1971 trip to Europe, Italy & Spain, part 2
Memoirs of a Tracy Kid
Continuing on from last month’s column, it was now the middle of August and we had just passed the 4-week mark on our trip to Europe. After two days in Venice, we got up early and caught the first train to Florence and boy was it hot when we arrived.
After finding the nearest campground, we set up our tent under a tree with welcome shade that offered a bit of a respite from the heat, but an airconditioned hotel would have been even better.
But back then, most economy hotels did not have air conditioning. After lunch, we headed to the open-air market which featured a lot of leather goods. With some hard haggling on my part, we walked away with some souvenirs for us and other gifts for our families.
The next day, we wandered around Florence, visited the large cathedral Santa Maria del Fiore and hiked up Grotto’s Bell Tower which offered a beautiful view of the city. During this era, there were no fees charged to visit churches throughout Europe and best of all, no lines.
Many churches didn’t allow women to wear shorts so Bobbie always had a slipon dress with her when it was required. Florence was a beautiful city with a lot of medieval architecture.
After two days in Florence we headed to Rome, again by train, and arrived to find Rome even hotter than Florence. There, the campground didn’t have any trees to offer relief from the heat so we always had to get up with the sunrise as otherwise we would have cooked in our tent! While in Rome we visited all the old Roman ruins including the Colosseum, Forum and Capitoline Hill.
We also spent a day at the Vatican visiting St. Peter’s Cathedral and the Sistan Chapel.
Both were amazing, especially the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling with the Michelangelo Fresco paintings. Bobbie still had trouble getting into St. Peter’s Cathedral. Even though she wore a skirt, it was deemed too short.
She proceeded to put on her jeans which she had fortunately brought along. She put the jeans on under her skirt and all was fine with the Vatican’s Swiss Guard. Afterwards, we stopped at the Pantheon and Tivoli Fountains, enjoying a ride in a beautiful MGB automobile, courtesy of a British couple who we met at the Vatican.
I took a picture of Bobbie in front of the Tivoli Fountain which was nothing unusual unless you were to try to do the same thing today. There was recently an article in the knew of any local campgrounds and all the nearby hotels we checked were full. At that point, we returned to the train station and rolled our sleeping bags out on the waiting room floor – a similar experience to getting stuck at some airport terminal because your redeye flight to Europe got canceled at midnight and the next flight left early the next morning. Well, the authorities in Toulon France that night weren’t so accommodating.
We were sound asleep when, at 3:30 a.m., four policemen came into the station and aroused us from our sleep and ordered us along with a few other “hippies” out of the station. We ended up spending the rest of the night on a park bench across from the railway station; not that much better than the night spent on the cobble stones under the castle in Koblenz, Germany.
The next morning, we checked with the local tourist office when it opened and found out that the few camping options in Toulon weren’t that inviting. So, with that, we hopped on the first train to Marseille, our next destination. We arrived in Marseille and first headed to the central post office to pick up two letters from each of our moms.
We then found a nice campground adjacent to the ocean. The view was wonderful but it was hell trying to stake down the tent in the sand coupled with a strong wind coming off the Mediterranean Sea. When we finally finished, there was sand everywhere in the tent. We celebrated by going swimming in the sea which was warmer than we expected, but the waves were huge due to the wind which was challenging. The warm sea was quickly forgotten after taking cold showers at our campground to clean all the sand off our bodies.
We headed into town for dinner and went to bed early. We were sleeping soundly until around 4:30 a.m., according to our diary, when we were awakened by a big storm. We got so much rain in a 15-minute period that we could feel the water flowing under our plastic tent bottom toward the sea which is where we thought we were going to end up. We heard people yelling in all the tents around us because most of the other tents were much larger than ours and they didn’t have a plastic floor like ours did.
With all the water running under the other campers’ tents, everything they had, including sleeping bags, was getting soaked. The storm subsided by daybreak and the camp soon looked like a big laundry with everybody’s wet camping gear hanging out to dry. We lucked out as our cheap trusty tent kept everything dry including our back packs which were always stored at the end of our tent by our feet. We slept in late that morning because I was feeling sick. While I was sleeping in, Bobbie did our wash and wrote letters home. Around 1 p.m., I finally felt well enough to venture out, and we headed into town to buy some groceries and have lunch. We returned to go swimming and were again amazed by the big waves. The water was especially dirty as a result of the storm, so we again were treated to cold showers to clean the muck off.
The next day we caught the early 7:30 a.m. train to Barcelona, Spain. When we crossed the border, we had to go through customs – the only country in Europe where that was necessary. We went through with 2 other Americans and were surprised at the search of our backpacks (probably looking for drugs). It was a long day on the train but was broken up with two transfers along the way.
When we finally arrived in Barcelona, we found a nice hotel room for only $5 a night with all meals included. With lodging that cheap, we skipped the camping routine and felt like we were actually on a luxury honeymoon! We thought that we would like to enjoy some wine with our dinner that evening. We found a little wine shop where the locals would take their empty wine bottles to fill them from a vat. We didn’t have a bottle so the proprietor rinsed the dust off a bottle and filled it for 15 cents! That evening we enjoyed a three-course meal plus dessert with our bottle of wine. The food never stopped coming and I think we finally gained back some lost weight that evening. And was it ever nice to actually sleep in a bed again which we hadn’t done for the past two weeks after getting our tent.
The next morning, we enjoyed our included “real” breakfast. (Our camping breakfasts were French bread and jam.) Then we ventured out to explore Barcelona. The first thing we immediately noticed was all the soldiers carrying rifles with bayonets, seemingly stationed at every intersection. At this time, Spain was a dictatorship ruled by Francisco Franco, a very repressive leader. He was ruthless and tightly controlled the country from 1939 until his death in 1975 when Spain once again became a republic with free elections.
The first thing we did, based on a recommendation by Bobbie’s English professor who was probably a Hemmingway fan, was to purchase some tickets to a bull fight which was occurring later that day. Boy was that a bloody affair! They killed six bulls that afternoon during the spectacle and Bobbie wrote in her diary that she had never seen so much blood before. We saw one bull fighter get thrown by the bull, but fortunately he didn’t get gored by its horns. It reminded us of what the Roman colosseum probably looked like 2,000 years earlier. It was definitely not something that you would want to claim as your national sport. We did manage to eat our dinner that evening (helped by another bottle of wine) and I will guarantee you that I will never get Bobbie to attend a bull fight again!
Next month: Off to France (again), Switzerland & Heading Home.
