"Eleven Weeks in Europe - 1965"

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Essays from Essex

“Eleven Weeks in Europe – 1965”

May 29, 2021

 

“Short honeymoons are better than no honeymoons,

but long honeymoons are best of all.”

                                                                                                                           John L. Davey (1916-1984)

                                                                                                                           English missionary

                                                                                                                           Partners in God’s Love

                                                                                                                           Published posthumously, April 2007

 

When Caroline and I married on April 11, 1964, I had ten months of college to go. We were married in New York on a Saturday. On Sunday, we stopped to visit Old Sturbridge Village and then my grandmother in Wellesley before heading to New Hampshire. On Monday I was back in class and Caroline was looking for a job. Once my degree requirements were completed in February of 1965 and a job with Eastman Kodak lined up for June, we took our long-planned, but delayed, real honeymoon to Europe. We had saved $2,000. With it, we bought roundtrip tickets to Paris for $440.80[1] each and arranged to rent a car for the eleven weeks we would be there. We brought Arthur Frommer’s Europe on $5 a Day, which had been first published eight years earlier. With a bit over $1000 in American Express Travelers Cheques, we felt confident in our plans. And we were right to feel so. After buying some gifts for ourselves, including crystal in Venice and a mantle clock in Switzerland, and “a little gift for everyone,” as Caroline reported to her parents, we returned home with $100.00.

 

On the evening of March 5, we flew to Paris, with a change in Brussels, seen off by my brother and his wife. We left from New York’s recently renamed John F. Kennedy Airport. Once in Europe, our route, in a white rented Volkswagen, took us south through Tours, Bordeaux and the beautiful port village of Saint-Jean-de Luz. We stopped in Madrid for four days and then headed to Alicante, where we spent five days in a pension across a highway from the beach. From there we drove along the Mediterranean coast, arriving in Rome on April 1. We then headed north toward Florence, Venice and arrived in Vienna in time to celebrate our first wedding anniversary, which we did at Vienna’s oldest restaurant, Griechenbeisl. After a side trip to Budapest, we headed west to Salzburg, Munich, Innsbruck and Zurich. From there we went to Vevey, where my grandfather had been born on February 4, 1873. After visits to Zermatt, Geneva and Grenoble, we headed south to the French village of Serres and then back to Paris. After eleven weeks, we flew home on May 21, met by Caroline’s parents.

 

There are only two times in one’s life when an extensive trip can be taken by most – when first starting out (with a job in hand but a delayed starting date) and when retired. Because of youth, energy and without the need for the luxuries one expects with age, the former is the most fun. We kept our living expenses low. Toward the end of the trip, I wrote my parents: “We were not staying at any first-class hotels, but they are clean and comfortable, and much more interesting.” Re-reading letters written to our parents during our belated honeymoon, along with Caroline’s diary, photographs, post cards and the Shell Touring Map we used have allowed us to re-live the trip. The photograph that accompanies this essay shows the two of us with Pat Bourdery, the sister of a friend of my parents. She had married a Frenchman in the 1930s. Widowed when we stayed a few days with her in mid-May, she lived on a small farm outside the village of Serres, in the Hautes-Alpes region of southeastern France. Caroline and I would hitch her burro ‘Kiki” to a small cart and go off on private, romantic picnics.

 

……………………………………………………..

 

Our room in Paris, when we arrived on March 6, was small, inexpensive, with the bathroom at the end of the hall and down a flight of stairs. After two or three days, we headed south. At a small pension in Tours, the proprietor informed us that a bath would cost an extra two francs (approximately $0.40). When we told him it was too expensive, he removed the stopper. Not to be denied, Caroline stuffed a T-shirt in the drain. At the Prado Museum in Madrid, we enjoyed the copy of Rubens’ “Rape of Europa,” which shows the Phoenician Princess Europa being carried off by Zeus in the form of a bull, appropriate, we felt, for Spain. After four days in Madrid, we drove south to Alicante. Caroline wrote to my parents of the landscape: “…rows and rows of olive trees…The leaves look as though they were brushed with silver.” We booked into the Hotel Costa Azur, at a cost of $7.87 a day for the two of us, which included a private bath and three meals a day. We spent five days, recovering from work and college classes. We enjoyed the beach and swam in the Mediterranean. Our drive east took us through Barcelona, to the walled city of Carcassonne, which had been used by the Germans as a headquarters. We took the tour conducted in French, because, as I wrote my parents, “the tour in English was about 7X as expensive.”  The next day, in Perpignan, we had our car serviced at the Hotchkiss (my mother’s maiden name) Garage, across from our hotel. We continued along the Mediterranean Coast, past Marseilles, with a side trip through Aix-en-Provence, back down to Cannes, Nice and Monaco, where we saw Princess Grace of Monaco (Grace Kelly) exiting a building. On the road between Aix-en-Provence and Montagne Sainte-Victoire, unable to find an affordable hotel, we slept in sleeping bags under the stars.

 

Crossing the border into Italy, we drove past Genoa and saw the Leaning Tower of Pisa by moonlight, and then spent the night in our Volkswagen bug. Five nights in Rome followed, where we spent hours in the Sistine Chapel, the Colosseum, museums and other touristy places. I wrote my parents (both sculptors) that my favorite piece was Michelangelo’s “Moses” in the Church of San Pietro. Caroline sent a postcard to my parents from Florence about Rome: “We were there 5 nights and still feel as though we only touched the surface.”  From Florence, our route took us over the Apennines, through Bologna and across the Po River at Ferrara, near where my father had crossed twenty years earlier with the 10^th Mountain Division. After crossing under German shelling on April 23, 1945, he wrote my mother a week later: “We made the bridgehead across the Po River, which was without doubt the most exciting boat ride I ever took, and I hope I never take another like it.” With no one firing at us, but hunkered down in our “beetle” just in case, we crossed the Po in under a minute. We spent a few days in Venice, where, on the island of Murano, “we bought,” as Caroline wrote to her parents, “some very beautiful wine, liquor and water glasses.” We had them shipped to her parents in New York.

 

We left Venice early Saturday morning, April 10^th, as we wanted to celebrate our first wedding anniversary the next day in Vienna, which we did.  That morning we attended a small church where the Vienna Choir Boys performed. We spent the week visiting St. Stephen’s Cathedral, watching the Lipizzaners of the Spanish Riding School at Hofburg Palace, riding the Wiener Riesenrad, Vienna’s 212-foot-tall Ferris Wheel, driving out to Schönbrunn Palace, the Hapsburg’s 1,441 room summer palace and Baden bei Wein. On Easter weekend – the next weekend – we joined a tour to Budapest, with fifteen Austrians, two American school teachers, four Italians and one German. The four Italians and the German were our age, and we became fast friends over the next two days. Still a member of the U.S. Army Reserve, I was nervous (needlessly, as it turned out), as armed Soviet soldiers boarded our bus to check passports and go through our luggage. It was the contrast between a free Vienna and Communist-controlled Budapest that was most obvious. I wrote my parents: “You should have seen the crowd that gathered and the way they looked when we left. It is all very tragic.” Caroline wrote her family: “Boy, count your blessings and be thankful we are who we are and have what we have. You don’t realize that until you have crossed over into the Communist section.” 

 

Two more days in Vienna and then it was off to beautiful Salzburg, where we walked up to the Fortress Hohensalzburg, instead of riding the funicular, to save a few pfennigs. In Munich, we visited with the sister of a friend of ours and had dinner with the wife of a couple we had met in Vienna. (Her husband was in Liberia on business.) Caroline wrote my sister and her husband: “The beer in Germany is delicious, and we seem to be drinking quite a bit.” From Munich it was on to Innsbruck, where I skied Patscherkofel, where the 1964 Olympic downhill race had taken place. After getting lost on the way down and having to hike part way back up (too proud and too cheap to take the cable car), Caroline met me at the bottom of the Luge track.

 

We crossed Switzerland, spending a couple of days in Zurich, then on to Vevey where we stayed at the Pension Beau Séjour and looked up my grandfather’s, whose name I carry, birth certificate. We spent two nights at the Hotel Dom in Zermatt, where the view from our room was of the Matterhorn. In a cable car, descending the 500-meter cliff from Sunnegga that looks down on the village of Zermatt, Caroline stood looking out, while acrophobia kept me cowering in the rear. In Grenoble, Caroline felt ill, so I had dinner alone at the railroad station. The next day, she felt better as we drove to Serres to visit the hospitable Madam Bourdery. We had a wonderful, relaxing three days in this mountain village, picnicking and swimming in remote, sylvan pools. From this small village, I sent Caroline a postcard, which she received at the American Express office in Paris: “Wasn’t this the most beautiful part of our trip?” By the 19^th of May we were in Paris (in a better room than the one we had eleven weeks earlier!), our honeymoon behind us, ready to board Air France flight 015 on the 21^st, home to the U.S., and back to the real world.

 

The trip was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Caroline wrote to her parents from Vienna: “This trip is really wonderful. We are free to leave, and do as we want, and to stay as long as we want.” Jobs, children, schools, and many long years of delightful married life, would follow. But we will always have this trip to look back on. A friend, as he got older, once told me: “I regret nothing that I have done. I only regret the things I did not do.” Leaving for Europe, as we did, airline tickets in hand, clinging to Frommer’s book and the keys to a rented Volkswagen “beetle,” we did the crazy thing. But, in doing so, we got to know one another even better, and we made lasting memories from our eleven weeks in Europe.