Introduction to the 2025 Edition
1984 gets all the ink, but it was the year 1985 that changed me forever. There was no keeping me down on the farm after I’d seen Paree (and Istanbul, Leningrad, Dublin and a beer garden in Salzburg).
There have been 46 follow-up journeys since then, and I’ve always returned to the place where I grew up, which I consider home, but in 1985 the European continent irrevocably rewired my consciousness. I’ve been unfathomably fortunate. I’ve also worked exceedingly hard to sustain my wanderlust.
We live in tumultuous times, and in May of 2025, as I set out to chronicle these long-lost experiences, I’m not laboring under any illusions (delusions?) whatever about a pressing need for autobiographical renderings documenting a generally privileged white American ne’er-do-well’s European vacation 40 years ago.
Rather, I’m writing for me, precisely because it’s a form of escape from the prevailing tumult.
Naturally, I hope you enjoy it. I’m not offended it you don’t. Frequent readers (thank you, by the way) will note that today’s first installment borrows heavily from previous writing, and to a lesser extent the second.
But after that, the bulk of this narrative has not been offered for public viewing since 2015 at my former blog. Perhaps this will be the definitive version, with the aim of publishing on Mondays and Thursdays through August, 2025.
I always knew something about me was different; not better or worse, just different. The stereotypical “American Dream” never enticed me, and there’s little more to add to this sentence: “An atheistic, socialistic polemicist and contrarian living in Southern Indiana, where he detests Bud Light.”
My eccentricities were obvious to me long before Europe entered the scene. While elements of the attraction remain mysterious even today, I know that whatever the nature of the existential itch afflicting me, Europe enabled it to be scratched.
I should say “enables” in the present tense, because the bug still bites. Long may this scratching continue. After the fire, the fire still burns.
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Part 1: Three months that shook my world.
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.
―Mark Twain, from Innocents Abroad
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