Previously: Euro Pilgrimage ’85, Ch. 8: At long last, glorious beer in Salzburg and Munich.
Air travel digression: I wasn’t a very good flier 40 years ago. Given my lack of experience in the air (and by extension, with life itself), this was understandable.
Up until 1985 I’d made only two round-trip flights ever. The first one came as a young boy in a prop plane from Louisville to Detroit. We taxied and taxied, and famously I asked the adults if we’d be flying, or driving.
Alas, this did not foretell a career in standup comedy.
The second time was in 1978, to San Francisco and back via Dallas during Christmas season. It was unpleasant in the extreme, and I’d have benefitted from sedation.
My problem wasn’t an aversion to enclosed spaces, or disgust with the free-range Hare Krishna devotees who still roamed airports during those unenlightened times, but a fear of heights. This continues to plague me sporadically to this very day, even though I’ve gotten far better managing it.
Consequently, the prospect of leaving on a jet plane for Europe instigated a fair share of anxiety. Everything about the flight made me nervous, and worse yet, I’d gotten absolutely hammered in Chicago the night before the flight.
Boarding Icelandair for Luxembourg via Reykjavik to embark upon the long-awaited adventure of a lifetime, I was brutally hungover, debilitated and seemingly immune to the hair of the dog, constitutionally and existentially challenged, and with certain doom lurking just around the corner.
Was it too late to call the whole thing off? At least there was a bright side. I wasn’t seated in the smoking section, which in those days still existed to the rear of the plane.
Using the toilet meant cutting through a solid wall of cigarette smoke; obviously, one couldn’t just step outside the plane for a breath of fresh air. Later I realized that for an addict, being deprived of nicotine stood greatly to exacerbate the sort of irrational fears gripping me, with the added joys of withdrawal of the sort I’d mercifully never experience because I didn’t smoke cigarettes.
However, the Rubicon was ripe for crossing. After the usual pleasantries, instructions and delays, we took off and reached cruising altitude. The trip was inexorable and irreversible. Europe finally was coming, and I could feel the level of stress slowly ebbing. Then there was a random act of turbulence, and the plane abruptly took a big, swooping roller coaster dip.
“WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE” (scrolled the internal message board inside my brain).
Pulse skyrocketing, heart pushed into my throat, and with a panic attack about to ensue, I had the presence of mind to look around the cabin, where dozens of fellow passengers were snacking, reading, talking and napping, utterly serene and oblivious to what for them was yawningly commonplace.
Relief yielded to chagrin as I worried whether anyone else had seen me lose my composure.
In short, my lifetime of naïve underachievement passed before my eyes in a flash, and yet it was a good lesson for a Hoosier deadbeat: Fake it until you can make it ― stop, look, listen and imitate. I tried mightily to apply this philosophy once back on the ground, and during the four decades since.
In fact, I became a better flier fairly quickly. By the 1990s, transatlantic flights became something I anticipated with pleasure, as I’d have worked myself into a frenzy to prepare for my absence from the pub business, then once aloft could untether, relax and not be bothered. Nowadays these commuting hours in the air have become sacred times for decompression and meditation. Truly, I’ve come a long way in this regard.
Just don’t expect me to watch one of those videos of someone doing handstands atop the Burj Khalifa, or climbing the Half Dome in Yosemite while playing the spoons. Those people are bat-guano crazy exhibitionists, and I’m perfectly content to remain earthbound most of the time.
—
As noted previously, one of the factors that most influenced my resolve to spend three months in Europe in 1985 was an absolutely debilitating level of self-doubt. It’s nice enough knowing you’re capable of connecting with reality just barely enough to get by, but sheer hell being bright enough to realize you’re doing nothing and going nowhere.
Should I return to university and get my public school teaching credits? What about law school? I’d done relatively well on the LSAT. Maybe get a real job at last, instead of stringing together part-time gigs?
To reiterate, it was a luxury to have so much time for dawdling rumination. Then as now, it matters to be aware of my good fortune in life.
When I was 24, there were no wars to be drafted into fighting, no nearby mines with coal for extracting with a pickaxe, and no babies with little mouths to feed. I worked, ate, drank and slept alone, because it hadn’t yet occurred to me that the opposite sex’s interest in getting to know me just might be enhanced by me knowing something positive about myself.
Looking back, it’s quite clear that once I’d made the decision to spend time in Europe, it was necessary to up the conceptual ante. Travel was a legitimate fork in the road for me, but I wasn’t randomly encountered. Rather, it was self-engineered, and I’d never spent so much time working toward something tangible.
Traveling simply had to be an act of self-redemption. There was no fallback strategy, apart from returning home and following meekly into a mundane world of home, car, job and Indiana University basketball games. I had to jump and trust the parachute would open, fear of heights be damned.
And so, I did.
It cannot be denied that I’m a slow learner and a late bloomer. The 1985 journey was about delayed fundamentals, overdue basics, and meticulously growing into a framework for interpretation of what came afterward.
Subsequently I witnessed the collapse of the post-war European order, stumbled into a career in beer, experienced the transformational impact of the wider-wired world, raised my fair share of hell, learned, fought, loved, lost and even won, albeit on widely scattered occasions.
Now, through all the years and all the beers, a 65th birthday approaches. There is enough time on the clock for new adventures, although I wish the ticking wasn’t so bloody loud.
—
The way from Le Havre’s rail terminus to the port city’s preposterously cluttered dockside was signposted, but only barely. Considering the impact of the fearsomely irksome French tongue on my fragile youthful psyche, the route might as well have been entirely unmarked.
Predictably, the tourist office was closed for a lengthy midday break, but I glanced at a city map someone had haphazardly Scotch-taped to the window, and made a few mental notes, plotting my own way to the sea by winding through the streets toward a jumble of cranes visible on the skyline.
Soon enough there was a larger thoroughfare, and then directions in English posted for the benefit of British lorry drivers. After that, it was easy.
All the while, a youthful backpacker seemed to be following me, always a half block behind, displaying the usual signs of confused timidity, trying his best to look oblivious by gazing first at his shoes, then toward the rooftops, and otherwise averting his eyes whenever I paused to study the streetscape.
It was comical, but seeing him fidget made me think: It was July, almost two months into my first trip to Europe. Could it be that I’d already earned the right to look into the rear view mirror?
That other kid behind me appeared to be just as uncertain of the route as I was, but had decided that somehow, in some unknown way, I actually knew what I was doing, and where I was going. He was placing his trust in me, a foolish American tourist; as it turned out, two of them.
But I was leading, and he was following. Earlier in the summer ― in fact, for most of my life up to that point ― it would have been the other way around. Processing this turnabout would require more thinking, and probably more drinking.
Meanwhile, Le Havre was no garden spot. Rather, it was the required linking point to oceanic access, because after connecting all the land (and one river) transport dots on my itinerary map since Vienna, I’d finally run out of continent on the pathway to Ireland, which was a very important goal for me in 1985.
Later that day when I joined the backpackers’ queue in Le Havre for the ferry ride to Rosslare, it occurred to me that only five days had passed since the last night of revelry in Munich, where my cousin Don Barry had assisted in the enjoyment of fine continental summer days and nights amid beer, pork and pervasive Gemütlichkeit.
Staying at separate hotels, long before mobile devices and with no real interest in trying to learn how to use local phones, which cost money otherwise devoted to beer, we’d prearranged everything around periodic meetings at the Gleis 16 Imbiss in the Hauptbahnhof, where solid and liquid sustenance could be acquired at intervals between long Munich walks.
One afternoon was given over to the city’s art museums, and another for a hike to the Nymphenburg palace. Evenings were the domain of the Mathäser beer hall. Since the next stages of the itinerary would take me back to Paris, and then on to Ireland, and seeing as these places were particular passions of Don’s, Munich offered a final chance to pick his brain, a task always best pursued with Leberkäse and Helles.
So we did, and it was glorious, although it disappointed Don that the all-you-can-drink Löwenbräu brewery tours were no longer being offered.
From Munich, I caught a train to the city of Mainz and walked from the station to the bank of the Rhine River, where the boats awaited. The plan was to ride one of them to Koblenz, then debark and travel by rail to Köln.
By the time of arrival there, it would be late in the evening, and I’d hop an overnight train to Paris, arriving in the best possible position early in the morning to cherry-pick from the cheap summertime hostels located in temporarily abandoned university dorms.
(Or did I follow this route? A scrap of paper that survived the trip charts this day differently: A train from Munich to Strasbourg in France, then another to Koblenz; riding the boat upriver to Mainz, debarking, and doubling back through Koblenz to Köln by rail. This itinerary would have made sense only if the boat schedules made direct connections downriver impossible ― and I suppose it’s plausible. But Strasbourg?)
I’ll grant that it wasn’t a particularly novel idea to take a Rhine cruise. However, the early July weather was ideal and the riverside scenery truly gorgeous.
There was a succession of tidy, well-ordered towns, surrounded by vineyards perched on slopes, accented with church spires, with manicured castle ruins atop adjacent promontories. At every bend came another postcard photo opportunity, and this posed the usual problem, because I’m one of the world’s worst photographers.
I should have been buying postcards of these “sights” and using my limited film to take informal pictures of actual people and their milieu, but this somehow never occurred to me. All I could think about was how Europe looked, when the more important consideration was how it felt, and with whom I was sharing the feeling, whether a short-term travel companion or a random passerby.
For use in Europe, I’d bought a trusty, fully manual Pentax K-1000 and brought a lead-lined pouch filled with cheap and slow film enough to (hopefully) last the whole trip. The pouch was conventional wisdom as a precaution against intemperate x-ray machines at the airport, which may or may not have been necessary. I’d shot a couple rolls of film before departure, and learned as I went, rationing exposures and eschewing spontaneity.
Looking back from the vantage point of today’s unlimited digital world, it’s absiolutely unfathomable. In 2025 there exists no compelling reason to refrain from taking literally thousands of photos, as saved in a space the size of a newt’s eye, and editing as you go. Nowadays I cull a few dozen to post on social media, and relegate the remainder to the archives.
In 1985, I returned home from Europe with 20 or more rolls of film, containing hundreds of photos, for which I spent hundreds more in dollars developing the film not into prints, which would have made a modicum of sense, but slides, because I refused to settle for photo albums filled with prints when I could stage evening-long lecture projections over drinks and snacks.
They were my TED Talks. Believe it or not, this stratagem worked, at least until a diminishing audience began resisting reruns.
Of course I stubbornly persisted in using slide film all the way until 1994, which meant owning and maintaining items that now fill the closet with archaic remnants of long-lost methodologies.
Four decades later, that 1960s model of paddle-wheeler slide projector my parents owned is too balky to use, and even back when it actually still worked properly, the bulbs became stupidly expensive to replace. The slides have since been converted into digital backups, which required a scanner and a whole lot of patience.
I’d like to be a better photographer. But we can’t have everything, can we?
—
I have two solid memories of being in Köln. The first coincides with everyone else’s: the mountainous edifice of the cathedral towering over the train station, which awaited a future visit to be properly examined (it is in fact mind-blowing). The mob scene on the rail platform is the second, as reminiscent of the post-election ride to Athens in May following the Greek election.
Note that fully loaded backpacks can be used as weapons of mass shimmy, often inadvertently, but still capable of sending a boy sprawling. Had I not possessed a first-class rail pass, my berth likely would have been a seat on the floor by the toilet, but I found an empty spot in an otherwise completely filled compartment, squeezed my elongated frame into place, and managed to nap for a few hours.
The youth and student room-finders at the train station in Paris assigned me to 144 Av. Ledru Rollin near Place de la Bastille. After two nights, I bowed to the prioritization of incoming groups and returned to the agency to be switched to a different although similar accommodation in a much older and more atmospheric building on the Right Bank (12 Rue des Barres).
My new digs became noteworthy owing to a strange incident one evening. I was alone in my upper-floor triple occupancy room with the window pushed open when a clod of dirt broke apart on the window frame and scattered inside. I peeked down cautiously at the source of slurred invective coming from the street and saw a young man unsteadily hurl a second projectile in my direction.
It fell far short. Assuming this was a case of a drunkard’s mistaken identity, I closed the window and went downstairs to explain the situation to the person standing behind the desk, who listened patiently before revealing that he was a resident like me, and was looking for his room key in the absence of an actual employee.
We rang a buzzer to no avail, and then my new acquaintance shrugged and suggested a quick trip to the kiosk down the street to buy a few beers. Come to think of it, there was another hostel episode with unisex showers, when my neglecting to wear my eyeglasses led to wet, impromptu hijinks; in the tradition of Sgt. Schultz, be aware that “I saw nothing!”
Five days in Paris were interesting, just not altogether epochal. My reaction to the French capital was lukewarm, which still puzzles me now.
There were no bad experiences of the sort that Americans always seemed to be advertising amid their lists of cultural grievances. Rather, Paris struck me as self-absorbed and detached in the fashion of big cities anywhere, not exclusively French ones.
None of it was taken personally. It’s just that my tastes ultimately run more toward places like Berlin, London, Prague and Copenhagen, perhaps because Don’s claim on Paris was firm, and I elected to be an expert about somewhere else.
I smiled a lot, stayed humble, and frequented North African and Southeast Asian ethnic food shops and bakeries, where English seemed to be spoken most readily, and people were very friendly in spite of lingering American military traditions.
The required tourist’s checklist of Paris “musts” were duly crossed off: Notre Dame (and a hike up to the roof), the Louvre, the opera house, the Left Bank’s venerable Shakespeare & Co bookstore, the catacombs, the site of the Bastille, a day trip to Versailles, and obligatory nightly meals at the very same North African couscous restaurant that Don and I had visited on our whirlwind rail trip from Turin a few weeks earlier.
Here are Notre Dame views:
The Eiffel Tower was determined to be out of my budgetary league, with that accompanying pesky fear of heights dissuading me. The money saved earned me a few bottles of beer for park bench contemplation.
I’ve been to Paris only three times since 1985. Different strokes, I guess.
In all honesty, the Parisian shrine with the most resonance for me during my first visit was the one having perhaps the very least to do with the city’s history: Jim Morrison’s grave, tucked away behind mausoleums and chapels in the Pere Lachaise Cemetery, a place where a bottle of inexpensive wine and a camp cup proved handy.
Mind you, the remainder of the cemetery has much to do with French (and European) history. Among the luminaries interred there are Proust, Chopin, Molière, Piaf, Delacroix and Oscar Wilde. The Communards’ Wall, where 147 revolutionaries were executed in 1871, is a must visit for anyone fascinated by the history of rebellion, and I paid my respects.
However, it was Morrison’s legacy that drew me to Pere Lachaise. The lead singer of The Doors died of a heroin overdose in Paris in 1971, when I was eleven years old ― and no, the adult me believes that neither Morrison nor his poetic hero Arthur Rimbaud faked his own death.
The music was lost on me until I read the late Danny Sugerman’s controversial book No One Here Gets Out Alive in 1980. Only then did the band as an entity, and particularly its resident poet, shaman and singer, begin to interest me.
(Did you know that Sugerman later married Fawn Hall, who was Oliver North’s document shredding secretary during the Iran-Contra scandal? Or, that North, who sold weapons to Iran to fund anti-communist rebels, now pontificates against Iran possessing weapons? Ronnie Raygun and the Lizard King are strange bedfellows, indeed.)
You might say I was going through a Morrison/Doors phase in college, to the point that “mute nostril agony” (pulled from a Morrison lyric) served as one of my intramural basketball team names, and turned out to be very accurate as a descriptor of our impeccable conditioning.
To find my way to the grave site, I merely followed the “Jim lives” and “break on through” graffiti scrawled everywhere until voices and music could be heard. There was enough open space around the grave for a couple dozen people to congregate, and so together we communed with Mr. Mojo Risin’.
A new contingent of Doors parishioners arrived each day to party, much to the annoyance of local officialdom, leaving candles, cigarette butts, food wrappers and empty wine bottles strewn around.
A marble bust donated by Croatian sculptor Mladen Mikulin was placed atop the block-like marker a few years before my visit. It was frequently painted and repainted, stolen and replaced, and disappeared without a trace in 1988. Bizarrely, the bust was recovered in May of 2025 during an unrelated police search in Paris.
As I sipped my wine, a fellow mourner offered me a puff from his piquant pipe. I politely declined. Strange days had found me; strange days had tracked me down, and it was fine, even if my shirt smelled of ganja for the rest of the week.
There was a final musical omen before I left Paris for the Atlantic coast. At my university housing block, I spotted a British rock and roll magazine parked atop the breakfast table. It was trumpeting something called Live Aid, Bob Geldof’s approaching benefit concert for Ethiopian famine relief, as scheduled for worldwide transmission by satellite on July 13, 1985. I’d heard about it previously, but hadn’t been paying attention.
The Wembley concert venue was close enough to Paris, although attendance was out of the question at the time. I’d made no plans to visit the United Kingdom, and my budget couldn’t support a change in schedule. However, when the concert aired on television, I’d be in Ireland somewhere, and a mental note was filed.
The train to Le Havre was boarded. Roughly a month remained in my first trip, and the home stretch was about to begin with a first glimpse of Ireland.
I was resting dockside in Le Havre, thinking about the meaning of life and craving a draft Guinness, which I’d seldom had the chance to enjoy. This was about to change.
One night, long before this quayside moment, in a drunken stupor of semi-religious ecstasy, my cousin Don had uttered an astute prophecy, foretelling of delicious and creamy Guinness pints, as served by impeccable barmen on the wonderful ships carrying budget travelers from France to Ireland.
Actually, we’d both been in our cups, and it was less of a bold vision than a recapitulation of his own previous travel experience. I was suitably enamored, and incorporated a budgetary line item for the inevitable splurge. At 24, I was a beer neophyte, and Guinness was anything but ubiquitous in Louisville and Southern Indiana. The draft version was almost unheard of locally, and mythical in proportion to its rarity.
Then one of my pals returned home from college touting the bottled variety of Ireland’s national beverage, and seeing as Guinness Extra Stout could be found at better area package stores, it was a start. Even if this firmer, roastier and more bitter version lacked the raw mystique of the elusive draft, it was an absolutely transformative introduction.
In truth, the flavor of Guinness Extra Stout was a bit much at the very start, so we began by mixing it “half and half” with any and all cheap lagers, from Red, White and Blue on up to Harp (somehow Irish-on-Irish seemed to make more conceptual sense). As time passed, I began weaning myself from the lager “filler,” and learned to drink the nectar straight. That’s when I fell in love with stout.
Still, veteran travelers and the guidebooks agreed: Draft Guinness was best, and it never got any better than in Ireland. Why? Because it was fresh and unpasteurized, with a whole national culture revolving around it, uniting all classes in philosophy and knowledge over pints in classic pubs renowned as universities for poor men?
Perhaps.
It also might have been the relative absence of draft Guinness closer to home, where we might have been able to compare, and soon become jaded by proximity, as I am now, 40 years later.
As expected, my reticent shadow from the Le Havre train station walk was contemplating many of the same directional strategies. We converged at the ferry office and exchanged pleasantries.
It transpired that his name was Paul, from somewhere in New York. Paul had graduated from college and broken up with a girlfriend, and now he was using the Let’s Go: Europe book to assist in finding himself before returning stateside for graduate school.
For the next three days, we became bosom pals, and I’ve not seen him since. That’s how it goes. Electronic networking had yet to be invented, and you took life on the road as it came, exchanging postal addresses and phone numbers, and then mostly forgetting about them. Mine were recorded by hand in a little blue (not black) address book, now entirely obsolete. It would be nice to thumb through this little blue book, trying to associate names and details long ago submerged, except it was subsequently lost.
C’est la vie.
As for the Irish ferry itself, the 1985 model of 1st Class Eurailpass came equipped with three valuable seaborne options: free deck passage on routes between Italy and Greece (I’d done it); Sweden and Finland (still ahead); and France and Ireland.
The Eurailpass covered the ticket cost, otherwise offering nothing more than an overnight nesting place on the exposed upper deck, or in various out-of-the-way nooks inside. Either way, the night would be spent on the floor, and the importance of those pints of Guinness loomed even more critically.
There was a baggage check for storing my increasingly battered gym bag, and the quick dispatch of leftover bread and nibbles from Paris. The maritime Shamrock Bar didn’t open until the ship was a few miles out from the shore, in international waters. When the signal was given, we approached the bar and had the first of several pints.
They were better than I expected, and even better, in gratitude for my being of assistance, Paul bought. Later, the floor wasn’t so bad. We found a carpeted area to crash.
Coming into Rosslare Harbor late the following morning, the weather was spectacular. Paul lived near the ocean, but I was a Midwestern landlubber, albeit one without a propensity to sea sickness. I found something joyous and primeval about coming into harbor on a ship, producing an old-school feeling of pre-mechanized landfall. I enjoyed it immensely.
As we debarked, a scrubby, stubby bluff could be seen just ahead, behind the terminal buildings. Atop it was a billboard depicting pint glasses of Guinness, all in a row: “Welcome to Ireland.”
Seldom have I felt this patriotic in America.
At the time, the Rosslare port was small and workmanlike, paired with an equally tiny rail stop for the train to Dublin, where both of us had resolved to begin. Between my visits to Ireland in 1987 and 1989, the harbor was dramatically upgraded, with a sleek ferry terminal constructed in the fashion of an airport, to be known henceforth as the Rosslare Europort.
Several hours later, Paul and I alighted in Dublin at Connolly Station. As we stood on the sidewalk plotting potential hostel strategies, we were approached by a middle-aged woman who asked if we needed a room. The guidebooks noted this freelance practice, and deemed it generally safe with the usual caveats, so we accepted her offer.
It wasn’t just around the corner. We walked a bit, hopped a bus, and walked some more. All I can recall about the commute is that “Nora” kept referring to my speaking voice as reminiscent of John Wayne, her greatest American action hero (something about the Irish gift of gab, lady), but the arrangement was above board and perfectly serviceable, and even included an ample fry-up for breakfast.
Another culinary first: Baked beans with coffee at 8:00 a.m. Of all my interior worlds undergoing renovation, eating habits looked as if they’d be changing the most.
Nora’s place was a row house among many in what appeared to be a perfectly average neighborhood. She provided maps, pointed to nearby amenities, provided public transportation tips and noted bottles of Harp in the fridge: “just replace the ones you drink.” All the while, Irish history came spewing from her.
We’d neither slept long nor eaten much, and a couple bottles of beer immeasurably enhanced the entertainment value of the lesson, which began with our gray-market innkeeper demanding to set one thing straight, immediately, using American basketball as an example.
Basketball?
That’s right. Specifically, Nora wanted to talk about the professional basketball team located in Boston, Massachusetts, arguably the world capital of the Irish Diaspora.
“You mean the Celtics (SELL-tics),” said Paul.
Hook, meet fish: “Yes, I do, but it isn’t SELL-tics at all. It’s KELL-tics,” and so began a digression on the legacy of the Celts (properly pronounced “Kelts”), ancient tribal Europeans of the Iron Age, and ancestors of today’s Irish.
And how to remember the hard “k”? Nora had a suggestion for this, too. Just fix an image of Bushmill’s or Jameson’s in your brain ― “remember, it may be true that the Arabs invented distillation, but we Irish perfected it” ― and always ask the bartender for a Belt of the Kelts … maybe even two.
Indeed.
Celtic cultures expanded into many European territories, but the advent of the Roman Empire gradually pushed them toward the continent’s western periphery, to remote islands and isolated coasts. In modern times, we think of the Celts as comprising the Gaels (Irish, Scottish and Manx peoples), Welsh and Bretons, among others.
It’s more complicated than this, but it’s enough to know that a few central elements of enjoyable living, including music, beer, conversation and food, are a stock in trade of the Celts, and that among Celts, the Irish stand out as visible and enthusiastic proponents of these virtues. Nora was the first of many native examples, and I’m grateful that her hospitality transcended what otherwise was an ordinary business transaction.
Exhaustion had set in, and Paul and I had no desire to roam widely in an unfamiliar city, so we walked a couple of blocks to a diner of sorts, where I promptly devoured my first-ever chicken curry. It had peas and carrots, and I didn’t know or care about authenticity (this contemporary recipe looks close to it). Replacement beers for the lodging came from an off-license on the walk home.
Back at the house, I noticed Nora had a sizeable collection of record albums. There was familiar international pop music from the 1950s and 1960s (Elvis, Beatles, Stones), and also lots of Irish folk music.
Some of these names I recognized, because my own introduction to Irish history came through music, and as always, I had Doc Barry to thank.
Next: Euro Pilgrimage ’85, Ch. 10: Irish history with musical accompaniment and a Guinness chaser.
Summer of ’85 song sampler:
