I asked him his age. Fourteen.
It was a beautiful encounter. I was fourteen with my parents on my first trip. Jake was just like me and my family in 1969: doing it all wrong. While they had no guidebook, were changing money at the rip-off desk, and packing heavy, they were wide-eyed and hungry for the world. As I flew home, ready to embrace home and family again…I had a hunch Jake was starting something really big.
Rick, It has been a highlight of my last two summers to read your summer travel blog. In a way I feel like I traveled across Europe with you. I took trains across Europe last summer, and am driving through the Peleponnese with my Dad this winter. Thanks for the great reading!
What a wonderful memory for Jake! You made his trip even more memorable. He’ll have a story to tell the rest of his life. Thanks for great summer reading. Welcome home!
Rick, Thanks for your well-written and stimulating blog this summer. My husband and I are off to Europe in a couple of weeks and will spend time in Italy on our own before joining one of your tours there. I finished reading “Inside the Third Reich” two weeks ago. I am sure I will want to re-read it again in the future when we travel to Germany. (This “read” was inspired after reading your blog from Berlin.) Your blog posts reminded me why it is important to keep “world travel” on our list of things to do. It brings to mind one of my favorite quotes from Mark Twain: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it soley on these accounts.” Buon viaggio to all!
AH comming home. It is always exciting to me, but at the smae time, i always experience an intense depression. i always feel like i will never be able to travel again. i always think about how i will manage to save up enough money to do this again. and when i arrive home. its like the sound has been turned down on the radio. i daydream my way through traffic without a care in the world. I go to school and work in a daze. time flies by as the days blend into one another. but eventually it all catches up, and all i can think about is where i want to go, and what i want to see. i find myself wanting to see new things but at the same time wanting to revisit familiar places and friends. Life is short. There is no way one can fully accompish everything on his or her list. I guess that after a big trip you just have to put one foot in fornt of the other, grind it out when necessary, but always keep that hope in the back of your mind. always keep that dream alive,&it will happen
Guau, Steve!… I have felt exactly the same. Thanks for your thoughts.
Steve, think of coming home as the preparatory part of your next trip! Saving money, making plans, doing research…all leading to the next journey, and being PART of the overall journey! Me, I’m the blessed American on my dream journey, marking a year in Europe next month–4 months in France, then 5 in Spain, a month in northern Italy and now 4 months in Vienna and hopefully on to Ireland where my family hails from for a more settled stay to write a book…as long as the money holds out (curse that weak dollar. It’s probably shaving months off my trip!) Poor Jake–how is it he watches all your shows, Rick, and they were still doing it all wrong? Maybe his folks didn’t listen to any suggestions he may have made. Out of the mouths of babes…. Love the blog. It’s harder for me to access your guidebooks as I travel (I never know where I’m going next because I house sit and have to wait for assignments). am headed to Prague for 5 days. anything to post on that?
When I travel using a guidebook other than a Rick Steves book, I miss Rick’s quirky comments and specific directions for finding things in towns, as I did on the trip to Athens and the Greek Islands from which I returned last night. I am always startled by the amount of luggage Americans take to Europe, as though they don’t understand there are laundrys and clothing stores in Europe. People often ask me, enviously, how I manage with one small rolling suitcase and an overnight bag. I explain that packing light allows me to handle my luggage without help, and still take all the things I really need for two weeks of travel with a minimal number of things to keep track of. I’m a walking advertisement for the Rick Steves method of packing, and I’m converting my friends and some strangers.