Frostwriting

The European Schedule

by Jane Hertenstein

We never once thought we were the type. Our vacations usually never extended beyond the tri-state area. European travel was for the rich or at least well-to-do. My husband and I both work at non-profits. We had a budget of $750 per year for vacation. But one day a friend called us. “Ninety-nine dollar round trip tickets to Europe,” he announced unannounced. Marek, our Czech neighbor, was always making big statements. He was the king of hyperbole. So I pretty much dismissed him. He said it again, “$99 round trip tickets to Europe.” He rattled off a website. Marek was constantly on the lookout for airline deals. About once every three years he and his family made the trek back to the homeland of beer and big pretzels and svíčková.

Even though I knew it must be a scam, I typed in the web address. Up popped a very nice page explaining that for $99 plus airport taxes I could fly to either Paris, London, or Madrid. Hmm. I clicked on each city to see what the airport taxes were and of course this added another hundred or so dollars. Still this wasn’t a one-way listing but $99 for a round-trip ticket.

A vision of opening shutters and gazing down upon a sunlit garden flitted through my mind. Europe. I longed to see castles and Gothic churches and eat a slice in the birthplace of pizza. I pulled out my address book. We had friends scattered all across the continent. I knitted together a route where we could stay with people we knew and day trip to the big sights. If we took night trains then we could save on hotels. Bread and cheese is cheap. Our daughter was eleven, eligible for child rates and free at most museums. If we “borrowed” from next year and put our two vacation budgets together, it was possible. More and more the far-flung idea of traveling overseas began to seem do-able. I booked the tickets.

After that my husband and daughter got onto the European schedule. This consisted of getting up progressively earlier each day in order to avoid jetlag. He would wait for her at the end of the hallway. She had her own alarm, and at 2 AM she’d poke her head out the door. It was their ritual. He’d do a little work while she finished up homework. Then they’d watch a movie and eat cold cereal while the sun came up, fuzzy at first, then slowly breaking over the horizon. By the time she left for school they’d been up for over 5 hours.

The deal was too good to be true. About a month before our planned departure I got a call from the Attorney General’s office in Colorado alerting us that it was a scam—but, good news, our money would be refunded. I hung up the phone and then called my husband at his office. That evening we broke the news to our daughter.

“No way,” she cried.

So we looked in the back of the newspaper in the travel section at all those advertisements with teeny-tiny lettering and turned up tickets that averaged $360 per person with taxes. Real tickets. I earned extra money on the weekends helping a friend out by baking goodies for her coffee shop. It is possible to cinnamon bun one’s way to Europe.

Now we think in terms of before and after. We view life much differently after having traveled abroad—perhaps like the difference between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, or the difference between having a cup of Maxwell Coffee or sipping a cappuccino at an outdoor café by the Palazzo Vecchio. Our lives have been completely changed, our world got much, much bigger. The effect of deciphering a Paris Metro map, of hearing Czech spoken in a submerged restaurant in Prague, of opening the shutters of our room overlooking a frenetic Vespa-filled street, of waking up to “other” sunlight made us hungry for more. Like those chocolate Nutella filled croissants we bought at the bakery kitty-corner from our hostel, we just couldn’t get enough. We realized you didn’t have to be rich to travel, to experience the relatively simple pleasures that go along with opening yourself up to new experiences. We realized we were the kind of people who went to Europe.

At the moment our daughter is living abroad, doing a gap year in London before starting college in the fall. Since our first trip to Italy she’s been back three more times, the last two times on her own. As an independent traveler she’s experienced the thrill of exploring a new city and surprised herself—finding her way back to the hostel. She has learned to quickly calculate Euros to dollars and pence to cents. She’ll return home to us a year older, jetlagged, completely changed, on the European schedule.