Where it Started

Most of my blog covers travel reminiscences.  Here, I'm reaching way back to the beginning of my independent adventures . . .

Among the first, not with my family, is a trip to Europe with two college friends; actually, my adventures had started early in that I had been in college away from home for extended periods of time.  Although I had very little money--ok, no money--still I dreamed of the big world outside my dorm walls and schoolbooks.  Following my graduation, I was going to be a dedicated teacher, but before that I craved adventure!  Not too long into my college life, I felt wings, the tug of flying away to imagine myself into the great places I'd read about.  

Where does this wanderlust come from?  I don't know -- maybe from my father's, the Lebanese, side:  as a very young man, my grandfather came to America, by way of Ellis Island, to join his brother;  my grandmother's arrival from Beirut was as a child, as circumstance of a chronically ill mother, my great-grandmother, brought her across the ocean to live with an older brother.   On my mother's side were Scottish-Irish settlers to America: in 1770,  my great-great-great-great-grandparents died on the ship and were buried at sea somewhere between Dublin and New York.  Their son, my great-great-great-grandfather, who was taken in at the age of 12 by the ship's captain, left New York at 18 to eventually find a new home in the frontier of western Virginia after his service with a Pennsylvania detachment in the Revolutionary War.  Perhaps my wanderlust is honest, born of the genes.

It wasn't ever enough for me to view distant lands as an outsider.  I wanted much more than to simply observe.  I wanted to feel a part of the people, to become them,  to thrust myself into their place, their time, their history, to push my hand into the indentations of the worn tracks of cobbled roads and detect the vibrations of the wheels that put them there;  to sniff the cooking fires, and from the hearths, to see the houses, to feel the lives of those who lived far before me.  So, I approach travel this way.  I am the dreamer, and the adventure seeker.

I guess I have a fairly good imagination, enough to  cancel out the hum of power lines, the rumble of traffic, the cacophany of modern chatter, to listen for the echoes.  My first trip was not disappointing on that count because my companions, my college girlfriends, Carol and Becky, were just as enthusiastic, and they, therefore, tolerated, as well as encouraged, my excitement.  Carol, with her political science degree and her love of history, Becky with her art education degree and her artistic talent, and I with my love of literature, their tales, and all things exotic, received special dispensation from our dean at West Virginia University to miss our graduation ceremony to catch our flight.  So there I was,  four months before my 22nd birthday, plunging headlong into cultures so unlike that of my Appalachian roots.

In order to get the best deal possible, we had purchased the excursion fare with Icelandic Airlines which required an early May flight and our stay of 21 to 45 days before our return.  Imagine!  Requiring us to stay a minimum of 21 days!  Lucky for me, Becky and Carol were as happy as I to be abroad for the whole 45 days allowed.  And while we were there, Carol's sister, then living in Germany, booked our return flight for us.  On the 45th day we presented ourselves to the ticket counter in Luxemburg to return to America, and discovered an error had been made-- the flight wasn't available that day!  We were provided vouchers for a hotel room, cab fare and dinner, so, thanks to Icelandic, we had 46 days.

To finance my trip, I had gathered money from the bit of cash I received as graduation gifts;  the remainder I borrowed from a local bank in my small home town, with my father as co-signer.  By the end of the trip, I had spent somewhere near the astounding figure of 900 dollars, including my airfare and bus fares to and from New York City, as well as train fares, hotels, meals, and museum admissions in about seven countries.  People, we're talking quite a few years ago.  Frommer's book, Europe on $5 a Day, was our guide, and with it we traveled as the Europeans, locating family-run hotels down quiet residential streets and multi-floored walkups along busy thoroughfares.  In cities, we took subways and buses, or we walked.  And in the villages, of course, we strolled.  Our cost-savings were points of pride:  I remember one dinner in Rome, when I had spaghetti, salad, bread, and a glass of wine for the equivalent of $1.27.  Even in 1971 that was quite a deal.

One memorable room was in Paris, on the fifth floor -- with no elevator.  But we had an en suite bathroom and a window that opened onto a psuedo-balcony from which we could see the Pantheon, if we leaned out and craned our heads to the right.  An added bonus was that a police precinct was next door and each evening young officers in uniform congregated on the sidewalk below our window, waiting to receive prisoners from surrounding smaller stations unloading from police vans.  The officers would look up to our window and meow.  "Hellooo, beautiful! (meow) Hellooo, Pretty! (meow)."  We really liked that room.

Traveling can enrich us, entertain us, and educate us in any number of ways, including creative problem-solving.  Companions who must spend every minute together, as we did for so many weeks, eventually tested our ability to get along.  Not for me, however, as I had always been the peacemaker.  Toward the end of our trip while we were staying in a chilly London hotel, Becky was certain that Carol was wearing her pantihose, a claim which Carol stubbornly refused to consider.  When Carol finally relinquished the pantihose, I washed them so that Becky would see that they were completely restored to her.  In my enthusiastic efforts, I said, "See, Becky -- no problem.  They're washed."  At which point I hung them on a chair back near the gas-fired heater.  Except that I pushed the chair too close, and the legs of the pantihose melted together.  My horror at what I'd done to fix the problem was met with gleeful whoops from both Carol and Becky.  Thank goodness, peace was restored.  And it only took one pair of fused pantihose.  Whew.