Doug Mack took a trip to Europe, but instead of bringing a current guidebook like a normal person, he brought a 1963 copy of Europe on $5 a Day. Thinking this might be a bit limited, he also brought the postcards his mother wrote to her fiance (Mack's father) during her 1967 trip to Europe.
He didn't try to live on $5 a day. He wasn't on a marathon or a gimicky challenge so much as he wanted to see how travel had changed in a half century, and how it had not changed.
Mack's adventures are mostly low-key, and he's a pleasant and observant travel companion. His experiences in 2009, along with the perspectives of his mother in 1967, and Arthur Frommer in 1963 add up to a very entertaining book. Mack found that the old guide book was often a good conversation starter, and really lucked out in Rome, when the desk clerk in a recommended hotel recalled the book and reminisced about when Elizabeth Taylor ("Do you know Elizabeth Taylor?") and Richard Burton popped in to avoid the paparazzi.
Americans traveling to Europe now are not as disconnected from home as they were half a century ago. Phoning home was a time-consuming and expensive business. Postcards might take a couple of weeks to arrive home, and letters from home came to centrally-located American Express offices. Mack tried to maintain that sense of distance by restricting his internet use to posting new entries to his travel blog, and letting his email go unopened.
Mack found a lot had changed since 1963. Most of Frommer's listed hotels, bed & breakfasts, and restaurants were gone and the ones that remained were no longer budget options. Frommer's choice of seventeen cities to cover left out cities that are very popular today (such as Prague and Barcelona), either because they were difficult to visit due to the Iron Curtain or simply weren't in vogue yet. Berlin had a wall in 1963, but in 2009, Mack found the American and East German soldiers at Checkpoint Charlie were actors playing roles and spoke with Russian and North African accents when they demanded tips for photos.
To round out the travel narrative, Mack includes some history of American tourism to Europe, the evolution of guidebooks, Frommer's success story, and how politics has affected the travel decisions of Americans.
As an alumna of the backpackers of 1976, I thoroughly enjoyed joining Mack, his mom, and Frommer on their trips. My guidebook of choice back then was Let's Go, but in subsequent trips have used Frommer's and Fodor's. It never occurred to me to use a decades-old guide book, but maybe it isn't such a bad idea after all. Maybe I'll try this one -
1936-- On the Continent by Eugene Fodor.
