Memoirs of a Tracy Kid
After all the planning for our wedding and honeymoon trip to Europe, Bobbie and I got married on Saturday, July 10th, 1971 in a simple wedding by today’s standards at Bobbie’s church in Des Moines, Iowa. A church reception followed with cake and punch after which we went to Bobbie’s parents’ house to open gifts with our families.
Our wedding night was at a budget hotel in Des Moines as we were trying to stretch our limited savings for our Europe trip. The following Friday, we departed on our honeymoon by driving to Chicago to spend the night with a college friend and drop our car off at his apartment where it was parked for the duration of our trip. The next day, our friend dropped us off at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport where we boarded a new TWA Boeing 747 jumbo jet that had just started flying commercially a year earlier.
Much of the following material regarding our 6-week trip to Europe comes from a diary that Bobbie kept throughout our trip. It was supplemented by the many 35-millimeter slides I took on my dad’s German Zeiss Ikon Contaflex SLR camera that he loaned to me for our trip. One of our wedding gifts from my parents was 15 rolls of 36 exposure Kodachrome film plus prepaid Kodak mailers I used to mail each roll of exposed film back to the U.S. for processing throughout our trip. Our parents would eagerly receive the processed slides and follow our adventures throughout the rest of the summer.
Our flight to London was a typical redeye which left O’Hare at 5 p.m. While we were obviously flying economy class, Bobbie wrote in her diary about how good the food was and we even splurged on wine, the last time we splurged on anything for the remainder of the trip. Fortunately, nobody asked to see Bobbie’s ID as she was only 19 years old when we got married (they really didn’t seem to care). The 747 was not very full and we both were able to stretch out across 3 seats while trying to get a few hours of sleep.
After breakfast and shortly before landing, the head stewardess discretely gave us a bottle of champaign wrapped in a paper bag as she noticed that we were loveydovey and asked if we were on our honeymoon. Half empty planes serving good food is a relic of those good times compared to the packed full airplanes today serving food that isn’t as good as my college dorm food.
After a bumpy landing and a brief customs check, we finally set foot on our mother country, the United Kingdom – the first time either one of us had traveled further than visiting relatives in California, and that was via a long car trip with our families.
We had no idea where we were going after we landed so, we took a TWA bus to downtown London. There we asked a girl in the bus terminal for directions to King’s Cross where our “Europe on $5 a Day” guide book (our travel bible) listed several budget hotel options. After hiking 1 mile to a nearby subway station looking like lost immigrants, which we were, we made our way to King’s Cross where we had lunch and eventually found a hotel. They let us check in early and we promptly slept for four hours and had supper at a “greasy spoon”, after which we drank our bottle of champaign (it was too heavy to haul around) while plotting our itinerary for the following day. (We each had a large backpack that held all of our sparce allotment of clothes and toiletries.) Thus began our European adventure.
We spent our first day touring London, going to Westminster Abby, Buckingham Palace, Trafalgar Square and Piccadilly Circus. Our initial impression of London was that it seemed like we were walking through a storybook but it was dirty, probably due to all the coal smoke generated by thousands of household coal furnaces over the years.
As with most big cities, the people were a bit unfriendly and we had to remember to first look to the right rather than the left when crossing streets. We capped our day off with dinner in a pub that was away from the main tourist areas and was filled with mostly local families. Our stay in England was short as our Eurail passes weren’t valid for travel in the UK and according to our book, it was very expensive in London, as compared to the rest of Europe. The next day we took a train to Dover on the coast and boarded a ship to sail to Calais, France.
Our boat was a ferry that carried people and vehicles over the English Channel. On it we had a sandwich and beer for lunch and met a nice English man who was interested in my story about my dad living in England for a year during WWII helping prepare for the Normandy landing in which he participated. After we landed in Calais and cleared customs, we hiked to the train station and boarded a train to Paris.
During our entire stay in Europe using our Eurail pass, we didn’t have a schedule of train departures or arrivals. We just arrived at a train station and took the next scheduled train to our destination. We didn’t even have to get tickets, we just showed the conductor our Eurail pass.
And since this era was decades before the invention of the Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) system and digital maps, we just relied on good old fashioned paper maps to find our way around. Michelin maps were the gold standard and we would purchase one for each country when we arrived. These maps were very detailed and besides showing streets/roads, it also showed train lines, the locations of train stations and public camping grounds which proved to be very helpful later.
As it was getting late in the day on our train ride to Paris, we hoped off the train in Creil France with another couple we had met on the train and found our way to a youth hostel where we all spent the night with other young travelers. This was our first night staying in a youth hostel and while we found it to be very inexpensive, we didn’t exactly care for the dorm style bunkbeds as newlyweds. Hostels were like the college dorms we lived in just before we were married.
The next morning, we hiked back to the train station and after waiting an hour, caught the next train into Paris. When we arrived in Paris, we made our way to the nearest Métro subway station and found our way to Saint Michel where we started looking for a hotel for our stay in Paris. After finding several hotels already full, we found the very small Rue du Pelican (Pelican Street) hotel, as listed in our bible, on a narrow side street, not too far from many of the main tourist attractions.
It was definitely a budget hotel with shared bathrooms at the end of the hall and no elevators. But it had several pluses — it was clean and cheap at only $4 a night, which fit our $10/day budget, and each room had its own bidet which we ingeniously used as a toilet in the middle of the night, saving a trip down the hall. It also worked out well as a shower basin for sponge baths, saving four French Francs each (about 80 U.S. cents) for a shower, and served as a sink to do our laundry, as long as we didn’t mind kneeling on the floor. And best of all, it sure beat the dorm style living in a youth hostel the previous night!
Next month: Our stay in Paris and the Spanish Cholera epidemic.
