Evanston RoundTable, June 11, 2025
“There is a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries,” reads the famous quote from Julius Caesar.
Far be it from me to rewrite Shakespeare, but I think he should’ve added something like: “And there are times you need to leap into the water and make your own tide.”
My own leap was a nine-week hitchhiking excursion in Europe starting in the spring of 1968 which, over the course of nine weeks, took me through 10 countries and dozens of cities — from London to Jerusalem and back — all for less than $360.
Not only was the trip hugely fun and educational — all the people I met, the places I saw and the museums and cathedrals and churches I visited — but it instilled in me badly needed confidence when I realized I could navigate my way through most every dicey situation, such as getting booted out of Morocco, losing my backpack in Tel Aviv and going broke in Rome.
Make me king for a day, and I would wave my wand at young people and command them to do the same: see the world, find yourself!
Off to London
My world tour began in fall 1967, when I arrived at University College London, where I had been accepted as an “occasional” student. I could audit classes but would receive no college credit. (Fortunately, my draft board didn’t know about that.)
That meant I could drop in and out of class, and I quickly found it far more enticing — and educational — to travel, first walking throughout London, then visiting the renowned Summerhill School in East Anglia, then going to Manchester to visit a young British med student I had met the previous summer, and when that didn’t work out consoling myself in Paris. In December, I joined a student group traveling by train to Moscow, Leningrad and Warsaw.
I returned home in April 1968 to register for college in the fall, during which time Martin Luther King Jr. was shot. On my way to Circle campus, as the University of Illinois Chicago was then known, I watched National Guard Jeeps head down the Eisenhower Expressway to quell anger-fueled riots on the West Side.
My mother wanted me to stay home, and it was tempting. As I wrote later in a long account of my year abroad, “I had been in England eight months. I had traveled, I had lived alone, I had studied and learned, the world outside my former Chicago neighborhoods had come alive and taken on personal meaning. But here was something far more profound, far more important: the chance to walk across Europe and savor both it and my youth in one fleeting moment in time, a moment and a youth I would never have again.”
The dream begins
So I returned to London to embark on a dream of longstanding: hitchhiking through Europe.
Financing my year abroad had been surprisingly easy. The previous summer I had worked two jobs and managed to save several hundred dollars plus airfare. That might not sound like a lot, but the dollar was strong and the London family with whom I lived charged only £4 a week (about $10) for room and board, which included a full English breakfast on which I could stuff myself.
Thus I still had a good amount of money, in the form of American Express Travelers checks, when I began my road trip in late April 1968 with a train ride down to Newhaven, a four-hour ferry crossing to Dieppe in France, and a ride with two American college students embarking on a gap-year excursion in their newly purchased VW van. The first night I stayed at an inexpensive youth hostel in Rouen, which I described in a RoundTable column last November.
“America’s problems — King’s assassination, inner-city uprisings, the war in Vietnam, campus takeovers — seemed insane and far away, and the lovely Old World beckoned. In my backpack was everything I needed: a passport, three pairs of clothing, a sleeping bag, a few toiletries, a Hallwag map of Europe, a directory of European youth hostels and some guidebooks. The general idea was to stick my thumb out and go wherever the rides took me. I would travel six days a week — and then, like God, rest on Sunday.”
A good plan, until …
The general idea was to head south, to warmer weather, and then work my way back to London in a large counterclockwise circle through central and northern Europe. I expected it would take eight to 10 weeks. I managed to stay very close to plan — until I decided on a continent-wide detour outside Munich.
Youth hostels cost less than a dollar a night, rides were free and meals at roadside food markets or local grocery stores were cheap and healthy: a sandwich, some fruit, bottled water or soda. I had set myself a limit of $25 a week, and for the first six weeks I managed to stay within budget.
At this point, in the interest of keeping this column to a vaguely manageable length, I will skip many of the details, such as making my way south through France and Spain to Morocco, only to be unceremoniously turned back at the border by customs officials, with no explanation. Perhaps they were ordered to secure the country from drug-crazed hippies planning to score some of that fine Moroccan hashish. Who knows? I only wanted to see the Atlas Mountains.
From there I hitchhiked northeast through Spain, France, Monaco, Italy, Switzerland and southern Germany. Rides were mostly plentiful, drivers mostly friendly, scenery invariably spectacular.
After two days in Munich, I thought I’d take the Autobahn to my next destination, Austria, but that’s where things stalled. There was no speed limit, so cars zipped by without a second look. And (though I didn’t know it at the time) hitchhiking was illegal and so was picking up a hitchhiker. I stood with my thumb out getting nowhere, except increasingly frustrated. After an hour or two, a police car honked at me from the other side of the divided highway, and I knew he’d turn around as soon as he could to come after me. I shouldered my backpack and started walking back toward the nearest town when just at that moment, as if by magic, a beat-up old Volkswagen pulled over.
“Where you headed?” the young driver asked in German-inflected English.
“Salzburg for the night,” I said. “How about you?”
“I’m going to Israel. Want to come with?”
Whoa! Israel! This was one of those Big Decision moments, the decisive inflection points that come along so rarely in life. To go or not to go, that was the question. Traveling alone can be lonely, but has one great advantage: No need to consult with anyone making one of the Big Decisions!
“I’m in!” I told him.
Wolf’s plan
Wolf was a strapping thirtyish blonde who explained, as we drove southeast, that he had quit his job as a Berlin veterinarian to see the world, the first segment of which was traveling to Greece to catch a boat to the Holy Land. From there he planned to sell the VW and continue east around the world. He’d scribble the names and addresses of the hitchhikers he picked up — I was the first — hoping they would put him up if and when he arrived in their city.
Thus we were constantly picking up other hitchhikers — a rolling caravan of young western Europeans and Americans — making our way through Yugoslavia and Greece. Wolf insisted on avoiding major highways in favor of the lovely and usually quiet roadways and picturesque villages we’d pass through. He liked to stop for lunch in small towns, buy some bread, sandwich meat and wine at a local grocery or food market, and find a nearby river or stream where we could eat picnic-style. It was a great way to enjoy a midday repast with newfound companions.
We stayed a week in Belgrade while Wolf waited to repatriate some hard currency a friend owed him, then continued toward Greece. Riding through Yugoslavia, I wrote my parents “…was quite an experience: they are so unused to cars passing through that the streets are crowded with children, cows, horses and bicycles.”
As we approached Athens on the afternoon of the last day’s ride, we crested a hill and looked down from a distance on the Parthenon, a stunning and memorable view.
The next day we visited the Acropolis and in the late afternoon boarded a ship from the port town of Piraeus heading east through the Mediterranean. We docked in Crete and from there took another ship to Israel, where we landed in Haifa several mornings later.
From there I made my way to Jerusalem. A Chicago friend was studying at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and I managed to locate her; luckily she was as glad to see me as I was to see her, and she invited me to sleep on the floor of her dorm room. The next day, while she was in class, I ventured into the Old City, “fantastic quarters of Armenian, Jewish, Arab and Christian sectors,” I wrote home. “At the Wailing (now known as the Western) Wall, as I was pondering the remains of the Second Temple and watching the Orthodox Jews praying and davening, an Orthodox rabbi asked me (in Hebrew) whether I was a Jew and when I said I was, proceeded to wrap me up and prepare me for praying and assisted with Hebrew at the Wall.” Despite being nonobservant, I found myself surprisingly moved.
The next day was the sabbath, so most public transportation was shut down. But one of the university students invited me to walk with her the few kilometers south to Bethlehem, where we had coffee with a couple of her Arab friends. They were very cordial but complained bitterly of their second-class status as Arab Israelis.
Running out of money
I headed south to the Dead Sea and then back to Tel Aviv to organize the next stage of my adventure, which entailed flying back to Athens and taking the ferry to southern Italy and the train to Rome. Staring me in the face, for the first time on the trip, was a serious lack of funds. “I am quite low now because of the boat and plane fares, but have enough to reach Rome. Will need a minimum of $50 from there to get me to London,” I wrote to my parents, and asked them to wire the funds to the American Express office in Rome.
What I didn’t mention — unnecessary to needlessly alarm the folks — was a near-disaster in Tel Aviv. I had taken a cab somewhere, and before I had a chance to collect my backpack from the trunk the driver sped off, turned a corner and disappeared. That left me without money, passport or clothing. Fortunately I had the presence of mind to ask a passerby where the nearest cab stand was, and sure enough, the cab was parked there.
By the time I got to Rome, on Sunday, June 16, I hadn’t eaten in three days and had only a few drachma and lira coins rattling forlornly in my pockets.
I stayed at a cheap pension near the main rail terminal and waited for American Express to open on Monday. But when I got there the next day and sorted through the waiting mail, I was alarmed to find no cash. This was serious! I borrowed 2,000 lire from the man in line behind me to make a reverse call to Chicago.
“Dad,” I opened the conversation without preliminaries, “I’m in Rome and I’ve been to American Express and there’s no money here!” He assured me he had wired funds on Thursday. Sure enough, when I went back to American Express in the afternoon, it was there: one hundred bucks!
With my newfound riches, I had a fabulous time in Rome and Florence. I took a train to London, arriving June 26, exactly nine weeks from the day I left. Two months and a week that crammed in two years’ worth of adventures, education, excitement and companionship.
Altogether, I had traveled some 8,400 miles by foot, car, bus, train, ship and air to 10 countries: France, Spain, Monaco, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Yugoslavia, Greece, Crete and Israel. I visited or passed through dozens of cities, including Rouen, Tours, Poitiers, Bourdeaux, Biarritz, San Sebastian, Madrid, Seville, Algeciras, Gibraltar, Marbella, Malaga, Valencia, Barcelona, Montpellier, Marseille, Nice, Monaco, Turin, Geneva, Bern, Lucerne, Interlachen, Munich, Belgrade, Thessalonica, Athens, Piraeus, Heraklion, Haifa, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Brindisi, Rome and Florence.
Total cost: $355, which comes to four cents a mile.
What to make of this ridiculously cheap and marvelous adventure? Obviously, I was lucky to stay safe taking scores of rides from complete strangers. Lucky also to experience the best of Europe and its people.
And lucky too in the growth in learning and confidence the trip instilled, which was hugely important in my development as a person.
There was however a dark side: gallivanting through Europe and the Near East while hundreds of thousands of American men my age were fighting and dying in Vietnam.
But I didn’t think of that then. I just thought about getting from one city to the next. Wolf’s arrival at the Autobahn to spirit me away to Israel was like magic. The whole trip and the whole year were like magic.
Travel cheap, see the world, make magic yourself.