Some Travel History   I sailed to Europe for the first time in 1957 with a friend on the original Queen Elizabeth, round trip. I was 17 and had my 18th birthday in London.

Bev, I believe, made two trips to Europe in the fifties, one private one to friends and family and one on an NDEA (National Defense Education Act) scholarship for study in Bad Boll in Germany, with trips to Bonn and Berlin included.

We met in the summer of 1961 at Middlebury College in Vermont, speaking German in the German School. Our friend Rita was also there, and a group would be spending the following school year at the University of Mainz in Germany for our Master's Degrees. It should begin to become obvious that both travel and German language were integral to what we were doing from Day One. On our return in August 1962 we got married.

For the next three decades we continued our travels in North America and Europe. Every summer we'd be on the road from between six to ten weeks, on one continent or the other. Of necessity, all this travel was budget travel. Sometimes, the travel included study. We studied Swedish in Göteborg, Sweden, and Spanish in Mexico City, for two examples.

Probably the travel in North America worth mentioning was in 1968-69-70. We bought a Volkswagen camper, a simple thing with a sleeping area, table, and fridge that you filled with ice, in other words, nothing more than a cooler. It was like camping without a tent. We stayed in national forests, campgrounds, supermarket parking lots, sometimes on city streets. It was the simplest of living, and fun.

In our first summer of 1968 we drove 10,000 miles out of New York to the western US and Canada over many weeks. In 1969 we drove 8,000 miles to the eastern US and Canada. We went in a figure 8 thru New England, and Canada, then down to Florida and around the south. That was the trip when we drove past Tampa on the interstate and decided there wasn't anything interesting enough there to bother stopping. In 1970 we drove to Minnesota, sold the camper, and proceeded by train, then plane to both Alaska and Hawaii. On arriving in Hawaii we had gone to all US states and all Canadian provinces, plus one territory, the Yukon.

Our travel in Europe was budget, on charter flights, or Icelandic airlines landing in Luxemburg. We would stop in bed & breakfasts, which in those years were just that, people renting out rooms. Everywhere we stayed was clean and simple. Of course, we always took the rooms with the toilet and bath down the hall, since they were cheaper. I remember us lugging luggage down the street in Brussels, getting to a hotel and asking for a room, and having the man take a look at us and ask knowingly "Sans bain? (Without a bath)". The thing is, Bev had to say yes, since I didn't know enough French yet to understand what he said. She teased me for quite a while after that.

We used "Europe on $5 a Day" regularly. Now understand that not only was Europe cheaper then, everyone's salary and prices in general were much lower numbers. Now, I believe the book is called "Europe on $70 a Day", maybe higher. But keeping the old price structure in mind, excluding transportation we each spent no more than $5 a day for hotel, food, and incidentals. I can prove it because in those years we kept records to the penny.

The least we ever paid for a hotel was in Algeciras, Spain, which faces Gibraltar. We paid the equivalent in Spanish pesetas of about $1.65 for a nice room without bath. Now that's budget travel. And that's the way we saw Europe and traveled for weeks at a time.

We did include the Middle East once. We took that ship I mentioned, the Bilu, out of Venice and coming back to Marseille thru the Strait of Messina. We saw what you'd expect, but the most curious part of the trip is that we crossed thru the Mandelbaum Gate. That was the era of a divided Jerusalem between Jordan and Israel, and the only way you could travel between them (Jordan to Israel, not the other way) was to be brought to the Jordanian side of this crossing point, the Mandelbaum "Gate" (there was no real gate there) where you had to pick up your bags yourself and walk across the checkpoint, to be met on the Israeli side.

In 1971-2 we both got half-pay sabbaticals from our schools. As I recall, our two half salaries totalled $7,000 for that school year. Of the 12 months, we spent four (July to October 1971) travelling and studying in Europe (including three weeks of French at Pau), then four months studying at home, then four months again in Europe (May to August 1972). The latter included a three-week course in Russian (in German) at Unterweissenbach near Linz, Austria.

The first four-month period included travel in the southern part of eastern Europe. The second period included travel in the northern part of eastern Europe, including driving the VW beetle we'd bought from Vienna into the Soviet Union. You may recall that when I told Eddie/Eduardus, the baggagemaster on the QE2 that we'd done that, he couldn't believe they had let other than groups into the USSR. On top of that, we had certain restrictions, and were limited to certain roads, covering Ukraine, Russia, and Estonia. To go to other places we wanted to see (Latvia, Lithuania, Byelorussia), we left the car at the Moscow hotel and used trains and one unforgettable flight on Aeroflot. We left via Finland and took the car ferry back to Germany, where we shipped the VW home and kept it for 20 years (1972-92).

When we came to Italy out of Mainz during spring break in 1962, we went back sitting up overnight in a train compartment for eight, to save hotel money. The other six were brawny Italian laborers going north, and Bev was sitting between three guys on one side and I was between three on the other. One was nice enough to exchange seats so we could sit together, but it still was overnight sitting up.

When we were in Naples on that trip we stayed in a 5th class hotel near the station. The porter thought it was a hoot for me to have the name Di Napoli. It’s nice to have our view of the Bay and Vesuvius now. We have earned our travel stripes.

Would we have done those three decades of budget travel any differently if we could have?
Not on your life.

Would we do it that way now?
Not on your life.

The Marx Brothers   When we were on the Deutschland, there were two themes. One speaker told about the liners of the past, and the other had several lectures on emigration, particularly from German ports such as Cuxhaven and Hamburg. Not only did many Germans emigrate from there, they were also the gateway for eastern Europeans. I believe my Russian grandparents sailed from Hamburg to New York.

Obviously when we were in Ireland there were reminders of the potato famine and Irish emigration (as well as the new Irish emigration momument in New York near where we live), and here in Italy I've discussed emigration as well, so it seems appropriate to tell this story.

When we were on the Deutschland I spoke at dinner to the lecturer on emigration (in German) about something I had just recently heard about the Marx Brothers that was not only appropriate, but interesting.

The vaudeville audiences that they played to after the turn of the century were very highly ethnic, with large numbers of immigrants. Therefore, the characters that Chico, Harpo, and Groucho played started out as being immigrant stereotypes, in order to "play" to the crowd.

It is curious that one character kept his pseudo-ethnicity throughout his entire career, one dropped it, and one remained sort of in-between.

Clearly, the character Chico Marx portrayed was the stage Italian. He always used and kept the false Italian accent on stage, had that immigrant-looking hat and outfit, and maintained an "Italian" persona throughout his entire career. Oddly, he chose the name Chico, which is not Italian, but Spanish.

Believe it or not, Harpo started out as a stage Irishman. The wig he wore was originally bright red and he apparently presented an Irish persona. For reasons I do not know, he dropped the ethnicity entirely, developed the mute character, and played the harp (could that have been the Irish harp I now wonder?). But he didn't stop wearing the wig, he just changed the color from an Irish redhead to blond.

So what ethnicity did Groucho portray? Remember, he was the smart one of the three. Also, the long morning coat he always wore when in character is a clue. Groucho not only played the long-coated professor, he was the stage German professor that was so popular. (Note that many years later, Sid Caesar also took up the know-it-all German [Viennese] professor as a character.) However, Groucho just looked like a professor, but didn't emphasize any German accent or any such ethnicity.