I am going on a virtual trip

Anyone want to join me? My sister suggested I take a virtual cruise somewhere and report on it. Especially the cuisine. Well, I thought about it and I just couldn’t get anything going. Then I started thinking about my first trip to Europe and decided to dig into my teenage musings of Travels with Grandma. Maybe I can turn that into something.

When I was 16 my Grandmother Dailey (my Daddy’s mom) took me on a 4 month tour of Europe. She wanted to go back to the Old Country as she and my daddy called Czechoslovakia. I don’t know if she really wanted my company. She told me a few months into our journey that she brought me to make a lady out of me. But I think she really needed help. She was way old. 70! I thought she was ancient. But she was pretty mobile for her years. As it turned out she could out walk me almost every day of our trip. But I was strong and I had a drivers license. She wanted to buy a car and drive from Germany to Czechoslovakia and maybe Austria and Hungary. For that she needed help. I was the oldest of her grandchildren and in some ways the most malleable so I was designated as the traveling companion. 

We made plans. We poured over Frommer’s $5 a Day tour guide of Europe. The original plan was that we would take the S.S. France from New York to Le Havre. I started acquiring a wardrobe for travel on a ship. It seemed so romantic and exciting. I read Our Hearts Were Young and Gay, by Emily Kimbrough and Cornelia Otis Skinner. About their wild (?) adventure to Europe in the 1920’s. I was ready! 

Then Grandma found a charter flight from Los Angeles to Rome that was so much cheaper than the travel she had originally planned. It was with St. Anthony’s Catholic Church in Los Angeles. A mostly Italian congregation. At that time charters were becoming very popular. All you needed was membership in some kind of affinity group and you could get to Europe fairly cheaply. I am thinking that at that time our round trip tickets were about $300 for each of us. Not bad. Of course my mother tried to throw a wrench in the gears. She was terrified of flying. She wasn’t going to have me fly. But wiser counsel prevailed and the trip was on again. So at the beginning of May, 1965, we drove to the Imperial Terminal at LAX and met our couple hundred fellow travelers. The terminal may have been the original terminal at LAX but by then it was just a little low building that charters flew from. It was an interesting assortment of people. Mostly I heard Italian being spoken. There were a lot of families. Young families who were going to Italy for the first time since the mother or father had emigrated to America. Going home to show off the wife or husband and the grandchildren. It was pretty exciting and emotional. And there was the priest who was leading this group. I cannot remember his name. but he was bustling hither and thither, calming people, checking papers. 

We got on the plane. It was a TransInternational Airlines plane. Pretty sure it was a Boeing 707. We sat in rows 3 by 3. I got the window seat and Grandma had the middle seat. A woman in her late twenties or early thirties sat next to Grandma. She was from Italy. Her husband was staying at home while she flew to see her parents. She was so excited. I think for a lot of people it was their first airplane flight and their first trip back home. We all settled into our seats while the stewardesses, in their vaguely military looking uniforms, explained all the safety procedures. Somethings never change. They were a very nice group of attendants. Someone asked them about how many people could fly on plane that size. I really don’t remember the numbers but she said that we were no where near full capacity. That they flew soldiers to Vietnam and could cram in another 100 or so seats at least and fly them with all their gear. Seemed almost impossible to believe. (And this was several months before the conflict was officially called a War)

I was a little anxious as we took off. My mother’s fears kind of rubbed off on me. But once we were up in the air it was just too exciting to hang onto being scared. I watched as we passed over East L.A., the mountains, and across the deserts. Somewhere along the way we were served a meal. I do not remember what it was. I suspect it was chicken. I do know I liked it even though it seemed a little meager. Halfway across the U.S. some of the babies onboard needed to take naps. Out came slings which the stewardess strung up beneath the overhead bins. It was amazing. I think there were about six of them. In went the babies and quiet ensued. Grandma and the lady talked quite a bit. This was the first time I heard Grandma discuss her marital status with people. Her name was Anna Marie Dailey. She was Mrs. Dailey. Her seat companion asked where Mr. Dailey was. Grandma said he died. Well! Technically she was right. He had died in 1961. But I knew Grandma had been divorced from Grandpa. She left him in the thirties. Grandpa had waited until his strictly Irish Catholic mother had died in the late forties before getting a divorce based on desertion, I assume. But flying with this group made it important for Grandma to appear to be a respectable widow, not a vulgar divorcee. And I kept my mouth shut. I’m glad I did. 

We left L.A. around 11 a.m. and arrived in NYC in the evening. We had to take chartered buses from one airport to another. Not sure if we went from JFK to La Guardia or the other way around. All I do remember is that when we boarded the Sabena Airlines plane we were greeted by a MALE attendant who offered us wrapped hard candies. We thought it oh so elegant. We settled in and after taking off we were served a light meal of a roll and a shrimp salad and some kind of dessert. It was a little disappointing because we were hungry. But the shrimp salad was kind of classy so there was a minimum of grumbling. Of course, as it turned out, that was not the whole meal. While we were busy scarfing down the salad, roll and dessert, the cabin crew had been busy heating up the filet mignon. We felt kind of silly when we realized what was going on. It was pretty tasty as I recall. My first shrimp salad, my first filet mignon. Yum! Then we settled in for the next few hours flight to Brussels where we would refuel and fly on to Rome.