Vol. 25: No country for old tourists

The traveling Rottenbergs hit a speed bump in their European road

         For nearly 30 years, our family’s summer vacations have revolved around my need to show up each June in the village of Talloires on Lake Annecy in the French Alps for an annual foundation meeting. My own relationship with that magical spot stretches back much further, to 1952, when I spent the first of three life-changing summers at a remarkable international camp operated by Donald and Charlotte MacJannet, radical educators who believed that learning should not merely be fun but should be downright spectacular. Their acolytes subsequently created the MacJannet Foundation, an incubator of innovative ideas for building a better world by enhancing individual human potential. So when I was invited to join the board in 1994, I jumped at the chance to return to Lake Annecy every year.

         (To answer your obvious question: Yes, it’s a nasty job. But somebody has to do it.)

         Over the years, Barbara and I have customarily spent a week or so in Talloires, which has become as familiar to us as, say, the Hamptons are to New Yorkers or the Jersey shore is to Philadelphians. Sometimes we’ve rented a house there with our children and grandchildren. But once that week is over, our great joy is to climb into our rental car, just the two of us, to spend a few weeks exploring the countryside— usually in France, but sometimes in Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Austria, or Germany. Wherever we found ourselves at day’s end, we could consult the Guide Michelin’s “red book,” confident that the simplest inn or restaurant listed there would provide decent lodging and a memorable meal. Throughout those years, we’ve steadfastly resisted packaged tours and river cruises, seeking instead the serendipitous pleasure of spontaneous encounters with “real” people rather than tourists like us.

Spray-painting slogans

         In that respect, at least, our latest two-week trip last month was typical. In a restaurant in Nancy we met a young Chinese techie from Hong Kong, and the following night we encountered a Dutch couple who were midway through a 900-mile bike trip from Arles in the south of France to their home in Gouda, Holland. That same night we came across two young men spray-painting anti-police slogans on a wall behind the Nancy Cathedral.

         In the village of Ay in the Champagne country, we stumbled upon a Sunday art tour and bought a local artist’s fanciful work constructed from parts of a very old piano (a subject dear to my piano-teacher wife’s heart). Walking around Ay’s narrow streets, we also discovered the Pressoria, a mind-blowing virtual guided tour through the history and creation of champagne.

         But something was different on this journey: a dismaying realization that times have changed, and so have we.  

         This was our second trip to France after a two-year COVID hiatus. On both outings, I feel in retrospect, we tended to take our eyes off the ball— assuming, wrongly, that our customary routines still work as they once did.

Adjusting to rental cars

         Everything in France and Switzerland— our destinations on this trip— seems increasingly automated. These systems are indeed ingenious, once you’ve figured them out. At the Park Hotel in Rheinfelden, Switzerland, for example, each guest is given a blue plastic wristband which, with a simple tap, provides instant entrée to the pool, the spa, the exercise room, the sauna, the changing rooms, and any of the hotel’s other extensive facilities.

         But if you have only a few days to get up to speed… .and you were born in 1942….  and you’re behind the technology curve to begin with… a simple task like connecting to Wi-Fi, or making a call from your mobile phone, or charging your laptop or shaver with the appropriate French or Swiss electric converters, or deciphering the symbols on your car’s dashboard, or retrieving your car from a parking garage, or even retrieving your clothes from a swimming pool locker, can become a major challenge.

         Every new rental car requires adjusting to, and this time we had to adjust to two cars, because the first one blew a tire on our first day. GPS is a wonderful device for getting around, when it works. When it doesn’t, as happened late one Sunday night in the deserted outskirts of Epernay— and when you’ve neglected to provide a backup, like a paper road map— we’re reduced to nervous wrecks.

         As for our beloved Guide Michelin, it has mostly gone digital and now emphasizes restaurants rather than lodgings. That’s not much help when it’s 6 p.m. and you’re in your car without Wi-Fi.

Wheeled suitcases, digital keys

         More so than in the past, we seemed to be misplacing things— a room key, a tote bag, a watch, a toothbrush, pens, a magazine. Everything turned up eventually, but this time these petty annoyances magnified our sense of lost control.

         Remember the wheeled suitcases that revolutionized travel when they were first introduced in the ‘90s? Barbara and I used to say that they added 20 years to our lives. Well, more than 20 years have passed and we’re still dragging those original suitcase models through airports and hotels while everyone else is bopping along with lighter upright models that glide along beside you.

         And you know the way smart digital keys revolutionized auto travel by enabling you to unlock or start your car just by thinking about it? I discovered the downside in Switzerland when I accidentally dropped our key and it broke into three pieces. We’d probably still be there if the hotel desk clerk hadn’t successfully reassembled it.

Avoiding airport security

         Thanks to 9/11 and then COVID, every passage through an airport has become a slog of seemingly endless security checks. If you change planes in, say, London or Paris, you must repeat that aggravating process all over again. Talloires is less than hour’s drive from the Geneva airport, but there are no direct flights to Geneva from our home in Philadelphia. Rather than change planes, we usually fly to Paris and then spend a few days driving the 400 miles to Talloires, a road trip that used to heighten our anticipation of returning once again to Lake Annecy. These past two years, we even splurged in order to fly business class, where the seats convert to beds, thus enabling us to get a passable night’s sleep before doing all that driving the next day.

But spending so much money or frequent flyer miles so you can drive all that distance on a monotonous autoroute in a car that blows its tire after 200 miles and leaves you stranded, frantically phoning the police and the car rental company on a cell phone whose battery is rapidly expiring— it’s become the sort of adventure we can do without.

         Bottom line: We spent some 50 years mastering the art of European travel modes that are today largely obsolete.

Escape from Soviet tyranny

         What’s the solution? I know one Philadelphia couple who’ve given up travel altogether. As for Barbara and me, we no longer scoff at the idea of a river cruise— a floating hotel on, say, the Danube from Budapest to Amsterdam, where some younger, tech-savvy grownups relieve you of all your sightseeing and meal planning and baggage handling and technological needs.

         Better still for folks like us, all this new technology requires the presence of a confident and knowledgeable child or grandchild. As those American Express ads used to say: Don’t leave home without one.

         If you’re wondering what Barbara and I were doing in Switzerland: We were visiting my cousins who escaped from Czechoslovakia during the Soviet invasion of 1968, with barely the clothes on their backs. Today, when the once-mighty Soviet Union is merely an unpleasant memory, my cousins have established themselves as fully assimilated Swiss citizens, mostly around Basel and Zurich. Their ranks include pediatricians, dentists, a banker, and a UNICEF official. For the past few years, I’ve been taping their memories of that ’68 getaway, when their patriarch, a respected lawyer in Bratislava, declared, “I will wash dishes if my daughters can live in freedom.”

         It’s an inspiring story— as well as a useful reminder that our own difficulties pale by comparison. An annual visit to Europe puts things into perspective, which is why we keep returning.

Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s new memoir, The Education of a Journalist: My Seventy Years on the Frontiers of Free Speech. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com