Rick Steves’ Travel Blog

I just wrote a prologue for the upcoming tenth anniversary edition of my Postcards from Europe book. I’m thankful my publisher wants to bring it out again and is including 16 pages of color photos. It was interesting to give some thought to how the world has changed for travelers since 1999. Here’s what I wrote:

This book was originally written before the events of 9/11 made our country more fearful and more isolated. Since that time, I find the role of a travel writer has become much like the role of the medieval jester. The jester had a valuable function: to go out, learn what’s really going on, bring it back into the court, and tell the king. The king didn’t kill him. The king needed the information.

In this security-conscious age, I see a fear being used against us in a way that, ironically, is bad for our national security. Lately I’ve traveled to places (such as Bosnia and Iran) where people worry about my safety. The term “travel safe” is creeping into our lexicon as a standard “bon voyage.” I don’t want to be afraid and I don’t want people to bid me farewell by telling me to “travel safe.” For me, the flip side of fear is understanding. I gain understanding through travel.

Recognizing that travel helps us overcome fear, I will always promote the value of travel in the hopes that our nation can more constructively engage the other 96 percent of humanity. Life is more meaningful, fulfilling, and flat-out fun when you celebrate rather than fear the diversity on this planet.

Before bringing out a tenth anniversary edition of this book, I reread it to consider its timeliness. It became clear to me that while the world has changed since I wrote Postcards from Europein 1999, the value of travel has not. In fact, considering the ongoing impact of 9/11 on all of us, I believe gaining a broader perspective through travel is more important than ever.

If the lessons and stories in this book — travel experiences from the days before ATMs, euros, cell phones, and taking off your shoes at airport security lines — weren’t still vivid and applicable, I wouldn’t bother with a new edition. It’s clear to me that they are. And now that my college-aged children are backpacking on their own through Europe, it’s affirming to see the positive impact their travels have had on their young lives.

Squinting at the jam-packed postcards I mailed home on my early “Europe through the Gutter” trips, I realize that even as a teenager, I was bursting with a desire to bring home the lessons learned from my travels. Those postcards morphed into journals, then guidebooks, then public television and radio shows. With the amplification brought by digital-age technology and my staff of 80, my travel writing is reaching a wider audience than ever. My hope is that the 12 million Americans who venture to Europe annually can learn from my experience and travel smarter.

So, like that medieval jester, I’m working more enthusiastically than ever to bring that broader perspective home. We made a TV special on traditional European Christmas celebrations to inspire a simpler, more thoughtful holiday season here. We produced a public television special on Iran to help humanize that country. I’m a busy spokesman for advocating a more pragmatic drug policy that, like Europe’s, treats drug abuse as a medical rather than criminal problem, and focuses on harm reduction instead of imprisonment. My weekly radio program is aired by over a hundred stations, bringing thought-provoking snippets of our world to countless people who don’t have passports. I still step out of the train station like a hound dog, looking for a cabbie to rip me off so I can learn that scam and take the lessons home to share. And I am continuously inspired by people I meet — people with nowhere near the freedom, affluence, and opportunity I’m blessed with as an American — who wouldn’t trade passports. They don’t have the American dream. They have their own dream.

Europe is the wading pool for world exploration. Splash around with my favorite friends, encounters, and experiences collected in this book — distilled and woven into a fantasy trip covering what I think is the most exciting introductory loop through Europe. Then, it’s my hope that you’ll be confident and inspired to push off into the deep end for some adventures that bring your life as much joy and meaning as my travels have brought me.

If Mount Rainier was in Austria, I likely would have explored it on my first week in that country. But for all my life I’ve looked at it standing Fuji-like on Seattle’s horizon and never driven the hour off I-5 to actually take a hike there.

A friend, Sherri, celebrated her 50th birthday by assembling a gang of nine (including me and my wife Anne) to hike to Camp Muir — the base camp at 10,400 feet, below the mountain’s 14,400 foot summit. Helmets are required to hike beyond Camp Muir.

I’ve never really hiked up a mountain like this so gear was a mystery to me. I used gaiters for the first time (great for keeping snow from falling into your shoes). I tried some borrowed, “serious” boots but opted for my high-top Eccos (my winter Europe shoes — they were just fine). I never wear sunglasses but everyone said that they’re required for hiking all day on snow and ice. I found old clip-ons and bent them to fit my current glasses. (My one gear regret was eye protection — my eyes are sore and red today.)

Suiting up in the parking lot, I debated between polypropylene gear and my favorite cotton. Every mountaineer loves to say “cotton kills” (it doesn’t keep you warm when wet) but I anticipated hot weather and wore the cotton, packed the polyprope, and appreciated the cool of my sweat on this gloriously sunny day. Ski poles were vital. I don’t think I could have made it without them (for helping power up, navigating fields of ankle-breaking rocks, and glissading down). The prescribed water for a nine-mile, 5,000-foot elevation gain hike: two to three liters. I took five half-liter plastic bottles and finished the last one in sight of our lodge.

I wrapped my toes prophylactically. In their white tape they looked like little hostages. It was probably best they didn’t know where I was taking them.

The nine of us left Edmonds at 5:30 am, arrived at Paradise Lodge in Mount Rainier National Park by 9:00, and were on the trail by 9:30. I had hopes of getting back to the lodge in mid-afternoon. We would rumble home just as the sun was setting at 7:30 pm. We took it easy — and spent 10 hours on the hike.

Searching the web for “Camp Muir Rainier hike” I found reports all over the place on the time required (four to eight hours). All said it was a very difficult hike, not for beginners, and worth the work. As this was September, we hiked through a lot of rock fields, which slowed us down. Not in mountain-climbing shape, I enjoyed plenty of re-energizing “savor the view” stops. The views explained to me why many find God on Rainier.

A nine-mile hike with a 5,000 foot elevation gain means we gained one mile in altitude in 4.5 miles of uphill climbing. I just thought: I’m climbing and then descending a staircase a mile high. In Europe there would have been a gondola to the summit — here you had to earn it.

The first half of the hike took us to Pebble Creek, a steep, partially-paved, then dirt path lined with boulders to keep you off the fragile meadows. We saw deer, marmot, and chipmunks. On this Thursday in mid-September, we probably passed 100 people over the hike. I’d say a quarter of them were foreign visitors. Every time a group of “summiteers” passed us — marching effortlessly up or down in their crampons — we felt like sophomores in the presence of upperclassmen.

Sherri, the birthday girl, had made the hike six times. The guardian angel of blister protection, she’d wrap anyone’s “hot spot” anywhere … anytime. At each stop we’d slather on the sunscreen.

Halfway up, we stopped and chatted with a dear 76-year-old man — who looked 60. He was Dale Thompson, a retired ranger who had spent a lifetime working and playing on this mountain. Hearing him recount his mountaineering stories was as engrossing as reading some thrilling mountain-climbing book.

The last mile was exhausting. Step after step I trudged, staring at my shadow in the snow leading me uphill. There was no trail really … just keep climbing up. Sliding back on the ice sucked extra energy. Slow, small steps … breathe loudly, Dale Thompson advised (“none of this macho holding your breath”). For one stretch I put on my iPod to sample the joy of music at 10,000 feet and found it made climbing easier.

A distressed man in a t-shirt came through the snowfield at me. I took off my earbuds and he said, “Be careful of the crevasses.” As this was September, the crevasses were opening up. He crashed through one, just catching himself with half his body dangling over an open hole. Horizontal fissures marked the last stretch of our hike to Camp Muir. We’d cross them where it seemed to be strongest. Following a line of boot prints, I came upon a hole in the ice three feet around and then the boot steps showed how he somehow got out and carried on. It must have been the guy in the t-shirt.

Camp Muir is a shanty hamlet of three or four mountain huts where, for a century, people have slept before summiting Rainier. The best thing about the place is the commanding view and the feeling of accomplishment for a novice to actually be here. Most people’s Camp Muir memory includes the smell of sewer.

My memory is of a tumbling boulder. Two hundred yards below Camp Muir is an ice field dotted with volcanic boulders — most a foot or two wide, some four or five feet wide. I was with three others and our main concern was simply keeping our footing on the steep, icy face. Suddenly we felt, heard, and then saw a huge boulder bouncing demonically down the mountain right at us. It’s one of those times when your brain works at the speed of light. Clearly, the rock would have killed whoever it hit. I looked at the rock — thought of my wife and the others. It was bouncing like a goofy football and could go potluck in any direction. It felt surreal, like I was in a treacherous video game. I remember thinking “I’d love to grab a photo … but in a snapshot, it would look just like all the other boulders.” Then I thought, “That’s ridiculous.” We scrambled to the side and it bounced by us, getting as much air as a tumbling beach ball. Gathering our wits, now we all just wanted to cross those crevasses and get back down.

We passed the t-shirt man’s body hole, hopped and slid past the crevasses, and finally got to more comfortable terrain. My knees and legs were pretty tired and I knew there was a mile of altitude to lose before dinner. I put on my polyprope jacket and heavy leather mitts in anticipation of a tumble on the rocks or ice.

We cracked open our big black garbage bags and, with every chance to sled down a snowfield, held the bags between our legs like a diaper, rolled on our side to dig in our ski poles to slow down when necessary, and scooted, laughing, down the mountain. Navigating between ice fields on the broken rocks was no fun. As we descended (realizing we’d spent six hours just getting from Paradise at 5,000 feet to Camp Muir at 10,400 feet) we kept marveling at the story of the fastest Rainier climber, who actually went from Paradise to the summit (14,400 feet) and back in four hours.

At Pebble Creek we took off the gaiters and dressed down for the easy hike back to the lodge. Just as photographers were hiking up to catch the purples and golds of the sunset on the mountain, we got back to Paradise Lodge. With four bloody knees and two bloody elbows and nine big smiles between us, we were thankful to all be home in one piece.

For me, I think this was the max. Stretching out on the split-log bench, under the sturdy eaves of our humble circa 1920 mountain lodge, I was almost not able to get up. I felt wonderfully stiff. Looking back up at the mountain, I was thankful that I had skipped two days of work to enjoy Sherri’s fiftieth, the best birthday party of my life. And for the rest of my life, when I marvel at our Seattle views of Mount Rainier, it will come with more understanding and rich memories.

Travel can make you a poet. Travel can be spiritual. You meet people on the road you’d never meet otherwise. Traveling rearranges your cultural furniture, challenging truths you assumed were self-evident and God-given. By traveling, you learn not only about the people and places you visit — you learn about yourself. (You come home pregnant with ideas that you know will piss a lot of people off. And you get a strange joy out of sharing them.)

But without capturing your thoughts on paper, the lessons of travel are like shooting stars you just missed…and butterflies you thought you saw. Collecting intimate details on the road and then distilling them into your journal sharpens your ability to observe and creates a souvenir you’ll always cherish.

Choose your travel journal carefully. I prefer a minimalist journal, light yet stiff enough to protect the pages and to give me something solid to write on (since I often write on the fly without a convenient table). I like invitingly empty pages — not pages decorated with extra literary frills and verbose doodads. It’s my journal, not someone else’s chance to decorate my observations with cute quotes, clever tips, and handy reminders. I use black ink or a mechanical pencil. Nothing should compete with the simple words. Avoid spiral notebooks — they fall apart quickly. A bound book will become a classic on your bookshelf. (BTW: We’ve designed the traveler’s journal of my dreams that will be available in a couple weeks on our website.)

The key to good journaling is being both observant and disciplined…to take the time to notice what you’re noticing and then to jot down your thoughts. I use a tiny pocket-sized notepad to capture the moment right there. Then, when I have time, I pull out my actual journal, sort through those notes, and organize them into something vivid and fun to read.

Thinking back, it seems I’ve always had a desire to capture my discoveries and eureka moments in a journal. On my first trip (as a 14-year-old), I collected and logged my experiences in a file of several hundred postcards, each numbered and packed with my notes.

Every trip I took inspired my passion for filling up an “empty book,” even back when I was simply a footloose, fancy-free vagabond with no intention of being a travel writer. The flight over came with a ritual personal inventory of where I was at psychologically as I began the trip, and the flight home came with a similar introspective wrap-up. And each night in between I wouldn’t drift off to sleep without collecting my day’s experiences, discoveries, and thoughts into that book. The book, which started empty, always came home full.

Hiking deep into a misty English moor as a teenage traveler, I wrote, “Long-haired goats and sheep seem to gnaw on grass in their sleep. We were lost in a world of green, wind, white rocks, and birds — birds singing, but not present. Then we found the stones. Standing in a circle they have waited for endless centuries — not moving — waiting for us to come. And in stillness, they entertained. After being alone with our private stone circle, Stonehenge — with its barbed wire, tour buses, and port-a-loos — won’t quite make it.” It was on the boat to France the next day that I worked on those rough notes, and realized that finding hidden bits of Europe and bringing them home through my writing was what I wanted to do for a living.

Now, three decades later, I still snare those happenings as they flit by, eager to see what I can build with all that fun raw material. On my last trip to Helsinki, I was so flustered by the language barrier in an extremely local sauna that I didn’t know how to get a dry towel. Sitting in the corner to air dry, I decided to pass the time observing and jotting down ideas for my journal:

“People look more timeless and ethnic when naked with hair wet and stringy. The entire steamy scene was three colors: gray concrete, dark wood, and ruddy flesh. Surrounded by naked locals (each with a tin bucket between his legs — to use to splash cool water on his face), there was absolutely no indication of what century I was in. But from the faces, it was perfectly clear: this was Finland.”

With those notes, I can revisit that sauna for the rest of my life. Enjoy the physical act of putting pen to paper, gathering new experiences, lessons, thoughts, and feelings while they are fresh and vibrant.

If your life is a canvas, travels bring new color. And journaling is like being a painter who stands back every once in a while to both understand and enjoy the art as it unfolds.

I dreamed that I was at a car show. There was an old Ford Maverick — a classic. But people were ignoring the Maverick. Instead, they were all gathered around a hot new car — it was black and sophisticated, with an exotic name and all the latest technology. The people trying to sell the old Maverick huddled. They gave it a paint job and hired a fresh young model to stand on a slowly revolving platform with an arrow pointing to the old Maverick. She didn’t know much about cars but suddenly that Maverick was getting lots of attention.