Still can’t believe you spent a night in a seedy motel with the bus driver. You are lucky to still be here to tell the story…

This was in 1976, long before cell phones and the Internet. I carried a crappy backpack that hurt my back so much that I wanted to fling it off the train after the first day. I also carried my cute high school purse, which hung from my left shoulder and slightly behind me, just begging to be stripped. It didn’t take long before, in one fell swoop, I was robbed of my passport, cash, Eurail pass, plane ticket home, and the little notepad on which I’d written my American Express travelers check numbers (the wrong numbers, as it turned out).
This was in Amsterdam, a lovely city and a grand place to stay if you have a few guilders, but pretty sketchy if you’re alone and penniless.
I spent the first couple nights on a park bench, gathering my courage to call home and waiting for the American Embassy to open on Monday morning. I had very few problems in the park; in fact, it was so littered with drug addicts and strung-out backpackers that one more dirty-haired American girl didn’t cause much of a stir. Mostly I just fended off panhandlers and guys who wanted to know if I had any drugs.

As luck would have it, both my parents were away on separate trips that particular fortnight; Dad was in Berkeley doing research, and Mom was taking advantage of a free trip to Bermuda. My sister answered my collect call a couple days later (at 2am her time — it hadn’t occurred to me to consider the time difference) and was helpless when I told her I needed a copy of my birth certificate so that I could get a new passport.
It took twelve days to get out of Amsterdam! I borrowed money from someone — no recollection who — and found a cheap room at the dingiest of the youth hostels. I also met a kind woman at the embassy who agreed to wire New York for my birth certificate. I guess that was her job, but at the time it felt as if she was doing me a huge favor.
About a week into my adventure I met a guy who told me that he could get me a forged copy of my Eurail pass, but I would have to travel out of town with him, it would cost me $30, and it might take a couple days. It turns out he and a friend were running a black market print shop in their basement in Utrecht. They made a perfect replica of a Eurail pass; again, this was in 1976, when counterfeiting was apparently pretty simple, and they really and truly only charged me $30. Nothing else!

I eventually replaced most of my documents, bought a passport case that I wore around my neck and under my shirt for the rest of the summer, and hopped a train out of Amsterdam and into France for my next travel horror story.

As for travel stories, mine are all quite tame by comparison. The one that was most perplexing was when traveling with my father and sister through Scotland, we could never find a place that served dinner. It was mystifying when they ate. The first day we arrived around 3PM and wanted to have lunch but no on was serving though they offered to serve us tea. We ate little sandwiches and figured we would catch-up at dinner. Checked into our hotel, rested a bit, and around 8PM went to the few restaurants in town and found all of them closed. The next night we went to each restaurant around 6PM and they weren’t ready to serve, when we returned at 7PM….closed. We ended up eating the left-over scraps from a fish and chips truck. I am convinced this was some elaborate town joke at the Americans’ expense.