Backpacking through Europe was rite of passage

I’m kicking off my summer reading with Bill Bryson’s “Neither Here Nor There,” an entertaining and irreverent account of his travels through Europe in the 1970s and again 20 years later as he retraces his earlier journeys.

Since I was among the throngs of young people who backpacked through Europe in the ’70s, his book is a real trip down memory lane. I can relate to a lot of his predicaments and spot-on observations about how Europeans put up with and sometimes loathe American tourists.

My college dorm roommate from my freshman year at Moorhead State instigated our summer-long adventure in Europe in 1975, which began with nearly a month of sightseeing and ended with working two months at a hotel in Salzburg, Austria.

We were two country bumpkins, both dairy farmers’ daughters, but Cleo was a boisterous thrill-seeker. I was much meeker. Neither of us had any street smarts.

We flew to London to begin our backpacking trek and quickly hit our first snag when Cleo’s luggage — her 40-pound pack — didn’t arrive with us. It took three days for the airline to reunite her with her belongings.

Our first accommodations were at a rundown youth hostel equipped with bunk beds — but no bedding — so we slept in our clothes on the bare mattresses. Since we were poor college students, hostels were really our only choice of lodging.

In those days, long before cellphones and GPS, we relied on old-fashioned paper maps to get from Point A to Point B. One of the great things about wandering aimlessly through foreign countries is that we’d connect with a different group of college students in every city we visited. We’d be the best of friends for a couple of days, then would go our separate ways never to see each other again.

We felt the most unwelcome in Paris, where even nearly four decades ago the French seemed to hate Americans. When an opportunistic photographer took our picture outside The Louvre, we didn’t realize he expected us to buy the photo for an exorbitant amount of money. He got real confrontational with us, so we paid him and ran into the museum.

There were plenty of memorable moments as we made our way across Europe. The hostel we stayed at in Amsterdam was in the red-light district. Suffice to say it was an eye-opener for both of us to see block after block of women sitting in store windows.

Being the good girls that we were, we rejected the many offers of legalized marijuana from the moment we stepped off the train until we got to the hostel. Our worst judgment call in Amsterdam was touring the Heineken brewery and imbibing too heavily in the free samples and then touring the Van Gogh museum.

There were plenty of other bad decisions on our part, such as hitchhiking a couple of times when we had run short of money and hadn’t cashed traveler’s checks before the weekend. I could write an entire column about our hitchhiking escapades, which involved Turkish college students, Iranian truck drivers and eating cream of mushroom soup cold from a can, in the rain, outside Munich. Thankfully we weren’t maimed or killed as we climbed into strangers’ vehicles, though we had a couple of very weird encounters.

By the time we reached Salzburg we felt quite worldly. We had trusted strangers, taken some risks and honed our independence. We came, we saw, we conquered, and somehow lived to tell about it.

I went back to Europe a couple of times after that, but the summer of ’75, without a doubt, was an unforgettable rite of passage.

Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by email at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com.