The Meaning of Travel: Reflections on a 4-Month Trip

By David Wheeler

Fifty years ago, when I was 18 years old and just out of high school in Hartford, Vermont, a town of about 7,000 people, I went on a four-month solo trip to Europe. 

My journey began in November, 1971, when I took a bus from the White River Junction, Vt., terminal to Boston’s Logan airport. When I boarded the trans-Atlantic flight, it was only the second time I had been on an airplane, the first time being a short flight over the Green Mountains in a four-seater, a trip that was a reward for dog sitting for a neighbor with a pilot’s license. 

After flying over the ocean and experiencing a sunrise above the clouds, I landed in England at 10 a.m. I headed to border control, carrying an old brown army backpack filled with flannel shirts and jeans. “If you are thinking of working here,” an immigration officer told me, “You are not allowed.”

I soon wrote my parents that “I am alive and well in London.” It had taken me three hours to locate my first accommodation even after I got off at the right underground station. The hostel I stayed in cost £4.50 a week. It had no central heating but hot water for showers from 5 to 11 p.m. It had a midnight curfew and a rule that guests had to be out of bed by 10 a.m.

 

A Difficult Decade

1971 was a tough year to leave high school. America was climbing out of a recession, and Richard Nixon, an unpopular figure among teenagers, was president. The war he supported, the Vietnam War, hung like a shadow over young American men, who risked being drafted to serve in the army. The class of 1971 had lived through some exuberant events, such as the Woodstock music festival and the Apollo moon landing, but many tragic ones, such as the assassination of Martin Luther King and the killing of student protesters at Kent State.

“The country seemed broken down,’” says Stevens Williams, who has been a friend of mine from my Hartford High School days until now. “And you could ask ‘Why not just go live in a chicken coop and raise goats?’”

Stevens, who eventually became a prize-winning architect, said he felt adrift then, and so did I. I made traveling to Europe a goal to flee the uncertainty of that time in America. 

I recently found some letters written to my parents that document my journey. Combined with journal entries made at the time, the letters helped me experience my travels again, relive my passage through that cultural era and revisit the emotional territory that lies between adolescence and adulthood. What, I think I was wondering at the time, does it take to grow up, finally and completely?  

To guide me in my new adventure, I had a copy of “Let’s Go Europe,” the popular student travel guide, but no credit card, no camera, and—given the state of technology then—no mobile phone. I carried American Express traveler’s checks and cash, money saved up from a job at a furniture workshop for handicapped adults. The only communication I had from family and friends was letters, which I could pick up at American Express offices.

If I got lost, I had to look at a map, or ask for directions. Later in the trip, I developed a long-running fondness for the Scots, after an incident on an Edinburgh street corner when, just off the train, I asked how to get to the city’s youth hostel. Soon I was surrounded by a small crowd debating the best possible instructions to give me.

 

Encountering Art

In London, I first did the whirlwind tour of popular tourist destinations: Buckingham Palace, Big Ben, Houses of Parliament, and Foyles, then touting itself as the “biggest bookstore in the world.” I have to thank my parents for having made me a booklover: As a child, they took me on the regular trips to the town library. When I became a teenager, I used money earned as a dishwasher to buy books at the Dartmouth Bookstore, in Hanover, N.H.

As a new traveler, I continued to search out literature and art, as part of my drive for new experiences that might help me gain citizenship in the elusive country of adulthood. 

In London’s West End, I saw three plays by Shakespeare, following up on an interest developed in a summer university course sandwiched between junior and senior years of high school. In West End theaters, I also saw Alan Bates, a British actor who was later knighted, in the play Butley. His character was an alcoholic university lecturer encountering a day in which he loses his wife and a treasured colleague. The play was directed by the playwright Harold Pinter who said that Butley’s character courted “death by remaining ruthlessly—even dementedly—alive.”

I still remember the energy Bates brought to what Pinter called the character’s “savage lacerating wit” and the resounding standing ovation at the end of the performance. That I still recall the play in detail is testimony that art’s impression can last a lifetime.

I also toured London galleries, wandering through the Tate (there was no Tate Modern yet), the Courtauld Institute of Art (a favorite then and now), and the National Gallery. My father painted in oils and watercolors, so visual art was of particular interest to me. I enjoyed paintings by J.M.W. Turner, wherever I saw them, with their rich skies and sometimes violent seas, and savored the way he used strong colors to help the viewer understand the nature of light.

I saw many of the French impressionists—Renoir, Monet, Seurat— whom I had only seen before in my father’s art books. I saw a collection of Albrecht Dürer drawings at the British Museum, although I got his name wrong (Albert) in my letter home. I admired Cezanne’s The Card Players and Van Gogh’s Self Portrait With Bandaged Ear, a painting also featured in a 2022 exhibit at the Courtauld Institute, as it re-opened from a long renovation—again, a testimony to the staying power of great art. 

Somewhere, I noted in my journal, I saw a series of paintings Mark Rothko originally did for the Four Seasons restaurant in the Seagram building in New York. He ultimately felt the environment would not be right for the paintings, and withdrew his commission. The paintings are now at the Tate Modern, and feature brooding, rectangular shapes in dark red, maroon, and black, in which it can be hard to distinguish between foreground and background. I saw them a couple of years after Rothko committed suicide, having suffered from illness and depression. I learned recently Rothko was an admirer of Turner, a connection I would not have expected.

In 1971, I sat on a gallery bench for a long time contemplating the Rothko paintings. I later mused in my journal about what they had evoked: magical doors, supernatural windows, caverns, portals, the transition to death. I wrote down the comments of two English girls staring at one painting: “It’s changing. It’s shaking. It disappears; it all goes black.” Then finally, one of them shrieked “I’m getting out of this madhouse.”

In November, 2021, a label for an exhibit titled “London Grads Now,” featuring the work of recent art school graduates, helped crystallize my thoughts about art: “It’s easy to think that art is made and then simply looked at,” wrote Victoria Cantons, of the Slade School of Art, “but the reality is that art makes us all, transforming with us we interact with it. We are fundamentally inseparable from it as it is from us.” 

For me, art is also inseparable from travel: I seek it out in whatever city I visit. It’s a crucial part of getting to know a place and the spirit of its people, even if they are hosting art from other parts of the world. 

In my 1971 journals, I also scribbled lists that reveal the texture of mundane days. My errands for one day included buying boots and airmail stationary and finding an office for Caledonian Airways (a Scottish charter flight operator at the time). I also, according to my journal, sang to myself, went for a long walk, drank Courage Ale and ate shortbread. In the afternoon, I went to the cinema and watched two movies—Play Dirty, a war film, with Michael Caine, and The Graduate, with Dustin Hoffman.

The Graduate made a strong impression on me. The movie opens with Dustin Hoffman’s character, Ben, flying home after his college graduation. He walks off the plane and down the airport corridor to Simon and Garfunkel’s song Sounds of Silence. (“Hello darkness my old friend, I’ve come to talk to you again”). The film stirred up the way I felt when I stood alone in the high school parking lot after my graduation ceremony. What lay in my future? At a homecoming cocktail party in the movie, one of the film’s characters famously gave Ben a one-word answer to this question—“plastics.”

Dustin Hoffman played Ben with a lot of vulnerability, unusual for male lead characters at the time. Without ever really explaining why, Ben relentlessly pursued Elaine, the daughter of “Mrs. Robinson,” whom he had an affair with early in the film. He finally made a commitment to Elaine, however random, and that commitment was more appealing than him floating aimlessly on an air mattress in his parent’s pool, as he had done earlier in the film. After watching the movie, my journal entries made it clear I longed to connect with someone the way Dustin Hoffman’s character had. I had yet to experience romantic love. 

 

Cathedrals and Cash

I had discovered poetry early in adolescence and it continued to sustain me in my travels. In my journal, I wrote down fragments of poems, like these lines from a Gary Snyder poem, that connected with my experience at the time:

“The glimpse of a once-loved face

       gone into a train

Lost in a new town, no one knows the name.” 

I went alone to a concert by the Moody Blues, the Birmingham rock band whose songs were, indeed, moody and blue—boomers may recall “Knights in White Satin.” I had only listened to rock and folk music in my late teens. There were whole genres I hadn’t mined yet, including soul, jazz, and the blues, but my motivation to see live music was already strong.

I rented a car with three new acquaintances to drive out to Stonehenge, lucky enough to see it when tourists could still roam freely around the prehistoric monument. I described Stonehenge to my parents as a “big circle of rocks.”

“Scientists can’t figure out what it was used for,” I added, “or how the stones got there.” Stratford-Upon-Avon, Cambridge, Oxford, Canterbury,  Bath, and Salisbury were also on my “Let’s Go” list. At the Salisbury Cathedral I imagined my English ancestors working among the masons during the two hundred years of the cathedral’s construction.  I was inspired in Oxford to get a sketchbook and make some architectural drawings, mentioned in my letters but long since lost. My father might have been happy I was trying to follow in his artistic tracks. 

My journey had its hiccups. One letter to my parents was written in pencil, as I had lost my pen, bought a new one, and then lost that one. I was living up to my father’s nickname for me: “the absent-minded professor.” I once got out of the theater after London’s underground trains had stopped running, and had to walk for three hours to get back to my hostel. I had no idea how to hail a taxi, and no notion of what it would cost. Despite my occasional stumbles, I tried to set my parents at ease: “Don’t worry about me,” one letter said. “I’m having a really good time, and I’ve made lots of friends.” 

I was, in fact, enjoying my first exposure to an international crowd. I think of myself as having been painfully shy, but in examining the record, perhaps I wasn’t. An Israeli girl, I wrote, cooked me a Middle Eastern meal one night at a hostel. I went out to hear some music with two Swedish women, Gunila and Evelyn. A New Zealander by the name of Godfrey let me sleep on his floor when I need a place to crash. At the hostels, I came to find my own kind strange. “Americans,” I noted in a letter, “seem to chatter on endlessly.” 

I took careful note of prices in my journals, and worried about money. At the end of my trip, I was afraid I wouldn’t have enough to take the bus back to Vermont from the Boston airport.

London theater tickets, I noted, ran from the equivalent of 75 cents to two dollars, although I discovered you could get standing room tickets for 30 pence.  I went out for dinner one night and had Hungarian goulash, rice, and ice cream for 40 pence. Later in the trip, I snagged a student charter flight to Paris for £5. 

Shortly before Christmas, I headed to Scotland, hoping to experience Hogmanay, the legendary Scottish New Year’s celebration. I was also trying to shake off the depression of not being with my family over the holidays. On Christmas, I foolishly struck out from Edinburgh up into the Highlands. Traffic was light, and my hitchhiking was not very successful. At one point I walked 14 miles in Loch Lomond national park, from Callander to Lochearnhead. I wound up in a poncho in the rain and dark, until some young people in a van who were headed to the same youth hostel I was picked me up. 

Indeed, for much of the Scottish leg of the journey, I benefited from the kindness of strangers. From the national park, I headed north to Glen Coe, one of the more storied places in Scotland, famous for its mountainous scenery and for its history—a government-ordered slaughter of the MacDonald clan in 1692. I got as far North as Fort William, getting rides from people I met on the way. After that, I headed south to Glasgow, and I remember a businessman who gave me a ride into the city in his black Mercedes sedan as Hogmanay approached, complaining that his workers would be “half pissed by noon and fully pissed by the afternoon.” 

 

Heading to the Continent

Two French women I met in Scotland, one a high school senior and the other in university, lured me to Paris. In three days there I saw the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, and the Cathedral of Notre Dame—which I do not remember well. But I am glad to know I saw the cathedral’s rose windows and other architectural adornments before the 2019 fire shut it down. Of the Louvre, I told my parents that I could not remember anything other than the Venus de Milo, Mona Lisa, and the French Impressionists.

I left Paris in the company of four Germans I met in a hostel. They were going to Barcelona, and joining them was appealing. “It is good for me,” I wrote my parents in late January, “Because I was tired of traveling alone.” We drove down through France, stopping in Borges and Montauban, and continuing on through the tiny, intensely scenic country of Andorra until we reached Barcelona. There, all of the Germans except one, Wolfgang, headed back to their homeland to go to university. By early February, I was on the Spanish island of Ibiza, surrounded by blooming almond, orange and lemon trees.

In Ibiza, I loved the sunny weather, a welcome change from England. Wolfgang, I, and another American rented a house with a balcony and a fireplace on the northern shore of the island at the off-season price of $10 a week. “It even has silverware!” I trumpeted to my parents.  

After a lot of relatively hard travel, I was happy to stay in one place. I slept a lot and got my clothes clean. I ate fresh bread, goat’s cheese, homemade noodles, and vegetables from a local market. My journal has recipes for semolina with fruit, curried fried rice, and béchamel sauce to put on asparagus and cauliflower.

My roommates and I met one of our neighbors, an elderly German woman whom I tried my high-school German out on. We heard a local resident refer to her as “That crazy old German lady who lives on the hill and loves hippies.”  When she clapped her hands, her parakeet would come and sit on her shoulder. She tried to fix me up with the daughter of another neighbor, Juan, cleverly separating me out from my friends to get me over alone to Juan’s for lunch. But the language and cultural barriers between the daughter and I prevented any long-term connection.

I enjoyed walks to a nearby town called San Miguel. I wrote to my parents that “The post office where we get our mail is also the town’s only bar, and the barkeeper and post-office clerk is also the mayor.” It was at that post office/bar that I got a letter from my parents informing me that I had a high number in the U.S. military lottery, and would not be conscripted and sent to the Vietnam war.

Near my temporary Ibizan home, steps were carved into a cliff going down to the water. I would climb down the stone staircase, sit in caves at the bottom and watch the Mediterranean wash in. “I’ve really done very little here except take walks in the woods and by the sea,” I wrote home.

I think now about the month or so I spent on Ibiza, and the quiet, introspective time there. After a lifetime of striving since then—trying to get good grades at university, win promotions, and working long days trying to make a modest, meaningful contribution to the world, I have struggled to learn to relax. I’m not very good at it. I’m trying to bring back the Ibiza mindset.

Slowly over my month on Ibiza, homesickness crept in. I was also running out of money. I didn’t look for a job, despite offers of help from our German neighbor. I wanted to go home.

My last letter to my parents was dated February 27, 1972, and was finished at 10:15 a.m. on a bench in a Paris train station. I had taken an overnight ferry from Ibiza to Barcelona, then an overnight train to Paris. “I am in good spirits as the return journey has so far been quick and fairly painless,” I wrote.

After arriving in London, I checked my mail at the American Express office. I had a letter from an uncle who lived in Claremont, N.H. He sent me $20. While I waited for my flight home, that money allowed me to eat well and see a newly released movie—Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, a futuristic depiction of British gang violence.

When I got off the plane at Logan airport, I was glad to hear the friendly immigration officer’s Boston accent. I was used to thinking of Bostonians as foreign city-dwellers far removed from my rural, northern New England experience. But this friendly man who asked what I did in Europe now seemed like a fellow American.

 

Questions Asked, Not Answered 

What was the trip’s meaning? It wasn’t just a compilation of the cathedrals, paintings, films, and landscapes I saw or people I encountered. My journals also contain some of the questions that I’ve spent the five decades since that trip trying to answer. “Growing up” has glided into just “growing”—a process that hopefully never stops. At age 18, I wondered in my journals what kind of work would make me feel fulfilled. My curiosity and love of writing drew me to journalism.

I also spent some time in my travel journals exploring my emotions. Does it make sense to love oneself, I asked? At age 18, I thought self-love perverse. My insecurity then was at such heights that I had difficulty even liking myself. I was a working-class kid who grew up in a college town. I felt too intellectual for the townies, and too rough-hewn and awkward to be a peer of the professor’s sons and daughters. I didn’t know what fork to use at fancy dinners. Self respect, not self love, seemed like all I could hope for.

On one page of my journal I tried to define what made for healthy emotional independence and what made for healthy dependence. I wanted to be strong within myself and to enjoy solitude. I also knew that I needed other people, and that it took strength to reach out to them. This is a balancing act that lasts a lifetime, a tightrope I still walk.

With the trip, I had certainly proved my independence. The decision to take the trip was mine. Neither of my parents had ever left the country. I paid for almost of all of the trip, save the minor contributions from friends and relatives, and planned it all. I give credit to my parents for not pressuring me to go to university immediately.  At 18, I was old enough to vote and to go to war. But I suspect a lot of American parents, then and now, would try to talk their children out of traveling to a foreign country on their own.

There were certainly times the trip was difficult, not from physical hardship but from isolation at a time when everyone was not constantly connected by email, social media and mobile phones. “Was I too young for this trip?” I asked myself in a journal entry. I had not been prepared, I wrote, for the occasional intensity of the loneliness.

After I arrived home, I did not stay connected to those whom I met abroad. Two Australian women I met somewhere followed me back and crashed for a night on a pull-out couch in my parent’s home. Their timing was off, because my mother was in the hospital for heart surgery. I don’t remember any other contact with people I met on the trip, although I think one of the Germans I traveled with mailed me a photo of myself, the only photo I have from those four months. I stand on the deck of a ferry to Ibiza with my shoulder-length red hair brushing the top of a plaid wool coat, staring out in the distance. 

Despite the lack of permanent human connections made on the trip, it shaped my life. When I first turned to journalism, my efforts were highly local—covering school board meetings, property tax increases, and dog shows. When I later joined a national American publication, The Chronicle of Higher Education, my global interests were eventually fulfilled. I became international editor, editing what seemed like a running contrast-and-compare essay about how countries choose to educate their youth. 

I left The Chronicle to found a new publication, Al-Fanar Media, which covered education, research and culture in the Arab world. I spent almost nine years growing that publication and mentoring Arab journalists. I was based in London, completing a circle of travel to the first foreign city I had ever visited.

I haven’t stopped planning trips, and continued even during the pandemic. I prefer to travel with family and friends now, but if no one wants to go where I want to go, I’m willing to go alone. At last count, I’ve been to 41 countries. My wife, also a travel buff, is from Thailand, and my adult children love to travel, when they can. 

For me, every journey has inner and outer strands that braid together—thoughts and feelings intertwined with the particulars of place. Whether 18 or 68, experiencing that braiding is often as close to a spiritual experience as I have been able to get. 

In my emotional and spiritual life, I still sometimes feel like I did when I stood in the high school parking lot, alone, wondering what will become of me. When that mood strikes, I try to set aside the sense of isolation and plan my next adventure.