Previously: European Grand Tour 1985, Part 1: Three months that shook my world.
In retrospect, two relatively odd twists stand out about the inaugural European expedition in 1985.
First, given a lifelong compulsion to write, and considering the ample time I spent waiting for trains, sitting long hours inside them, resting in hostel common areas after a hard day’s touring, or just sitting on park benches watching the procession of life’s rich pageant—in short, with so many spare minutes to harness, I managed to commit little of that first trip to paper.
Only snippets and random observations survive, along with a fairly accurate day-to-day record of my progress. Why? Was it laziness? Probably the issue was the sheer sensory overload being too much for me to handle. When you’re a wide-eyed rube challenged by the simplest of daily tasks, not to mention utterly transfixed by scenes previously only dreamed about, it’s easy to lose the thread.
I know what you’re probably thinking, but it certainly wasn’t because of the volume of alcohol consumed, which brings me to a second observation.
To this day, people don’t believe me when I say that very little drinking took place abroad in 1985, at least compared with my default proclivities prior to departure. However, it is absolutely true.
In the beginning, there were stray beers here and there. The first, a can of Oranjeboom from the Netherlands, came on the fourth day aboard the ferry to Greece. In Athens, I drank an Amstel or Carlsberg with each evening meal.
I’d been advised by travel veterans to drink Fix, a legacy Greek lager, and sadly couldn’t find any, learning only later that the brewery had closed in 1983 (a revival occurred in 2009).
There was an Efes with stuffed tomatoes in Istanbul, and Retsina on the boat from Greece back to Italy, yet nothing remotely approaching intoxication occurred until I let loose for a night in Rome with a group of fellow budget travelers, having discovered 2,000-lira (one dollar), 2/3 liter bottles of Carlsberg (uncharacteristically ice cold) at a bar down the ......
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