He left for two months in Europe, backpack, rail pass in his pocket, reserved places in dormitories. He’s been collecting money for years, planning the route with a childhood friend for months. I envy.
I bombarded him with advice before he left. Don’t hang around stations, don’t bring too much cash, are you sure a fanny pack is a good idea? Looks like an invitation to pickpockets. And frankly, it’s an 1980s fad that should have died out forever. In my day, we wore travel belts under our clothes…
A real daddy hen. I listened to myself speak and I got on my nerves. When he told me about a seven-hour journey between two capitals, in the middle of the day, I couldn’t help but ask him why he hadn’t thought of the night train. “You save time and the cost of a night at the hostel!” He’s been preparing for his trip for months and it was a week before he left that I thought it would be good to inform him of the existence of berths on the trains? He was not happy.
I repeated to him how convenient it was in Europe, thanks to a sesame called Eurail Pass, to jump on any train, at any time of day, to go from one city to another. Easy as buongiorno.
A few days ago, he was to go to Brussels, which he has dreamed of discovering since childhood. All the trains were full until evening. It was only then that I realized that many of my tips dated from Methuselah and weren’t worth much anymore…
His European trip inevitably reminds me of the one I did at his age with my twin brother and two of our friends. A five-week journey, from London to Paris via Brussels, Amsterdam, Berlin, Munich, Vienna, Innsbruck, Venice, Rome, Florence, Nice and Barcelona. An overview. We wasted no time and we weren’t hanging around anywhere.
Exactly 30 years ago this weekend, we were in Nice when Olympique de Marseille became the first and only French soccer club to date crowned European champions. On the way to the Promenade des Anglais in jubilation, we had come across two friends from high school who had just been robbed. A young woman had drawn their eyes to her bare chest while her accomplices were robbing our friends.
I didn’t dare tell the anecdote to Sonny. He would have rolled his eyes, for sure. I didn’t tell him either that armed agents woke us up at night, in our bunk, to check our passports at the borders. He could have imagined that I fled an authoritarian regime when the people’s democracies fell.
I didn’t tell him that I had been cheated in a gelateria in Rome, when I paid with a 50,000 lira note and only got change for 5,000 lira. He would have replied that the euro replaced national currencies more than 20 years ago.
I did not tell him that in a bank in Austria, I was exchanged the equivalent of US$100 because my traveller’s checks, in Canadian dollars, were issued by American Express (in my defense, I do not only realized much later). It would have been too complicated to explain to him what a travelers check is.
I told him on the other hand that we had taken part in a widespread subterfuge among the young travelers of the time. The Eurail Pass entitled us to a predetermined number of journeys. Except that you could enter the dates of your trips yourself. We had brought a pen with deletable ink…
I know it’s illegal. That’s why I didn’t tell him either about our stay in the seediest hostel in Amsterdam’s Red Light, nicknamed Bob’s “toker heaven”, where we were offered a lot of products cannabis and opium derivatives.
Of course, we didn’t have a cell phone or an email address. We sent our loved ones postcards that were not certain to arrive at their destination before our return. I only heard from my girlfriend and my parents for a few precious minutes in a phone booth.
We traveled with maps and a travel guide for all of Europe. We followed offline, thanks to the American newspapers, the progression of the Canadian in the playoffs, during his last conquest of the Stanley Cup. In short, it was a whole different era. In my mind, 1993 is yesterday. In fact, it’s been an eternity.
I have fun reliving vicariously my first big trip through Sonny’s. Knowing very well, from experience, that it will bring back many memories. Memories for life, in indelible ink.