I was browsing the web and a few days ago ran across an article about the wave of college-age travelers unleashed on Europe by books like “Europe on $5 a Day”. The article went on to say that during the 60s about 10% of all college students spent time in Europe, which was a surprise to me.
This was all before my time, but I’m wondering if anyone has stories they’d care to share about traveling around Europe with a railpass and a backpack (or at least that’s how I imagine it).
If I remember correctly, this book captures the flavor the time. http://www.amazon.com/The-Drifters-James-A-Michener/dp/0812986725
Our S did his version by flying to Thailand and going to hostels and inexpensive hotels. It’s not the same thing, but the closest anyone in our household came.
My younger sister had a friend who did it and loved it. By the time I went to Europe in the 90s with H, reservations were STRONGLY recommended.
I was a $5.00 a day traveler in the early 70’s. My college roommate and I were able to travel and live for five months on the money that was earned in our summer jobs and staying in hostels, cheap pensions and sleeping on the train at night when we did long trips. We travelled with traveler’s checks, no credit cards. I spent the first 20 days or so in London and Paris and did not begin the pass which was for 3 months and at the end took a long train ride to Paris from Madrid, spent another week or so in Paris and then another week in London. In addition to the Eurailpass there were discounted flights/ferries and either free or very limited admission to museums/concerts/opera. All hostels and pensions served free continental breakfast. We bought baguettes, cheese and fruit at markets for lunch, had a relatively decent if inexpensive dinner and there were lots of places to go for inexpensive dinners. Because only paper bills were convertible from one currency to another, we spent coins at the train stations on candy and chocolate treats. You had mail forwarded to either American Express or post office general delivery and we would stop there when we arrived in a new place. I guess we either did a lot of hand-washing or here and there must have had access to washing machines, I cannot remember that at all. Sometimes you had to leave the hostel during the day and it was closed until 5 PM.
To travel to Berlin which was in East Germany, we boarded a train heading to Moscow. In order to spend the day in East Berlin which is where the famed Pergamon Museum was located, you had to cash and spend a certain amount of money so I recall having a nicer than normal meal and being approached by people who wanted to buy the jeans we were wearing. We did travel through then Yugoslavia to Dubrovnik where $5.00 a day bought us a luxury hotel with 3 meals a day. We travelled in Spain during Franco’s time and there was no such thing as young women walking on their own without chaperones. It was not unusual in Spain to see people travelling with horse and cart even in places like Malaga and Valencia.
I returned home with literally one U.S. quarter… all the money that I had in the world.
When I was 15 (!) I traveled with my 17 year old cousin a few months before I was about to live as an exchange student in Denmark. I remember staying at a hostel in London and telling my cousin: “so this is what Dickens was talking about”. I thought that the old woman lying in the bed next to me was on the verge of dying from consumption. Some of the dumps we slept in were pretty horrific. I will say that (in retrospect) I’m surprised that my parents thought nothing of our youthful follies abroad.
A friend of my parents’ generation experienced $5 a day travel of a different sort. He was from a wealthy planter family that had weathered the hardships of Reconstruction and the Great Depression. In 1946 he said he had his car shipped over to Europe so he could spend a few months traveling about. His reasoning was that he wanted to be the only person in Europe to have a car with Mississippi plates, and I dare say he was.
For a while in the late 1990s it was possible to get some really good travel bargains on the Internet, since they were selling deeply discounted deals to the small segment of the population that actually used it. Still loving the round trip to Paris my wife and I took on Air France for $650 that ncluded four nights at the Le Meridian Montparnasse. It wasn’t $5 a day, but it was fun.
I did $75/day in Europe in 2008… price included everything except the flight to/from (Eurail, reservations, hostels, food, etc). That was when the dollar was very weak; I think that would be $55-60 today.
$5/day is not possible in Europe unless you sleep on the park bench and eat 1 meal. Edit: and don’t travel multiple places.
I remember WANTING to spend only $5/day but most days were in the $12/day range. This was right after I graduated college in 1983 when Let’s Go Europe was the bible and you had your Eurail pass (seems like it was much more liberal/generous back in the day) and would get off the train and walk to a hostel listed in the book to find a place to stay for the night. Spent 3.5 months touring Europe that way following the summer during which I stayed on campus and painted the dorms to earn money for my trip. And, I too remember going to the Am Ex offices where they’d hold our mail from home. Several times I ran into people I knew in those offices. Those were the days!
My travel time was in the '70s,so I was a little late for that party. My dad, an intrepid soul with a love of languages, and a job on the academic calendar spent a month in Europe most years in the late 60s. He spent more than $5.00 a day, but kept things reasonable in cost by staying in college dorms and similar lodgings all over Scandinavia and Britain. Even Norway was reasonable in cost at that point. In 1970 I was invited to go with him and his wife at the time, and we saw many out of the way places. That trip made me fall in love with travel, and has been high priority ever since.
In the later 70s, I had the opportunity to travel in Britain and then Asia, backpacking in youth hostels and similar lodgings. Possession of the right guidebook was key, as was the travelers’ network. There was usually a hostel or lodging in each town, and once there, you’d get hints from other travelers as to where to go and where to stay to supplement the guidebooks. Lonely Planet got it’s start at that point, with their single guidebook outlining the overland route from Europe to India via Afghanistan, Across Asia on the Cheap. I worked in a pub in Hong Kong catering to expats, and met people who had done that overland trek. They all loved Afghanistan! Iran was open at that point as well.
The world was such a bigger place back then. Travel felt unusual, like high adventure. No peers from home had traveled internationally. Spending a year in Asia meant talking to my mom on the phone, once. during that time. A significant amount of time was spent writing letters to friends and family. Bookmama, I had forgotten the joy of arriving in a new city and heading to “Post Restaunte” -general delivery in French, for a pile of letters from home. The relationships formed were amazing. Meet someone in the hostel, agree to go off exploring southern Taiwan or trek Nepal, travel for a week or three, then move on to the next country or adventure. I learned a great deal about Australians, Germans, Canadians and more due to traveling with people from those countries.
My dd couchsurfed with her fiancé around Europe so that’s one way to cut costs. They travelled very cheaply, using Ryan air, trains and eating local food.
Ah youth!! Some of my happiest, most carefree memories! Europe on $10 a day was the version when I went in the '70s. I just looked the book up - it was written by Frommer, one my go-to research guides to this day.
I was a music student and traveled for an entire summer with a musician friend. We boarded trains with our Eurailpasses carrying cello and violin and wearing backpacks. Cello didn’t need an extra seat then. I’m not sure how it would be treated now. We traveled from festival to festival, sometimes as participants, other times visiting friends at their festivals and sleeping, illegally of course, on their dorm floors.
When we didn’t have a festival to attend, we saw country after country. I remember my mother being concerned that the itinerary looked like, “If It’s Tuesday, It Must be Belgium”, but we thought moving from town to town with longer stays in major cities was just fine. Certainly the Eurailpass lost money on us!
Hostel memories - YUK. Florence had a good place, but we generally preferred small pensions when a friend’s free bedroom floor was not available.
Back then, many young Europeans were traveling for gap years. Does anyone know if this is still common? We met so many wonderful young people from all over. I always wanted my offspring to have an experience like mine, but the interests and circumstances were different. Sigh.
Love this thread . . . so wish I had done something like this.
My experience echoes the journey @bookmama22 had in the early 70’s. Really $5/day. My 2 month railpass cost about $200 and was unlimited 2nd class. The train cabin seats would slide down to form one large sleeping space and at night we’d all unroll our sleeping bags, strangers, all young. For a while, I traveled alone (female.) Sometimes, getting in to a city the first thing I’d do was check my large back with the baggage folks, then have a look at the late train schedule out, pick the next target based on a long enough overnight trip. Either on the train or at a hostel, I always met other kids to hang with, share tips with, trade paperbacks, maybe share a cheap pensione. Sometimes, that lasted a few days. (At that point, I didn’t speak German, so it came in handy to meet two guys, one of whom was fluent.) I read a lot, saw a lot of museums and historic spots, had a blast. Somewhere, I have the diary.
The book info was current- and comprehensive. Things worked. Many of the cheap places to eat were where locals went, not much English. I had a sense of relying on myself, defining my own adventures- and trusting others. Best hostels: London/St Paul’s boys choir dorm. And one in Germany, where they served Beef Wellington for dinner. They all had us out by some time in the morning, after some chores, let us back in later in the afternoon, and locked the front doors around 11pm.
When D1 was first in Europe, a few years ago, I strongly suggested she do hostels, too. And she had a fabulous experience, met kids and young adults from all over the world, some she is still in contact with. Of course, things have changed a bit. Her hostel in Barcelona was open 24/7, had a front desk fellow on duty who’d call taxis, would recommend the best clubs, etc. I think she paid about 17/night for a dorm-type room.
I still don’t understand when people insist on a top end hotel chain- that has its times, but so many experiences and memories come from a more casual approach. And traveling light.
My friend and I traveled for close to $5.00 a day in Europe in 1972. We had a backpacking tent and a little propane-canister backpacking stove. Most nights were spent in campgrounds, although we occasionally used hostels or other very low cost lodgings. We ate bread and cheese, sometimes supplemented by sausage and/or fruit, and we cooked things like Knorr dried soups or instant oatmeal on our little stove.
We used Eurail Pass and sometimes also hitchhiked.
That was the summer that presidential candidate George Wallace was shot in the US. We heard about it from a shopkeeper in Igoumenitsa, Greece, who only spoke Greek and Italian. It was frustrating and somewhat comical trying to find out what had happened with only a smattering of Italian! The only newspapers available were in languages we couldn’t read, or were out-of-date International Herald Tribunes. It wasn’t until we had reached a larger town with current English-language newspapers that we learned the details of the assassination attempt.
Me, too. Brings back memories. My first night in a hostel, I had to beg a towel to use from a young Brit because I hadn’t understood it was BYOT, and no way I was going a day without a shower. Now I can’t believe I begged someone to share their one and only towel with me. We did keep each other company a few days while we were both in that city. The next day I bought my own towel, so I probably exceeded the $5 budget. The towels were always hanging off our backpacks so they could dry during the day. And thinking of hygiene, I once wore a pair of blue jeans 30 days straight.
I have no fond memories of the wretchedness of the hostels and second class trains. Or those laundry mats where we washed our nasty jeans. However, the experiences that budget travel allowed me are seared into my memory: The Louvre before it was remodeled, when the cases were so dusty it was sometimes almost impossible to see objects; standing in the Colosseum and really understanding the scale of it for the very first time; my mouth dropping open at Gaudi, and thinking about what architecture might represent, for the very first time.
It is difficult for me to believe our parents let us go off like this. We called collect from post offices on the weekend to check in. If something had happened to us, they would have had no idea where we were. In contrast, the first time my teenage boys traveled Europe by themselves, a family friend met them at the airport and took them to get a cell phone so they could call us every night and we could monitor and nag them.
ETA: Remember when European chocolate was only available… in Europe!! We used to buy cheap suitcases and fill them up with chocolate to bring home for family and friends.
Really, when I look back on it, the experience formed a lot of my current behavior. I traveled in this fashion in '71 and later in '78. Both times with friends and both times on my own nickel. In '71 we shot for $5 a day but it ended up being more like $8 a day and later we shot for $10 but our more “sophisticated” tastes pushed it to $20. It taught me how to take care of myself. It taught me how to save, save, save and budget. It also taught me that you could have a wonderful time if you spent your money wisely and a lousy time if you got a little too stingy . It also taught me to encourage D to explore the bigger world on her own. H and I still travel every year and we still feel that by budgeting wisely we can have a better, more authentic experience than if we spent time in luxurious brand name hotels. Don’t get me wrong,brand name hotels are efficient for my business travel but they are too detached and sterile for any sort of travel when you want to immerse yourself in another culture.
Currently, couch surfing for the younger set and Airbnb for us oldies are the newest and best opportunities for this sort of travel.
I am remembering budgeting to such an extent that sometimes we took night trains (included in the Eurail pass) instead of paying for a hostel stay. Looking back, I’m surprised how very little alcohol we drank but probably because it would have broken the budget to have a bottle of wine a day. We used to save rolls and cheese from those hostel breakfasts.
I am leaving now to have lunch with friends and we are going to order a very nice bottle of wine. I like this stage of life 
^ ^ ^
Are you hitchhiking to the restaurant? 
That’s funny @alh . On our recent trip to Paris we had dinner at Taillevant and we laughed when I mentioned to H how much nicer those trips would have been if I had only coughed up an additional fifty cents for an occaisional bottle of wine. I still budget but now it’s so I can afford to splurge, not just for the sake of budgeting. $-) I like this stage of life as well.
I think we recreated some of this independence more recently, when we rented flats instead of getting hotel rooms. But we missed the chance to meet others in that same way.
I had started that summer with a friend’s family, back in the days when folks bought a VW van and then drove it all over Europe before shipping it home. We camped, cooked great meals (my first longer exposure to the mind of an engineer- their Dad could cook multi-part meals in one pot over a propane burner.) And yes, while I was with them, we hand washed jeans. Two people had to twist them to get as much water out as possible, then hope they dried in a full day or two.
I did find laundromats (and seem to remember they were in the book, too-?) But I think the issue was that dryers weren’t very effective.
Speaking of chocolates, this was before one could find Toblerone in the US and we thought it was such a treat.