Seasoned traveller

Today

I've been having lots of fun lately, planning our European tour with our Canadian great-niece. She's not quite 15, but I took rather a shine to her and thought it would be fun to see some of the continent through the eyes of a Trans-Atlantic teenager.

Ah! The Internet! Booking hotels, the ferry crossing, planning the itinerary, booking tickets for events (we're seeing opera in Verona and Jazz in Montreux), everything so easy and done in a moment. And the credit card - all paid for invisibly, so it seems. Of course, it does help if you don't have to spend hours trying to penny-pinch here and there.

We're going for just over 2 weeks in mid-July and will travel in France, Italy and Switzerland. We'll take the E-class as it's big enough for our bits and pieces.

In My Day

My other big European tour was back in 1968. All the world's young people were travelling, it seemed, using nothing but their thumbs and a lot of courage. So my friend Angela and I decided that we would take some time out one summer and do the same. We each scraped together £40.00 by dint of begging from parents, saving from our grants and doing a little casual work here and there.

We did take the precaution of pre-booking a couple of hostels in the bigger tourist spots and we bought a road map of Europe. Otherwise we played in by ear. In 6 weeks we covered: France, Italy, Greece, Crete, Yugoslavia, Austria, Germany, Belgium. We got home unscathed, with a fiver to spare and traveller's tales to dine out on for the rest of our lives.

We slept in hostels, tents, the decks of ferries, fields, the beach, caves cut into cliffs and, once, in the cab of a lorry driver in Turin. We ate whatever we were given, and lived off the cheapest food available. (This was often veg, fruit and bread). We met people of all ages and types, some exceptionally kind, some needlessly unpleasant. (The story of our escape from 2 Tunisians outside Paris and how we spent the night in the woods would make a story all of its own.) We spent a fair amount of time persuading various males that we were not available for cash, lifts or otherwise.

It was all part of being young and free in the '60s and I've never forgotten it.

I shan't sneer at 5 stars, lovely meals and good hairdryers this time around, tho'.