I have an ambitious To Do List to get through today, including this post and chapter 16. Chapter 16 is about an old school science book that I used as a diary, “Karina’s Travel Escapades Around Europe with Ruth”. With the exception of five empty pages, the exercise book is full of my fairly small writing, some “sketches” to compensate the theft of our cameras, train times, hand drawn maps, including one from “a real live Polish man”, addresses of people met along the way, noughts and crosses and hangman games and details of the cost of things, the stove-cooked meals we ate and what seems to be a diet of various European chocolates, biscuits, bread and tea.
In the first month, we just caught trains to Provence and hitchhiked around there, in the second month, October, we visited 13 countries, 39 towns and cities and spent most time in Germany, Norway and Sweden.
This notebook is the only comprehensive diary I kept as a teenager. As we spent a lot of time on trains (overnight) and waiting at train stations, each entry is long and detailed. I find it fascinating to read for more reasons than I expected. It details a Europe that no longer exists, including Deutsche Mark, Franc and Lira prices, passport checks and stamps crossing each border, prices, food and drink I largely wouldn’t even contemplate summarising as “lovely” now (rehydrated food), everything I bought (mainly cheap CDs, a Red Hot Chilli Peppers t-shirt and a woven mat), my wardrobe (including jodhpurs and a blue shirt that stained me blue) and an incredible number of flashers, perves, thieves, drunks and fellow travellers (a few of whom who stayed with us for a while and whom I clearly had little patience for; I thought it as just the older me who was intolerant!).