What I Learned From a Backpack Trip in 1985

Traveling Then and Now

Sometime in the spring of 1985, I sat around my bedroom with its yellow flocked wallpaper and planned a backpacking trip to Europe with two friends. With $2,000 that I saved from my summer jobs as a secretary in a Solenoid valve factory, I bought a plane ticket, a Eurail pass, a huge backpack, and six weeks worth of hostels and snacks.

Our travels took us through England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Switzland, and Italy. I turned twenty in Venice. We were befriended by nuns in Rome who let us sleep in their convent and by a troop of Irish boy scouts on a stomach-churning boat trip to France. We met Australians who extended their European travels for two years, picking carrots when they need more money, and Nonnas from Naples who shared their lunch with us. Without Google Maps, we unfolded paper maps to navigate the spaghetti streets of London and Rome.

It was a transformational trip, where I realized that I could go whereever I wanted and talk to anybody. I learned that I didn’t need a whole lot of money to go places, just good organizational skills and a perky attitude. Over the years, those skills and perky attitude have served me well both in future travels and in life. And we’re boarding a flight to Italy tomorrow evening.

Going to Europe armed only with pages ripped from a travel guide was very popular back then. Around the same time, my husband lived with a family in Austria for a year with an high school exchange program. My sister spent a year in Madrid teaching English to Spanish businessmen. We all came back with stories and new friends.

One common feature of our adventures was the lack of contact with parents. Before the age of the cellphone, my folks had no clue where we were for six weeks. We talked to them twice, when we fed lira into phones at special shops, but mostly, there were no calls, and certainly no texts and no “Find My Phone” to track our progress. We were free range teenagers roaming through the world.

Today, the young people are still going to Europe, but their trips are funded by parents and overseen by college programs. Like everything, parenting is more hands-on than in the past. Their travels are certainly much safer than ours — as a parent, that makes me happy — but they are missing out on a bit of the fun, too.

Tomorrow, we’re returning to Italy for the first time since that college trip. We’re bringing the younger kid. We’ve trained our kids to like what we like; the primary job of a parent, after all, is to create adults that you want to hang out with. So, he’ll happily spend three hours in the Vatican museum with us and explore side streets of Venice. He’s an excellent travel companion.

This trip will be much more bougie than that first trip. We won’t be sleeping on trains or in hostels, but in travel agent-selected hotels. Philip our friend/agent already booked our train and cars for us. I went online and purchased our tickets for trips to the Uffizi and the Forum. We’ve mapped out the trip with Google Maps and made dinner plans with a friend who lives in Siena. I’m really looking forward to the spa/hotel in Tuscany. I can never recreate the 1985 adventure — we’re just too old for that — but we left a lot of room on our schedule for randomness and discovery.

Travel is different from a vacation. Travel means going places, trying new things, talking to new people. A vacation is a chair in the sand with a frosty drink. Now, both are very nice things. I am very fond of frosty drinks and often need that down time. Other times, I need an adventure — a driving-through-the-hills-of-Tuscany adventure, not a tin-can-in-the-ocean adventure. In 48 hours, I’ll be drinking a glass of wine and nibbling on a plate of gnocchi by the Spanish Steps. Hurray!

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LINKS

I’ve discussed many times in this newsletter about school test scores show the real damage from school closures. Well, there’s more data. “The math and reading performance of 13-year-olds in the United States has hit the lowest level in decades, according to test scores released today from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the gold-standard federal exam. The last time math performance was this low for 13-year-olds was in 1990. In reading, 2004.” New York Times

Thank God, we still have standardized test to show this damage and document this tragedy. Without testing, this problem would be entirely invisible.

Touching obit to Donald Triplett, Case 1 in the Study of Autism. “The community of Forest, they wrote for the BBC’s magazine in 2016, “made a probably unconscious but clear decision in how they were going to treat this strange boy, then man, who lived among them.” “They decided, in short,” they added, “to accept him.”

In The Great Leap, I wrote about Stuck Song Syndrome this week.

What is Stuck Sound Syndrome?

Personal: Trip to the Bronx Botanical Gardens, Father’s Day. I might write when I’m in Italy. I might not. No promises.

Watching: The Diplomat (Loved it. Going to watch it again on the plane to Europe), Outlanders (Very silly at this point, but love the clothes), Next: The Bear, Season Two

Shopping: If one is in Florence, one shops for leather. I’m on the hunt for a woven leather bag, a wallet, and strappy sandals.