Memories of My Grand Tour, 1976 - Part 1

This is the very brochure I planned my trip with.
Now for sale on Ebay for five bucks.  I got my copy for free from the AAA travel agency, which handled the purchase and ticketing.

On this day fifty years ago, I began a two-week stay in London and Paris that remains a vivid memory.  Like most young men, I had a yen to see the world; but the family finances, though adequate for a quiet middle-class life, did not extend to such an extravagance.  However, the winter before, it had occurred to me that I could borrow from a life insurance policy my parents had taken out on me when I was born; it had a cash value of about two thousand dollars by this time.  My desire to see the Old World I'd read about in books all my life quickly became something of an obsession, so I set about researching ways and means to get there.

Happily, I soon discovered that TWA had a wonderful program of "freestyle" Getaway Vacations - one price covered all air fares and hotel bills, and best of all, you weren't tied down with a tour group all day, every day.  You were free to do your own thing and visit the places you really wanted to see on your own.  Perfect.  Although I would have loved to travel all around Europe, I settled for two weeks in London and Paris - the top spots on my must-see list - for which the price was about 800 bucks.  That seemed quite reasonable at the time.  I took with me about $400 in traveler's checks to cover incidentals - and I had my mom's Diner's Club card in case of emergency.

(To put the figures in perspective, my rent at the time was about $100 a month, and my total expenses, including utilities, food, and gas & oil, were less than $400 - minimum wage at the time was $1.80 an hour.)

I also invested in a couple of travel guidebooks - one was entitled Europe on $10 a Day, which was a great guide to all the cheap but good restaurants, hotels, and amusement places, and gave helpful tips on how to get around town cheaply.  For example, I learned that the thing to do, as soon as you got to Paris, was to go buy un carnet - a book of subway tickets - which would save you a third or more off the regular fare.  And in both London and Paris, the subway was a wonderful way to get all around town.

I also learned that I needed to get an International Student I.D. Card before I left the States - that gave you reduced rates or discounts at lots of stores, shops, and museums.  But of course the prime thing was to get a passport, and apply far in advance of your departure date because the State Department was rather slow to fill all the thousands of requests they were swamped with every month.  I didn't read that part until about the first of June, so I quickly got a photo taken and went to the downtown post office, where you had to swear you were who you thought you were, were not a criminal or communist, and could recite the Pledge of Allegiance backwards and forwards.  I sent the application off with a note asking nicely for a little speed in processing, as my trip was leaving in less than 60 days.

God bless the kind-hearted soul in Washington who had pity on my plea - or did he or she just like my passport photo?  My passport came signed, sealed, and delivered in good time, well before my departure date.  The next thing to concentrate on was my choice of clothing.  I bought a couple of new shirts, one neavy blue and one chocolate brown, both made of one of those new polyester fabrics they were trying out in those days - a kind of dense netting that wasn't see-through, but had many tiny holes, which I thought would ensure my comfort and coolness.  And it did.  To pair with those I had two pairs of jeans-cut slacks (not actual jeans), in tan and dark blue.  This gave me the equivalent of four outfits; and the no-wrinkle shirts were so light they could be washed in a sink and hung over a shower rod to dry overnight.  Perfect.

Your Head Trucker is not the type to go bumming around from hostel to hovel, hitching rides and begging food, as so many of my compatriots did in the sixties and seventies.  The mid-priced hotels I stayed in were very like what you find in every American hotel:  the rooms were air-conditioned, spotlessly clean, with comfortable beds and TV sets, and complimentary tea and croissants arrived on a tray first thing every morning.  That's my idea of the way to travel.  

Looking for my old passport photo.  To be continued . . . 

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