Smithsonian

To commemorate the Smithsonian Presents Travels with Rick Steves magazine — now on sale online, and at newsstands nationwide — Rick is blogging about the 20 top destinations featured in that issue. One of those “destinations” is actually a collection of Europe’s best eating experiences.

If you are what you eat, I am the best of Europe. But my appreciation of good food was slow in coming.

On my first solo trip to Europe — just after my high-school graduation — I packed along a big plastic tube filled with a swirl of peanut butter and strawberry jam. I figured that bringing this along would let me get my nutrition free (or, at least, on my mom’s grocery-shopping dollar). When the tube was finally squeezed empty, I resorted to jam. I remember being thankful that I liked baguettes, because that was the foundation of most of my meals. I became expert at spreading just a film of jam on the bread to give it some flavor, then washing it down with Fanta.

(I’m in Spain as I type now, and just the other day the wonderful, crusty local bread roughed up the roof of my mouth. I experienced a happy déjà vu of those early vagabond trips, recalling how the roof of my mouth was perpetually tender from the hard crusts.)

When I returned home from that formative first trip, I was literally sick. I had some kind of physical/nervous breakdown, and the doctor declared me “chronically undernourished.” When I started college that fall, I took a nutrition course. And I’ve never had a jam sandwich or Fanta in Europe since.

Today I provide my office staff free drinks in the cooler, but no pop. When we’re planning our tour itineraries, I always speak up in the interest of good eating — our travelers must experience the local cuisine at its best. And my passion in my research these days is to find great places to eat.

I’m currently in Europe updating guidebooks. My favorite thing about the rhythm of my 12-hour research days is the last three of those hours — blitzing the restaurants on my list to check existing recommendations and consider new ones, and then returning to my favorite place at the very end of the evening. Body aching as if I just ran a marathon, mind spinning with new ideas and additions to the book, I sit down and let the chef/owner cook me up whatever he wants me to experience. At the end of the day, good chefs (not pretentious ones…just good ones) seem to thoroughly enjoy taking off their apron, washing up, and sitting down to share a glass of wine with their last customer of the day — that’s me — eating their favorite dish.

As a travel writer, I measure profit by how many people’s trips I impact. By that standard, May 4th is one of the most exciting days in my 30-year-long career. Today, Smithsonian Presents Travels with Rick Steves, a special issue of Smithsonian magazine, hits newsstands all over the USA.

The magazine is 104 pages devoted entirely to my favorite places. For me, this is the travel-writing equivalent of giving birth to a child. While I’m a proud papa about my contribution (the writing), the “mother” of this collaboration — if I may call Smithsonian that — is why this baby is so darn beautiful. I’ve never seen my writing mixed with such beautiful art, and then so expertly laid out.

The experience was humbling. I learned years ago that life is too short to work with people who aren’t really talented and committed. And, just as important, life is too short to work with people you don’t enjoy. In other words, collaborating with talented and fun people brings this workaholic great joy. My (talented and fun) staff and I can be pretty self-assured. We cook up some great TV, radio, guidebooks, tours, and newspaper articles. But we’ve never produced a magazine. And in short order, we gained great respect for the talent of the people in Washington, DC, who make Smithsonian magazine.

I had my creative tensions with the Smithsonian staff over the course of the project. Now that it’s done, every little tug-of-war I won, I like, and every little tug-of-war they won…I like, too. I called it “censoring” when they took out the more juvenile of my jokes. They politely explained to me that “it’s not censoring, but editing.” Now that the project is finished, I’m glad some of my goofy phrases didn’t make the cut.

It’s human nature to enjoy photos you took, and to favor them at layout time. But I learned quickly to trust the Smithsonian photo editor’s choices. Only a handful of my shots made the cut. And yet — wow! Seeing my writing without my own photos, I was actually thankful.

Smithsonian Presents Travels with Rick Steves is on the newsstands from now through early August, or you can order it online. You can also see plenty of additional content related to the top 20 destinations featured in this issue at www.smithsonian.com/ricksteves.

This is the first of a three-month series of thrice-a-week blog entries that I’m writing to celebrate our collaboration with Smithsonian. Half of my entries will be my best effort to give a fun and tangy dimension to destinations featured in the magazine, and the other half will give a pithy immediacy to the new corners of Europe I’m currently researching.

Thanks for traveling with me and Smithsonian.