The Ultimate Trip

After college, my (at the time) future husband and I were deciding what to do. The two options? Follow the Grateful Dead for the summer or go to Europe. I convinced him to go to Europe by saying “The dead will always be there, we can follow them next summer”. This was 1995. We had gotten engaged in April and were setting out for 10 weeks in Europe in June. We backpacked through Europe and camped. We visited England, Scotland, Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, Belgium, Switzerland, Netherlands, Austria, Greece, Hungary, Czech Republic and Germany. This trip really tested our limits.

We landed in Frankfort, Germany with a rough outline of where we were going. We had some bus trips purchased and a train pass and $50 a day. That may seem ridiculous in this day and age, however backpacking and tent camping in Europe was possible on this budget back in 1995. He had a backpack that weighed 35 pounds and mine weighed 25 pounds. Neither one of us is fluent in another language and as we say “barely speak English most of the time” but somehow we managed.

We have a picture of us next to a street sign in Greece with a 15 letter road. We struggled to find the baths in Hungary (but we did eventually with help from an English speaking tourist). We rented a car in England and Scotland and I actually had him moving the car in the middle of the night to block the wind at Loch Ness. We spent the night in a train station in Spain because the trains just stopped even though the schedule said they should be running. We slept on a train in Italy where they took our passports and the next day a train passenger identified where my husband was from (the only thing that stated his city was his passport). We slept on the roof of a hotel in Greece. We fought. We made up. We got lost. I got sunburned so badly that it hurt to have my backpack on my shoulders. We threw things away to keep from carrying them. I skipped meals to make sure that he had enough food to feed him. We came home much thinner than when we left. Not that we were always hungry, but carrying backpacks and walking as much as we did definitely did a number on us. In the days before we left Germany we set up camp and slept for 2 days straight. Barely waking to eat or go to the bathroom. We always say that taking that trip cemented the fact that we could have a successful marriage. It was a great trip and I would do it all over again.

The day we landed in the US we were told that Jerry Garcia had died. We thought it was a joke since our choice for that summer was follow the Grateful Dead or go to Europe. We eventually decided (not that day, of course) that we had made the right decision. Now for good or bad, we were both bitten with the travel bug.

We got married and had children. Our travel began to change. A lot of times it included trips taken by car in the US. I stayed home with the children and became our accountant. We lived frugally so that every 2 years we could take the children out of the country and experience new cultures. We helped our girls experience Europe and visited many of the places we had seen on our camping trip.