Well, no more, I decided. If Europe could help launch my mother’s life, perhaps it could relaunch mine. And why not use this old guidebook? Even if it didn’t have the supernatural powers of an Indiana Jones relic, maybe it still had some of that old magic—maybe, like a divining rod, it could lead me to Truth, Enlightenment, Bliss, my own love story, my own gooshy letters. This would be my shortcut to Happily Ever After.
Right?
I’m aware that most people don’t go looking for happiness on the beaten path. “Enlightenment” is a word that conjures images of meditating in a forest or consulting a toga-attired guru on an isolated mountaintop—not tour groups and souvenir shops and overpriced, overrun landmarks. The term these conjure to many people and pretty much every single travel writer is, most likely, “god-awful.”
But I’ll acknowledge right here that I’m no Marco Polo, no bold adventurer. I’m kind of a wimp. Trekking across Nepal holds zero appeal for me, and meditating in a forest sounds like a great way to get eaten by a bear.
And actually, if you’re a travel writing addict, as I am, you may have noticed something: Himalayan odysseys, quaint towns, and “the Europe no one knows about” have, in fact, become tediously familiar destinations in modern travel literature. I’ll let those other writers have their epic tales of climbing K2 or skateboarding across the Sahara or living for a year in a sun-dappled, history-steeped Mediterranean village, where, by international law, said writers must meet delightfully eccentric locals, ruminate on the importance of tradition in the modern world, and learn “what really matters in life.”
My journey was going to be an arguably more treacherous one, a voyage into the heart of straight-up, cliché-ridden tourism, a path seldom taken by more bold travelers for the very fact that it is so well beaten.
Enough with the road less traveled. This would be a full immersion in the modern tourist experience.
Which is, in part, the creation of Europe on Five Dollars a Day or, more specifically, the man who wrote it, Arthur Frommer.
Tourism as we know it today traces its roots to the concept of the Grand Tour, beginning with seventeenth-century British aristocrats who journeyed to the Continent ostensibly as something of an informal but dignified academic exercise, but often involving a certain level of timeless tourist debauchery—heavy drinking, sexual escapades, barroom brawls. Think of it as Ye Olde Spring Break. According to Tim Moore’s book The Grand Tour—in which Moore follows in the footsteps of the original Grand Tourist, the amusingly crass and eternally unlucky Thomas Coryate—there were some forty thousand Englishmen on the Continent in 1786. In 1851, Thomas Cook initiated the package tour, leading a group from Leicester, England, to the Paris Exhibition.
The term “tourist” dates to around 1780, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. The pejorative usage followed shortly, with the English diarist Francis Kilvert grousing, in 1870, “Of all noxious animals… the most noxious is a tourist.” It’s a timeless sentiment, to be sure, for those who live in tourist-attracting locales and perhaps even more so for those fellow travelers who want nothing to do with the masses of people who happen to have journeyed to the same places as they—in the immortal words of Evelyn Waugh, “The tourist is the other fellow.”* Someone else, not you.
Still, in 1957, one could use the term “tourist” without shame or irony, as Frommer does in the very first line of Europe on Five Dollars a Day:
This is a book for American tourists who
a) own no oil wells in Texas
b) are unrelated to the Aga Khan
c) have never struck it rich in Las Vegas
and who still want to enjoy a wonderful European vacation.
This was one of the first things that struck me about reading Europe on Five Dollars a Day: its casual use of the terms “tourist” and “vacation,” words that make many twenty-first-century travelers recoil in horror.
As I read through the book and pored over my mother’s letters, I found myself continually amazed by—and I know how obvious this realization is going to sound, but bear with me—how super-crazy-astonishingly outdated it all seemed. It wasn’t just the cost increases, although I still can’t quite believe that five dollars was ever enough. It was the effort involved in booking a plane ticket—through a travel agent—back then, compared to the ease of comparison-shopping on Travelocity and Expedia now. It was the fact that Dad wrote to Mom in care of the American Express and Thomas Cook Travel Agency offices in various cities, and Frommer took care to list the addresses of these offices across the Continent, presuming that collecting mail was a daily ritual for all travelers. It was Frommer’s description of the nightclub where you could ride a horse on the dance floor, his politically incorrect (and two-page-long) section on “girl-watching” in Stockholm, his recommendation that if you wish to visit East Berlin, you should “register your name with the American MP’s at Checkpoint Charlie, tell them the time at which you plan to return, and if you’re not there at that time, they’ll take action.” (Let us pause for a moment to give thanks that World War III was not accidentally started by a tardy tourist.) It was the general tone of the book, lyrical and lively in a way that modern guidebooks rarely are, with a unique personality shining through, a voice that I came to think of as a peripatetic hybrid of Ann Landers and Falstaff. It was, most of all, the breathless wonder and delight with which both Frommer and my mother described European travel on what we now call the beaten path, the tourist trail.
Journeys abroad for purposes of leisure rather than immigration were mostly an elite endeavor for Americans until the advent of affordable air travel, and it’s here that the story of tourism—and, yes, let’s call it that—really begins. Quick-and-dirty version: tourist-class fares started in 1952, the first jumbo jet took off three years later, and the long-haul commercial jet trip debuted with a New York–to–Paris flight on Pan Am in 1958. By then, transatlantic journeys by air already outnumbered those by boat. The following year saw the debut of the key to frugal, long-term, intracontinental travel: the Eurail pass.
The evolving postwar psyche also helped fuel what was to become a travel boom. It was the era of the Beats and On the Road and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, a time of prosperity but also of restlessness and discontent about boom-time conformity in an aspirational society. As Maxine Feifer points out in her book Tourism in History: “In the era of the ‘lifestyle,’ one expressed oneself more at leisure than at work; by one’s hobbies, one’s possessions, one’s tastes.… The tour represented them all. Or, as the anthropologists saw it, the tour was the ‘sacred journey’ to a plane which gave meaning to ordinary life.” The U.S. government played a large part in this, promoting tourism as an integral component of the Marshall Plan, a sort of soft-sell diplomacy and financial assistance. “Vacations, not donations,” went the Eisenhower administration line. Government officials even met with the New York Times, Li’l Abner cartoonist Al Capp, and other popular-media figures to discuss subtle promotion of overseas travel to the American middle class. Going abroad was a key part of the new American Dream.
As all of these pieces were coming together to create the infrastructure and demand for affordable European travel, Arthur Frommer stepped in with the how-to manual for putting the desires into action: Europe on Five Dollars a Day, which he first published in 1957. At the time, most other guidebooks available in the American market, such as the Fodor’s Modern Guides line and Fielding’s Travel Guide to Europe, were light on budget-oriented tips and heavy on lyrical prose and rumination. Fodor’s first effort, 1936… On the Continent, checked in at 1,200 pages and contained an extended section on French wallpaper: “it is populated either by flowers or by birds in all colours of the rainbow, so that you see them even when your eyes are shut.…” Europe on Five Dollars a Day (or E5D) was different. With its manageable size and straightforward manner—twelve cities in the initial 1957 version; 124 pages; each chapter divided into sections listing hotels, restaurants, and other items-of-note; each
of these further broken down by neighborhood; the listings all bold-type recommendations and pithy descriptions—it was simply more user-friendly for the novice traveler than its predecessors. (By 1963, the year of my edition, the book had grown to include seventeen cities.)
In its egalitarian approach and tone, too, this was a book that aimed for a broad audience, one that had never traveled abroad before—like my mother. On the first page of his introduction, Frommer mocked Fielding’s:
I have one of the better-known European guidebooks before me as I write. This tome states that one really can’t consider staying in Paris at hotels other than the Ritz, the Crillon or the Plaza Athenee.… It shudders at any form of European train transportation other than First Class. It maps out, in other words, the short, quick road to insolvency that most American tourists have been traveling for years.
He then offered, as his alternative, the words that launched the era of budget travel as we know it: “I say that Europe can today be traveled, comfortably and well, for living costs per person (that is, room and board) of no more than $5 a day.” It was nothing less than a manifesto for the common traveler, a thin volume with a cobbled-together feel and a populist message presented in a spirited voice.
Frommer doesn’t get much credit for opening tourism up to the American masses, but this line in particular and the book’s tone and format in general seem proof positive that he was to travel as Julia Child was to food: the public figure who arrived at just the right cultural moment and said, with a light but nurturing tone, “You can do this. It’s not that hard. Here’s how.”
Just fifteen years after the first edition of Europe on Five Dollars a Day, a 1972 profile in Harper’s observed, “[Frommer] has done more to change if not the face then at least the feel of Europe than any living man. It is probable, for example, that he is indirectly responsible for the widespread use of English as a second language on the Continent.”
The mass tourism era had officially begun.
In the late 1950s, Europe welcomed (or at least tolerated) some eight hundred thousand American visitors annually, a number that rose to 4 million by the early 1970s. The trend was so striking, its ramifications so profound, that the United Nations declared 1967—the year my mother set out on her own Grand Tour—the International Tourist Year. By 2009, approximately 10.6 million Americans traveled to Europe (down from a peak of 12.3 million in 2007), with the United Kingdom, Italy, and France topping the list of destinations.
Half a century after his first book came out, “the dean of travel,” as the Los Angeles Times crowned him in 2009, is still going strong, even in his eighties. Each week, he pens a syndicated newspaper column and hosts a radio show with his daughter, Pauline. In a potent symbol of How Times Have Changed, he also has a blog on Frommers.com, with well over a thousand posts, and where he still preaches the gospel that spending less means enjoying more, offering tips on everything from Caribbean cruises to skiing in eastern Europe.
From that first volume of E5D, Frommer’s publishing house has expanded to 470 different titles, including Europe for Dummies and Frommer’s 500 Adrenaline Adventures; annual sales for the company’s guidebooks are now more than 2.5 million copies. Frommer’s also has an extensive website, which contains information on some 4,300 destinations.
The guidebook industry as a whole has seen equally astonishing growth. Lonely Planet, perhaps the best-known guidebook line today, was founded in 1973 by Tony and Maureen Wheeler and has grown to some 650 different titles; it sold its hundred-millionth book in 2010. And then there’s Fodor’s, Rough Guides, Let’s Go, Moon Handbooks, Rick Steves, Michelin, Berlitz… the list is staggering.
A few days before I set off on my trip, I trekked to the mammoth Barnes & Noble in downtown Minneapolis to gape at the guidebook selection. I wondered if the experience would be like that of a recent immigrant on his or her first trip to an American grocery store, a sense of incomprehensible excess and overwhelming, almost repulsive variety.
Yes. It was. For starters, Europe on Five Dollars a Day’s direct descendant, Frommer’s Europe—note the title’s lack of a daily budget; that ended in 2007 with Europe from $95 a Day—was comparatively expansive and extravagant, with 1,088 pages plus a fold-out map. I picked it up and marveled at its weight and size, trying to reconcile this behemoth with Frommer’s lengthy warnings, in my own volume, about the “burdens of baggage.”
And then were the spin-offs and competitors, a breathtaking number of narrowly focused, activity-specific titles targeted to those interested in the local food, shopping, art, music, sports, history, architecture, religion, hiking, or ways to get their groove on (see Rough Guide: World Party). There are books for those traveling with kids, with pets, solo, or via cruise ship, rail, RV, bike, or car. There’s now hardly a speck of land that doesn’t have its own weighty guide or several—surely the collective amount of paper constitutes a decent-sized swath of forest that, were it still standing, would have its own competing guides. I have not yet found one titled The Extreme Athlete’s Guide to the Vatican, but surely it exists.
Even aside from the titles, a glance at the back covers of the books demonstrated that these were not my mother’s travel guides. On the back of E5D, there is a black-and-white photo of Arthur Frommer wearing a suit and an expression of assertive pensiveness. Above the photo, in large, bold text, is a laudatory blurb from Travel magazine: “The mere possession of EUROPE ON $5 A DAY must become the conspicuous mark of a traveling American from now on.”
Conspicuous mark? Actually, that doesn’t sound like a selling point at all. To the modern traveler, the blurb basically translates to, “Buy this book and you’ll stand out like the unoriginal, stereotypical Ugly American tourist you are.”
The 2011 edition of Rick Steves’ Europe Through the Back Door offers on its back cover a similar photo-and-pithy-text formula but a vastly different overall message. At the top, there’s an amiably goofy snapshot of Steves, a beatific beatnik with a wry smile. The text below the photo all but promises that under this happy wanderer’s guidance, you’ll immediately blend in with the locals and will probably be the only American around, anyway. “Avoid crowds and tourist scams,” it pledges. Delight in Rick’s “favorite off-the-beaten-path towns, trails, and natural wonders.”
Such promises are, of course, effectively negated by guidebooks themselves—in an inversion of the Yogi Berra line that serves as the epigraph to this book, everyone goes to these places because they’re not crowded. But by the time you get to one of these hidden gems, you’ll often find dozens of other tourists already there, each one bearing the same guidebook and the same glum expression that says, “This is not what I was promised.”
In addition to all of the dead-tree guides, there are countless websites ready with advice from the experts and the masses. Flickr and Google Earth allow you to see your destination before you even leave your house; TripAdvisor and others offer a daunting variety of information and reviews (many of them conflicting) about hotels and restaurants; Expedia and Travelocity fill your email in-box with special offers and hot deals. Type “France travel guide” into Google and you’ll get more than 9 million hits; post a request for tips on Facebook or Twitter and you’ll get another 9 million responses, give or take. And the rise of smartphones means you can access all of this information on the go, wherever you are; everything and everywhere has its own smartphone app. There’s even cell phone service at Mount Everest base camp.
But where’s the fun? Where’s the adventure? It’s not just “If it’s Tuesday, this must be Belgium,” it’s “If it’s seven o’clock, this must be the Café Le Petit Obsessive-Compulsive, this wine must be the pinot noir that I read about on Wines.com, the server must be Yvette, who got high marks on TripAdvisor (thank God it’s not François—he sounded dreadful), and I have to be done eating by eight o’clock so that I can follow the Google Map instructions to the subway station and use the Paris Metro app to catch the train to Montmartre, where I will snap a p
hoto exactly like the one I saw on WikiTravel, which I will then upload to Facebook at the Internet café recommended on the bulletin boards at Yahoo! Travel because it accepts American credit cards.”
Even getting ostensibly off the beaten path can be all too effortless, all too predictable—never before has it been easier to journey to the farthest corners of the world and know exactly, down to the minute, down to the vista, what you’ll see and do, to be so overloaded with information that you miss out on the wonder, serendipity, and sense of blissful disorientation that are among the most profound joys of travel.
I’m as guilty of this as anyone, my travels tethered to a strict, neurotically overplanned itinerary and freighted with highly specific expectations—and never quite as fun as I’d imagined. Well, enough of that. Time to try something else, something more adventurous (well, by my standards) and more willfully ignorant. I would do the old-fashioned Grand Tour relying solely on my old-fashioned guidebook, my mother’s letters, and—gulp—my wits. No Internet research. No Lonely Planet. No safety net. Wave good-bye to the ol’ comfort zone.
I would go to Florence and Paris first, because Italy and France are two of the top three most-visited European countries for American tourists (behind only the United Kingdom), and Mom had especially interesting things to say about both of these cities. A very short tour for now, since my travel funds were low and my vacation time from my job was more or less nonexistent. But if I survived those first two cities, well, maybe I’d just have to figure out how to go back again later.
As much as possible, I’d stay in the same hotels as Frommer, eat in the same restaurants, take in the same sights—the same route, if not the same budget, since I knew that five dollars would probably get me a cup of coffee, a day-old pastry, and a trash-bag mattress beneath a bridge.
Europe on 5 Wrong Turns a Day: One Man, Eight Countries, One Vintage Travel Guide Page 2
