Ethnocentrism, Circumcision, and Monastisism:
Accelerated Living on a Tour Bus
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| The very first Europe Through the Back Door group. Every day a tailgate party. |
This is Part IV of a four-part series on the origins of Rick Steves' tour company (excerpted from Rick's book Post Cards from Europe, his travel memoirs).
Twenty-five years ago, there was one ETBD tour guide — me. A summer's tour calendar was nonstop: typically a total of forty-eight people on six three-week laps around Europe. Successive groups passed me like a baton between relay runners.
Often this transition would take place in a London theater. To save time and get discounted big-group tickets, I'd finish one group and start the next at the same play. After our tour-ending group hug, I'd step into the theater as the guide of one group. Two hours later, I'd walk out leading the next.
I learned I could handle anyone for three weeks. The first week we were all fresh and new to each other. Through the second week we were a comfortable family. By the end of the third week, our once-charming idiosyncracies began to wear on each other — but not enough to get in the way of a great last supper.
One year, the most difficult tourist happened to take two different tours back to back — forty-four days rather than twenty-two. I learned a valuable lesson: Be in charge of one individual's travel happiness for a maximum of three weeks.
Studying two groups in the same circumstance — one happy and the next miserable — taught me the importance of attitude. To one group, the arrival of a noisy group of students in a youth hostel robbed them of much-needed peace and quiet. To the next, it was an opportunity to make friends with a local teacher and learn about another country's school system. My challenge was to connect groups with the positive in whatever experience Europe doled out.
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| Tapping kegs of wine from Portugal to Greece, the early tours enthusiastically drank in the local culture. |
Willing to take risks for any powerful travel experience, I deposited one group without warning in the French monastery of Taize, south of Dijon. Taize offered a chance to experience modern European monasticism. The icon-oriented meditation that dominated the Mass was an exciting opportunity to grapple with the American fear of silence. And the silence was particularly profound when sandwiched between the easy-to-love music of Taize. But what my group experienced most vividly were the crude dorm beds and meals of thin soup and thick bread. Taize taught me the essential tour-guiding skill of preparing a group for the rugged experiences well in advance.
By experimenting with group after group to find the best hill town, castle, and Madonna and Child, I was managing time as well as money. Eventually, my tour handbooks became guidebooks so people could do our tours on their own.
These books were originally designed only as tour handbooks. I left them laying around at my lectures (hoping to interest people in my tours). Students began stealing these books. No one had ever stolen from me in classes before. It was clear: These tour handbooks were driving decent people to theft. They needed to be available for sale. I self-published the first 22 Days in Europe guidebook. Then came 22 Days in Britain. Eventually my publisher ran with the concept and the books spawned an entire line of guidebooks.
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| Trading his mini-bus for a big one, tour guide Rick cleans up his act. With guidebooks supporting each tour and tours supporting each guidebook, his business took off. Puncutality — ruthlessly enforced — was a theme from the start. |
These "22 days" books focused on getting the most out of your vacation time. Back in the 1960s, Arthur Frommer's groundbreaking "Europe on $5 a Day" series stretched the vacation dollar of the generation that survived the Great Depression. My guidebooks addressed the needs of a new "time-is-money" generation.
Confident I could help Americans enjoy Europe, I let my piano students go, turned my recital hall into a travel classroom, and started Europe Through the Back Door, Inc.
Our key to enjoying Europe — whether through guidebooks or on tours — was connecting with its people. And many of our travelers managed to do this particularly well. My memories of one 1984 tour are dominated by the love story of Colleen and the driver, Jan.
Jan was a Belgian man born to romance. Well-dressed, with movie-star gray hair and Old World manners, he was always the best dancer on board. Jan was a romantic whose personal hardships somehow made him even more lovable. It took nearly everything Jan earned to cover the costs of his reckless son's legal problems and a ruined first marriage.
Jan's Belgian girlfriend, Huguette, was planning a romantic mid-tour rendezvous with him on the Italian Riviera. But by Venice, Jan was hopelessly in love with a stately Seattle blonde named Colleen.
Colleen, straitlaced into a predictable suburban life with a flat marriage, was traveling to explore her options. Tall as Jan but twenty years younger, she saw in him the finer points of European life.
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| Bus driver Jan swept tourist Colleen off her feet. She learned Flemish...then they lived happily ever after. |
As we neared the Riviera, the entire group was buzzing with speculation. At the last freeway rest stop, Jan climbed wearily down from the bus. Amazed at his tragic predicament, he said, "Rick, I don't know what I gonna do."
Huguette met us at the Riviera hotel. The group was wild about Jan. The anticipation was electric. Not wanting to take sides but being the all-powerful room assigner, I went person by person through the rooming list. When I said, "In room twenty-four, Colleen and . . . Huguette," twenty-four tourists gasped. For some reason, it seemed right to me.
Colleen went home, got a divorce, sold her house, and moved to Belgium. Today she speaks Flemish and — to this day — lives happily with the bus driver of her dreams.
A big part of my early tours was introducing American friends to European friends. One year I'd visit Herr and Frau Moser, the Swiss parents of my sister's ski teacher. The next year I'd drop by with a busload of tourists. The Mosers would take us on a tour of their mandatory bomb shelter. Then, slicing hard, sharp, and curly pieces from an ancient brick of alpine cheese, they'd tell tales of Swiss military readiness: hidden jets ready to rip out of mountains like airborne Batmobiles, bridges designed with self-destruct explosives, and loaves of bomb shelter bread so hard they doubled as weapons. We'd conquer Alpine ridges with the Moser children, romping like mountain goats up one side to glissade down the loose shale slopes of the other. Landing on the doorstep of an uncle's lonely high meadow hut, we'd ring the bovine bell choir hung from his eaves before playing spoons and drinking schnapps at his hearth.
Much of my Europe was like the Mosers — a place I discovered alone that can be shared in small groups. But as groups grew, the experience inevitably drifted from a friendly show-and-tell to canned culture on stage. Sadly, my visits to the Mosers became a Swiss folk show as our groups grew from eight to sixteen, eighteen, twenty-one, then finally twenty-five. Now I tell stories of the Mosers from my bus microphone as we zip by their town on the Autobahn. While I still lead an occasional tour, most of the 3,000 people who take a Europe Through the Back Door tour each year never meet me.
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| About 1990, Steves begins tour guiding American couch potatoes. |
A happy ending is that my biggest tour group of all, the viewers of my TV series, can still fit through the "back door." My couch potato travel partners have joined me thumping empty wine kegs in Etruscan cellars, gambling at the dog races in Belfast, and celebrating five-year-old Ibrahim's circumcision in Cappadocia. And, thanks to our PBS camera crew, which travels where a tour group can't, countless Americans know my friends the Mosers. They're right there with us carving the cheese, visiting the bomb shelter, even seeing the grandkid pull out his tooth and put it in the oven (where the Swiss tooth fairy looks). And as TV brings European lives into American living rooms, I hope it inspires a few Americans to turn their travel dreams into actual firsthand experience — on one of our tour buses or on their own.
[This is the final part of a four-part series on Rick's early days as a tour guide and organizer back in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The article is excerpted from Rick's autobiographical and anecdotal book, Postcards from Europe. For the entire chapter, click here.]