EUROPEAN TOUR
The summer after high school. I travelled for the first time as an “Adult”. The “ “ are definitely highly sarcastic air quotes, because the experience would suggest my travel companions and I were not quite fully cooked. I went to Europe on a bike trip with a group of equally worldliness-deficient teens. We were under the supervision of two “adult” guides (sarcastic air quotes still in effect, but with lower case ‘a' as mild differentiator). At the time, the guides seemed up to the task - OLD even - but I now know for a fact they were only twenty and had no business biking across five countries/language barriers with a mob of clueless teenagers.
The trip included Rome, Florence, Venice, Munich, Zermatt, through the Rhone valley and Provence, to Paris and London over the course of two (yes: 2) weeks. We spent approximately 45 seconds in each city. Very early (read: day 1), we realized that actually absorbing anything culturally substantive at this pace was impossible. So we, in typical dumbass-teen-mode, reverted to field trip syndrome. For example, once one of the participants bailed on going to see Michelangelo’s "David” because quote: “my Dad has a miniature version at home, so I already know what it looks like”. The majority of our energy was focused on experiencing the food & drink side of each culture. Did I say “food and drink”? I meant: drink. One participant pulled her fathers (“for emergencies”) credit card out at every bar and cheered “Drinks on Wayne”. She was working through some father issues that would have been better solved through therapy than a gold card. [When she returned home she had to spend the remainder of the summer paying off the drink debt by working at A&W. I am sure the world’s ugliest uniform, hair nets and fry grease pimples taught her more than the trip did.] To be fair, having had my passport stolen (aka: I left it in the bar after too many “drinks on Wayne” and it was (shockingly) empty when I went back for it the next day), I can’t claim much high ground on Mount Tourism.
This approach to seeing the world, not surprisingly, resulted in some stereotypically awful tourist behaviour - like singing “The Gambler” on repeat from aboard Venetian gondolas at 1am. I am somewhat relieved that I cant remember much of the night we spent in the Munich beer garden. It could not have been good. Later in the trip, when biking through tiny villages in France, the children would throw stones at us. I thought then, and still do, that they were more than a little justified. The trip culminated, perhaps inevitably, in me being hit by a car in Paris, while biking down the Champs Élysées. The plan was to triumphantly (Arc de Triomphe-antly?) complete our ride as though it was the final leg of the Tour de France and then jump in the fountains at the Jardins Des Tuileries (illegal), after having a celebratory (liquid) lunch outside of the city limits. A poor plan in both concept and execution.
The upshot was that the trip was kind of like watching a trailer for future travel. A box full of postcard pictures of the places “I will go back to one day and do properly”. It was still an amazing experience. How could it not be? But, I think it is fair to say that only a small portion of us would have survived a year long Gap year version.
I have a sense that the Gong-Show-Gap-Year/Grad trip was not out of the norm in the 1980s ands 1990s. One friend (a Rhodes scholar, no less), had their Gap Year come to an abrupt halt when they partied their way through all their cash. Literally ALL. As in, they had no way home. They threw themselves down a flight of stairs so that they could buy a return flight home on their travel insurance. Another friend ill advisedly included the Pink Palace in Corfu in their itinerary: a legendary student hostel/den of vices, that to this day advertises itself like its Daytona Beach during spring break. This friend, thirty years later, gets cold sores on their lips every winter, from swapping spit at a Herpes riddled beach party. (Life lesson: never underestimate the lasting ramifications of a poor decision, or too much Ouzo.) Given that this was the height of the AIDs epidemic, I suppose they got off easy. The list of misadventures from just close friends and family goes on and on - everything from the gross (getting impetigo from jumping off the Rialto Bridge into fetid venetian canal water), to the near fatal (falling down cliffs in the Alps, or getting lost in the African jungle).
So, safe to say that it was probably a good thing to defer Adult travel until we were Adults without sarcastic air quotes. The only problem is that once you are mature enough to travel responsibly, you have responsibilities that keep you from travel. For us, between school, starting a company (and then another, and then another), and having a kid (and then another, and then another), the years, and then the decades, came and went and we still hadn’t been back to the places from my Cliff Notes bike tour. It was not for lack of trying. We would plan to take trips, sometimes even buying tickets, but they never happened. Instead my book shelf accumulated guide books for places I never visited. At the peak of this armchair traveller era, I had a whole shelf of Fodors/Frommers/Lonely Planet books to places we never went to. They sat there, hopefully awaiting eventual application, until they were so dated they were deemed too useless to even be donated to the school used book sale. But we held on to the dream, focusing instead on a mythical future when the kids had left home, and we were free to satisfy our nascent wanderlust with a Middle Life Gap Year.
Shockingly, here we are. And it just now occurs to me that having finally “aged into” a second chance at a Gap Year, we have simultaneously “aged out” of it. Because, truly?, the idea of roaming the world for months on end sounds exhausting, even without the “Adult” antics.