Most of these travel stories are taken from diaries we wrote at the time, and letters and emails home. But the next few pages are extracted from a couple of dozen photos, and what we actually remember 45 years later.
I’ve tried to resurrect a few slides but I can’t face trolling through all the negatives that we never bothered to print back then. We no longer have the technology to make it easy, I’ll have forgotten what most of those monuments are anyway, and our kids aren’t likely to care.
So here, after 45 years, is what’s worth remembering about the first time we “did Europe”. You may disagree, but I reckon that, like us, what you’ll remember after 45 years is likely to be the people you met and incidents along the way. Getting there and being there. Not so much the monuments.
After leaving the UK our itinerary said we’d be traveling overland for three weeks — “through some but not necessarily all of West Germany, France, Italy, Greece and Egypt, depending on time, energy and inclination”. The idea was to fly into Frankfurt and buy Eurail Passes, which would give us access to the Western Europe train network for three weeks. We’d then fly on to Bangkok for a week on our way home.
Italy and Egypt were following in my father’s footsteps. He’d been writing up his World War 2 experiences for a few years by then. Ten years earlier he and Mum had met up with an Italian family he’d been billeted with in 1944, and we planned to visit them too.
Things went wrong immediately — Heather’s luggage failed to show up in Frankfurt.
Pan Am gave her money to buy clothing for 24 hours and we stayed the night at a little hotel on Münchener Strasse. All I can remember of that night is thinking that the Brits might be mad about their dogs, but at least they didn’t take them to restaurants. Also the shape of the toilet pan, which left one’s stool on a little shelf where you, or maybe your mother, could inspect it before flushing.
Next morning our luggage still hadn’t turned up, so we decided to catch the overnight train to Paris, where Pan Am agreed to forward the missing bag.
From the train we checked into the Hôtel Diana on Rue St-Jacques, a modest little place, like everywhere we stayed. We were watching our cash carefully. The back of my diary is full of budget versus actual costs, and Heather was tracking every centime we spent, so I know that two-day passes on the Métro were 60F, and that we both took baths at the airport when we finally collected the missing bag.
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One of our Métro rides was particularly crowded, and Heather and I were separated. As we pulled into a station she shouted, “Ian — stop him!”
I’d been looking for the station sign but as I turned towards her I got a brief glimpse of her open bag and a wiry little man in a long coat making for the door. At least I think I did. I jumped off too but saw nothing. Heather did the same. Maybe he jumped back on as the train drew out. It was like a dozen movies you’ve seen.
At the police station we weren’t alone, as more pickpocket victims showed up. A very polite policeman couldn’t, or refused to, speak a word of English, so our conversation was long and laboured. Thank God for our Berlitz phrase book and schoolboy French. Trust me, I’m not proud of being a monoglot, a clear shortcoming of the Anglosphere.
Eventually Heather got the police report that she needed to get back what she’d lost, which was pretty much everything — credit cards, passport, Eurail pass, drivers’ licence, the lot. Including our travellers’ cheques. It was a traumatic experience and the last time we travelled with all our documents in one place.
Recovering everything took us a week, but I learned to love American Express, who replaced their card almost immediately. It wasn’t the last time they got us out of a major hole.
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We were reduced most of that week to day trips — fashionable streets, Versailles, Notre Dame and so on. Also the Folies Bergère (200F). We knew no better — just tourists doing France — and the reason ten million people peer at the Mona Lisa every year. But to look on the bright side, if the most memorable parts of your day are visits to the British embassy (about your passport) and to therapeutic English language movies (a Marx Brothers flick and The Life of Brian, 80F total) at least you’re not doing what every other tourist is.
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The impression Paris left was of pomp and elegance. Celebrations of battles and empires now gone but not forgotten — as far from our lives as London was, but more refined and less familiar. Versailles was grand, and quite a carriage ride from Paris. You could imagine why Louis and Marie-Antoinette became a little disconnected from their subjects — why bother leaving? Louis could even hunt there. My lasting impression is of the enormous spread of beautifully landscaped grounds — pools, walkways, flower beds and gardens — and a vendor demonstrating the little flying toys he was selling to the visitors. Given that fifteen million people visit every year now, one assumes there’s still good business to be done.
Once our paperwork was in order we hired a car, which we learned to drive on the right side of the road by navigating the fearsome Place de l’Étoile. We drove along the Loire, visited the beautiful cathedral of Chartres and after a couple of days took another overnight train to Italy.
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Perhaps the only thing we’d wanted to do in France that was a little out of the ordinary was visit Michel Guérard’s spa at Eugenie-les-Bains. Being very moderne we had his little book of cuisine minceur — in English of course — and our breakfast party trick was cooking his delicious scrambled eggs, which you served by spooning it back into the shells with a topping of caviar, and an eggshell cap like a beret. In the event, the booking agent’s smirk — and the impression she didn’t think we could afford it — meant we decided she could take her condescension elsewhere. Couldn’t she tell we travelled First Class?
We still love scrambled egg with salmon caviar, but on toast, please.
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In fact French cooking was a mixed bag. Heather remembers two meals. One was a delicious fish dish in Paris served with a red, remoulade sauce. The other was when our one and only Michelin Star restaurant served a dead leaf in her salad. I thought my New York fly trumped her leaf, but she said mine was just a neighbourhood Italian joint, so didn’t count.
We’d come to France ready to embrace the food but began to feel that, for people like us, just looking for a decent meal in a strange town, it wasn’t special. On a later trip we got friendly with a chocolatier who gave us the gallic shrug and said, “you need to spend more”. All very well, but we were counting our pennies.
To end on a positive note, you might remember Nellie’s Transport cafe in England, full of truckies, where we stopped for stewed tea and a sandwich. Well, we stopped at a truckie’s hangout in France too, and ordered omelettes. They were huge. Delicious. The place was crowded with truck drivers, congregating for a noisy yarn and knocking back hard liquor over breakfast. As it was mid-morning and we were still learning to drive on the right, we decided to skip the drinks and steer clear of the trucks.
Your attention to detail in thes pasages is a nice contrast with my own so many years later. Apart from the Metro incident, the atmosphere appears less pressured than current travel experiences.
The food observations make for an interesting read, that scene has deteriated significantly, at least in larger cities, without a depth of local knowledge.
Thanks Ken. Given you’re spending so much time in France I’m sure you’re eating better than the average tourist.