It was late morning on Sunday November 11 1973 when Steve and I left the Rue Titon hostel in Paris and its coterie of vivacious young female types, including foxy, flirtatious though racist Jeanette, who worked at the hostel desk and railed against the supposed scourge of criminal Algerians in Paris. Turns out, besides being Sunday, it was Armistice Day, a big French holiday to celebrate the day in 1918 when the French and German governments agreed to stop slaughtering each other’s young soldiers on the battlefield and finally put a stop to World War One. We had originally planned to stay in Paris one more day, but since the museums would all be closed, we decided we might as well depart. We also heard there was a “food strike”, but no details on what that was.

We were hitchhiking east towards Basel Switzerland, and it was going to be the swansong of our travels together. We had met three weeks ago in Paris, traveled through Spain and back to Paris. Steve was headed to Bern Switzerland to see if he could get a visa to stay and work in the country. I was headed for Geneva Switzerland and then on to Italy. Both our paths went through Basel, and since the dry mild weather seemed to be holding for now, Steve convinced me to hitch with him there before we went our separate ways.

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On Thursday November 8 1973 Steve and I left the hotel where Walter had put us up for the night after picking us up hitchhiking just outside Hendaye in southwestern France and driving us some 800 kilometers all the way to our destination of Paris. Along the way he had treated us to the most extensive and expensive meal either of us had had since leaving the States. He had been such a gracious and giving host, but also had revealed to us in conversation just this morning, his right-wing political orientation including sympathies for Adolf Hitler, whose army he had fought in as a young adult soldier during World War Two. I was still struggling to reconcile all that, him taking us under his wing and into his confidence for the day. Did he really think we shared his pro capitalism, pro Hitler, anti communism worldview? Since he spoke only with Steve, in German, had Steve said something that made him think we agreed with his worldview? Or did he finally just get comfortable enough with us to drop his guard and share his honest feelings?

I broached the topic with Steve as soon as we exited the hotel.

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Our train left the Madrid central train station a little after 10:30pm on Wednesday November 7 1973, headed north to the French border. From there my travel partner Steve and I planned to hitchhike back to Paris, where we had met each other three weeks ago. After spending a couple more days in the French capital together, we would finally go our separate ways having traveled together through Spain for the past three weeks. He to Switzerland to look for work to extend his stay before returning to the States. Me on to Italy to continue seeing the sites.

I was ready for us to part company. Back when we met, I had been so lonely, homesick and with very low morale, and the two of us had quickly bonded, really enjoying each other’s company. Now, though we had been through a lot together, there was more of a competitiveness to our relationship, and I felt like he was treating me more like a younger brother with whom a strong sibling rivalry prevailed. Of course when I said no to his request to have sex with me, that was certainly a big change point. At this moment, though still homesick, I was feeling much better about letting the last month of my travels play out, and traveling again on my own, before returning home to the States in mid December.

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It was an overnight train to Madrid and we used it to save the cost of a night’s lodging. Having boarded at its starting point in Malaga Sunday night November 4, we had managed to score seats on one side of a compartment, with no one ending up sitting between us, giving us room to at least recline a bit and try to get some sleep. The elderly couple sitting across from us were doing the same, and I thought it was cute how they cuddled with each other and smiled at Steve and I as we tried to find comfortable positions at opposite sides of our bench, not cuddling with each other. In the early morning hours, when we came into Cordoba, the couple debarked and we got even luckier as no one else boarded and took their seats. So we each took a side, stretched out and I got a reasonably good rest of the night’s rest, presumably Steve too.

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It was Wednesday October 31 when we left behind our hotel in Granada and Steve’s sexual proposition to me, to hopefully move on. I was still of course pondering it in my thoughts, how I had perhaps come close to actually agreeing, and if I had done so, how different the world would be today and going forward.

Too different! Would I return to the States the triumphant traveler who was now no longer a virgin because, of all people, I had had sex with another guy. I don’t think I could tell anybody. Certainly not my family or even my closest friends. Of course there was no danger they would ever find out. It would just be something I had tried, experimented with, outside of everyone’s view, my little secret. But would it be a secret, like Joey’s betrayal and Mrs Rood’s scolding of my sexual feelings for my classmate Mary, that I would have to bottle up inside and stew about and perhaps further hinder my development in that area. Would I be again concerned that I was some sort of sexual deviant. With every passing day I was more happy I had said no, if nothing else, my life was much less complicated.

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Monday October 29, some 20 hours after we boarded the overcrowded train in Benicarlo it finally arrived in Granada. We had spent the last couple hours sharing a compartment with two of our backpacker cohort, American guys like us headed for this beautiful old city nestled in the hills of the south of the country. When we got to our destination they headed off in their own direction, it was just Steve and I.

Spain continued to be true to its billing as heaven for thrifty travellers. We bought delicious freshly baked pastries at a storefront bakery for just five pesetas each, which was just ten cents U.S. Dinner with Paella, real steak, and wine for just 110 pesetas ($2 U.S.) And finally the hotel room, with two beds, tile floor and a small balcony with a stone railing and a great view of the Alhambra on the hill across town, just 160 pesetas ($3 U.S.) Real easy to eat well and sleep in nice lodgings and still stay close to that six dollars a day budget! So we were living relatively high on the hog for a while, including a bottle of wine with most non-breakfast meals. We spent the rest of the day doing nuts and bolts things like buying groceries, cashing traveler’s checks, washing some clothes (we actually found a laundromat this time), and writing and mailing postcards. These things, in a foreign land where you don’t speak the language, often turned into a logistical challenge that took all day.

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Thursday October 25 was our last morning in Barcelona. The sun pushed its way through the narrow window of our room in the little pension, inspiring us to get up early and enjoy getting out in its bounty of heat and illumination one last time in our beautiful old Gothic Quarter neighborhood of bricks and stone. Our plan was to try to hitchhike south to Granada. If I had been traveling on my own I would have used my rail pass to take the train, but Steve did not have one, and he wanted to avoid the expense of the train if at all possible given his limited funds. I certainly appreciated that, having very limited funds myself, beyond that key asset of the pass. To have a continuing travel partner, at least for now, I was happy to go with the flow, whatever the universe presented as the way forward.

Steve and I bypassed our hosts’ little breakfast pastry spread for the moment, and went out to the little grocery store across the plaza from our pension and picked up supplies for our anticipated day on the road. I noted the prices in my journal…

Spanish sardines in oil 10 pst
4 (125cl) tubs of strawberry yogurt 32 pst
2 glazed donuts 10 pst
Biscuit cookies 9 pst
100 gm cheese 22 pst
2 bananas 9 pst
6 smallish tomatoes 3.5 pst
1 liter of Coca Cola 15 pst
Total 110.5 pst

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It was mid afternoon on Monday October 22 when Zo and Randall’s beat up old VW van, having survived the thorough going over by Spanish customs, finally entered the eastern port city of Barcelona, my travel partner Steve’s and my destination. Our hosts for the journey had picked us up about 100 kilometers south of Paris and given us the longest single ride I had had to date hitchhiking. With lots of hugs and emotion, our two fellow traveler hippieesque Canadians parted company with us there, with their plan to continue down the coast to the south of Spain for an intended crossing over to Morocco in North Africa.

Zo wrapped her arms around my waist and pressed her short stocky body against mine for a long hug, her wild explosion of red hair, somewhat constrained by her ever present red Canadian flag headband with the white maple leaf, again gently and now familiarly tickling my chin and cheek. She glanced up at me and ever so subtly shook her head and grinned, the reason for that minuscule head shake tantalizingly unknown, her eyes now not heavy with fatigue like they’d been last night when she suggested we sleep, not “together” in a sexual sense, but next to each other. As we momentarily held the embrace, it struck me how connected I felt to this person that I had only known since yesterday, and how much I was going to miss her company. Though I had always been shy about any physical intimacy with women, Zo had made me almost instantly comfortable with her and I had had no discomfort sleeping very close to her last night, with our clothes on and sandwiched between our travel companions. I realized my trepidation really was in initiating the physical intimacy, but if circumstances led obviously in that direction, or my partner initiated it, I had no problem being intimate, and really enjoyed it. If only we were in a world that was not so male driven and women were more comfortable initiating more intimacy, it would be a boon to a shy male type like me.

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So Sunday morning October 21, Steve and I hoisted our packs and walked from the Rue Titon hostel to the main highway that headed out of Paris south towards Lyon, and stuck out our thumbs. I was a bit wistful to leave Giselle and her striking daughter Laurence behind, but was happy to have my new travel partner at my side. He seemed a good companion, a bit more extroverted than me, smart, funny and even-keeled, and all with low ego. I hadn’t seen him have the bouts of moodiness and withdrawal that had overtaken my last travel partner Jack.

Standing on the side of a big Paris thoroughfare packed with cars zipping past and lots of pedestrians as well briskly walking by us on the wide sidewalk, I wasn’t sure anyone would pull over and give us a ride. But someone finally did. A young guy, one of our cohort with his own long hair and bell bottom pants, driving one of the funkiest beat up runty little cars I had had the occasion to see in either Europe or the States. Later when I asked him, he told me with a dose of hippie pride that it was a Citroen “deux chevaux”. I knew enough French to figure out that that meant “two horses”, and I was ready to believe that the little engine, sounding more like a lawnmower under the front hood, might only be two horsepower (it was actually just nine). It was the cutest little ugly duckling of a car, his with a canvass rollback sunroof a lot worse for wear, which was closed on that crisp October day. Steve sat in the front passenger seat next to our host and driver while I sat in the semblance of a backseat squeezed next to our two backpacks taking up most of the space.

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It was Friday October 18, a long month into my odyssey and finally a gorgeous fall day after too much cold and rain over the past couple weeks. It never ceased to amaze me how much Mother Nature and her climatic moods influenced, even controlled, my own. A sunny day could assuage a lot. From atop the cupola of Sacre Coeur, I looked down at central Paris, my loneliness also medicated somewhat by the previous evening spent with Giselle, Paul and the stunning Laurence. Just somewhat.

As I stood alone on the observation deck and my eyes looked off at the city in the distance, my mind looked off into my future in the distance as well. After I visited Angelica in Tubingen I figured I would have about five more weeks, to go to Spain and Italy and end up in maybe Vienna. Once I got there I would have it licked, and could arguably say that I had seen Western Europe, and make my way back to England, maybe by way of Amsterdam, and then back home to the States. Of course, it felt a bit unnerving to be planning all this further travel when part of me just wanted to hop on a train and get my ass back to England and then fly back home as quickly as possible. I pondered whether to continue to consider that option of bailing, was undermining my coping with my situation, or perhaps instead providing a helpful escape valve.

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