The next morning was Saturday November 17. Jen and Sarah were off to the train for Florence. Hopefully I might see them again there. Our other comrades from last night’s dinner had not been in the common room . But I met Morgan there as planned and we decided we’d do the whole ancient imperial Rome thing today.

But first we adjourned to the bakery across the street where they had fresh loaves of Italian bread called “ciabatta”. Not long and thin like French baguettes, but more flat and oval shaped like a deflated football. We each bought one and sat at a table by the front window of the bakery, tearing apart and devouring the warm yeasty, chewy cooked dough. After all this wonderful bread I had had in Europe – soda bread in England, pumpernickel in Germany, baguettes in France and now ciabatta in Italy – I would never be able to go back to eating shitty Wonder bread in the States.

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The next morning, Friday November 16 1973, I was up early at the hostel with a plan. Morgan had visited the Vatican and the Sistine Chapel yesterday, but had been frustrated at the big crowds filling the Chapel by the time he got there. I was determined to get their early, head quickly through the first parts of the museum labyrinth to get to the Chapel as quickly and early as possible.

So I ate whatever remnants of food I had in my pack and headed out to walk to the Vatican, which was not too far from the hostel. With my Rome city map all strategically folded so it showed just the rectangle of streets between me and my destination, I navigated the city’s hodgepodge of streets and arrived at a spot on a small street on the periphery of the sprawling connected Vatican complex of buildings. There was just a small stairway up to a nondescript door. I had anticipated the entrance to the museum would be some ostentatious portico, so I thought I was in the wrong place. There was no one around except for a fairly official looking man standing at the bottom of the small staircase, so I asked him in my minimal Italian where the entrance to the “Museo del Vaticano” was, expecting to have to try and parse directions in Italian to somewhere else, hopefully nearby. He pointed to the door at the top of the little stairway and said that the “Musei Vaticani” (apparently it was considered museums plural) would be open in “quarantacinque minuti”, about forty five minutes.

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It was Wednesday November 14 and the morning sun lit the interior of the Basel train station where I still sat waiting for the train to Rome. I remembered the station from my first day on the Continent six weeks ago, on my own for the first time after I’d just left Angie behind in London that morning. I remembered how intimidating it had been to step off the train at three in the morning in this big place and see all the signs and schedule boards in languages I did not understand, having the challenge of figuring out how to purchase a ticket and board the train to Munich. That had been the beginning of “Phase One” of my odyssey on my own. Now having just concluded “Phase Two” with Steve, I was starting my presumably final “Phase Three” on my own again, feeling now, finally, that the entirety of the odyssey was really doable.

I had said goodbye to Steve yesterday evening in Mulhouse where I had to wait in the train station for the next train from Bar-sur-Aube to bring my passport and rail pass. It was a miracle that the station master had found my documents after they had fallen out of my jacket pocket as I boarded the train. Without that miracle I would probably now be heading back to Paris, to the U.S. embassy to get a new passport and then quickly return to the States, ending my trip several weeks earlier than anticipated. But instead I was headed to Italy, as originally intended, with a new lease on life and fate. The whole loss of my documents experience had chastened me, and made all my continuing issues with homesickness seem not so big a deal.

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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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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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