I was young, heartbroken and bolstered by an imbecile's courage. Overcome by the wanderlust only such a journey could rectify, I set off for six weeks - alone - in Europe. It was 1986. I was 19.
I took a backpack full of clothes, a one-month Eurail pass and, for fully 42 days, the meagre sum of $800. Barring an invitation to trim the hedges of a European contessa or the timely discovery of a wallet crammed with fifties, my budget was a mere $19 a day. I had no insurance and no idea what I would do when that money ran out.
This past summer, at the ripened age of 39, I returned. Though I'd been back often, this was the first time in 20 years I'd done so alone. Long since divorced from she who had broken my 19-year-old heart, I was yet again romantically shattered, insured to the proverbial gills and, having recently sold a pair of screenplays, anchored by assets closer to an Alp than the mere molehill of two decades past.
This time, should the urge grip me, I had a budget of upward of $500 a day. I kept careful track of my expenditures - as I had years ago - monitoring how long it would be before I'd blown through $800. It took five days.
I flew directly to Paris and took it in at a leisurely pace, spending lazy afternoons in cafés on Boulevard St. Germain, haunts where $10 caffe lattes are the rule not the exception. There was a certain satisfaction in knowing that I could afford this thanks entirely to a work of my imagination - an imagination, I realized, largely indebted to my first solo voyage, doomed walk and all.
In 1986, like many a young lad before me, Hemingway's A Moveable Feast had whet my appetite for France. Foolishly, however, I'd let the lowest airfare determine my route. I began in London - gloomy London - where my already insufficient resources took a wallop; where my budget allowed not for a room of my own, nor even a bed, but for the couch in the TV room of a B & B. That left enough for an occasional deep-fried snack and either a copy of the latest Razzle or a thimble-sized Nescafé at the Millbank Tate. All in all, it was . . . less than I'd envisioned.
After a damp and fund-sapping few days in England, I navigated the channel (the Chunnel was just a dream then), intent for Paris. I'd thought it wise to leave my train pass for the last 30 days of the trip. Presuming my funds would run out, I would be assured of a warm, dry place to sleep and constant access to the crumb-filled detritus of train travellers wealthier than I. The question became: How to get around in the meantime?
Fortified by a belly of hovercraft peanuts and a backpack stuffed with Razzles, I decided " au pied" was the way to go. From blustery Boulogne-sur-Mer, it was a couple of hundred kilometres to the capital, a distance I figured I could traverse in four or five days.
In eight long hours, it rained for seven. I'd managed all of about 25 kilometres and spent the night in Montreuil, a town of 2,700 people and once the home of Jean Valjean, the mayor in Victor Hugo's Les Misérables. Miserable? Yes, I was. This was not the trip I had envisioned.
I was thoroughly soaked and predictably blistered, so rationality finally prevailed. I activated my Eurail, hopped the next train for the Gare du Nord in Paris, and then promptly transferred for Greece.
Though I'd had no intention of venturing that far south, the Hellenic Republic - as other backpackers assured me - was not only a place where $19 a day would enable a life of decadence, it was a country where - as the landscape suggests - it only rarely rained. Best of all, the ferry from Italy was free, the passage included with my Eurail.
By the time Brindisi, a port city in Italy's heel once described in the Book of Lists as one of the 10 worst tourist destinations in the world, disappeared on the horizon, I knew I'd made the right choice. The sun had been shining since Rome, and the ship teemed with eager, young trekkers. I latched onto a trio from Toronto and debarked the next morning in Corfu. It was perfect. Greece personified the term "panacea": inexpensive pensions, beautiful (and free) beaches, nubile Swedes aplenty and the cheapest beer in the northern hemisphere. A backpacker's dream.
Corfu quickly became my favourite place on Earth. I returned this summer - retracing the original route - and took pleasure at helping the young travellers around me. As mine had been, their first glimpse of Greece was full on both wonder and trepidation. "Don't worry," I assured them. "Your travel stress is over."
On my first trip, I had only four days for Corfu. Each subsequent visit stretched ever longer. This summer, I had three full weeks - time I would spend working on a screenplay.
Sitting on the balcony of my hotel atop a mountain in the postcard town of Pelekas, I took a sip of Greek coffee and looked out over the fertile island. I could see, down in the Ropa Valley, the place where, 20 years ago, my mates and I had rented what amounted to a four-bunked lawnmower shed. It cost $4 a night.
It was on Corfu where I learned that the cure to heartbreak had a Norwegian name: Oona. A Valkyrie from Trondheim. One could do worse, I decided, than salving romantic wounds in concupiscent frolic in the balmy waters of the Adriatic, aided at every frothing turn by a tall, tanned and topless Nordic deity. She - like inspiration in all her forms - was out there, somewhere. The trick was in finding her.
My first journey through Greece took almost four weeks. It was too short by half. I eventually made my way north - to Amsterdam - for my flight home. I'd been away from my friends and out of touch for a month and a half - a long time for a kid. That I had hours of stories nearly bursting my cranium made the homeward flight seem that much longer.
This summer, thanks to my laptop and ubiquitous wireless, my friends and I remained in constant touch. There was no Oona this trip, but by the time I made it back to Paris for my return flight, I'd finished my screenplay, perfected my tan and baklavaed on about five pounds. Somehow I managed to spend five times more per day than I had in '86. Nothing crazy, mind you, simply a few euros here and there - a daily outlay for a beach chair, for instance (three euros) - where young me had been happy on the sand. An extra beer, a slice of melon on the beach - over three weeks, it adds up.
The day before my return, I sat at the tip of the Île de la Cité - in the very heart of Paris - watching the turgid brown waters of the Seine sluice around my feet. I leaned back and, squinting into the copper lustre of the setting sun, thought of the Buddhist notion that you never step in the same river twice.
Paris looked the same. The island, the river, the Eiffel Tower - bony and regal in the distance - all of those things had changed little in the past 20 years. What had changed was me. I realized that whereas my first impoverished trip taught me as much about myself as it had the world, this month-long outing was a lesson in the economics of nostalgia.
Twenty years ago - and for the first time - I kept a journal, the literal foundation of my career as a writer. I'd been prepared to sleep anywhere - on benches or beaches or even, when necessary, in the bushes. Now, I doubt my resilience is so hearty, though I suppose that whether backed by a mere pittance or a veritable fortune, the money will eventually run out. The trick is knowing what to do then. When I was 19, that meant roughing it; 20 years later, it means recounting those very stories - a luxury no amount of money will ever surpass.
David Robbeson's first film is The Last Sect.