My first trip to Europe was a summer of independent study in Sweden between my last two years at the Tulane School of Architecture. (Why someone with two architectural degrees is writing for a small-town newspaper and scribing a travel column—let alone a blog—is another story into itself. Maybe I’ll share it with you one day.)

Before I left, I spent weeks of anxious preparation quizzing anyone I knew who’d traveled in the Old World. Everything was going to be so new and exciting to me. I sat up late in Tulane’s Rathskeller (back before the administration renovated the University Center and made the Rat look like a chain sports bar) with my friend Kathy, who’d gone through the Junior Year Abroad program in France, and Susan, who was JYA in England. I picked the brain of my pal Nile, who lived in Ireland part of his life.

I prepped about as much as I could. The travels ahead of me, though, were still basically unknown. Fortunately, I was in the good hands of Curt, a Swedish guy I’d met when he was traveling around the U.S. on a Greyhound bus pass.

Here’s the back story: Curt had encountered Joe, the brother of my old school friend Rick, in San Diego. He visited Joe in Dallas, then was sent on to stay with Rick in San Antonio. One day Rick called me and said, “Joe met a guy from Sweden in San Diego who’d like to come visit New Orleans. Can he stay with you?” “Sure,” I said. I always enjoyed meeting Europeans, ever since I was a kid. But it was early on a Thursday morning when Rick called, my one sleep-late weekday, so I fell back to sleep and forgot all about it. Fortunately, I had the forethought to give Rick the phone numbers of several friends on my residence hall floor.

About two weeks later, on a Friday night, I returned from dinner at the Loyola University dining hall (it was cheaper back then for Tulane students on a meal plan to eat at neighboring Loyola than at our own meal plan. The food was better, too). Ron, one of the guys who lived next door, immediately popped into the hallway when he heard me opening my door. “Some guy from Sweden called,” he said. “Well, I think he was from Sweden. I couldn’t understand him. But he’ll be here in 20 minutes.”

Like a banshee I quickly straightened up my room. Fortunately, I like things (basically) tidy, so it was pretty easy. Just as I returned from carrying a bag of trash to the bin down the hall, there was a knock on my door, exactly 20 minutes after Ron had delivered the message. I opened it and there was a tall, cliché blond guy with a backpack and a friendly smile.

“Hallo, my name is Curt,” he said in that lilting accent of the Scandinavians. We became fast friends instantly.

Now, fast-forward about two years to the summer of 1980. Tulane’s architecture program had a summer study requirement for our last two summers of the five-year course of study. You could either study some aspect of architecture domestically or internationally, or you could work with an architectural or construction firm. I was on my last summer, having worked the previous summer with a roofing contracting company which, by sheerest of coincidences, was owned and operated by my father. (Needless to say I got a stellar review from my supervisor.)

After Curt (who, by the way, used to abbreviate his name “Qrt”) visited me for a week in New Orleans, he did more travel up the eastern seaboard (visiting my aunt, uncle and cousins in North Carolina en route) and then, as I’d finished the school year and returned home, stayed with my family and me in rural northwestern New Jersey for another week. (Where he also suffered for the first time in his travels a bout of homesickness, and our area of the country is, very much indeed, reminiscent of his homeland, as I soon learned.)

After two visits with me, he was quick to offer an invitation to visit Sweden. Sweden had never been high on my list of places to see in Europe, but I was keen to go anywhere in the old country, and having someone to show me around a new culture and land was a great incentive. My parents had been planning to give me a plane ticket to Europe as a graduation present, but when I told them I could get school study credit for going early, they agreed to advance the gift a year.

I submitted a purposefully vaguely worded proposal to study something about “Swedish domestic architecture” and “Swedish community planning.” The faculty board that reviewed such requests was apparently more pleased that a student was venturing out of the country and intent on experiencing a new culture and overlooked the vagueness of the proposal. It was approved wholeheartedly.

And thus, as the school year wound to a close, I found myself furiously taking notes in the dimly-lit Rathskeller (which we affectionately called The Rat) as Kathy waxed enthusiastically about her experiences in France.

Which kind of brings me to the point of this blog, which is to say, when planning your travels, particularly if you’re going abroad, don’t hesitate to pick the brains of those who have gone before you. All of us who’ve traveled love to relate our stories. Some of us get a little verbose, but when you travel, you’ll find out why, and will be permitted some verboseness of your own when you get back.

And if you really want to some good travel advice about planning independent travels, I just found out this morning that I’ll be instructing my “Europe Bound” travel seminar as a three-night, 6-hour, program at Okaloosa-Walton College in the spring of ’08. Mark February 13, 20 and 27 on your calendars, 4-6 p.m. each day. It’s part of OWC’s “Prime Time” education program. The catalog will be out soon, I’m told.

But if you don’t want to take the seminar, just shoot me an e-mail with your Europe travel question(s) and I’ll do my best to give you a sensible answer. ‘Cuz I love to blab about traveling! My address is brianh@crestviewbulletin.com

Next time: Some of my experiences during that first trip to Europe

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