My First Trip to Europe

Beth in Florence, Italy 1970

At the age of 17, between my Junior and Senior years in high school, my grandfather took my brother,age 20 my cousin, Scott, age 16 any myself on a bus trip around Europe.  My mom and aunt, we call her Cioc, wanted to go too. So all six of us flew to London (my first case of jetlag) for a seventeen night American Express tour of Europe.  If you remember the old movie, If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium, (1969), that's how our trip was.  Each day we got up, quickly packed, ate breakfast and got on our big bus.  My fondest memories of that trip are picking up a slight British accent after 3 days in London, going to my first discotheque in Lucerne, Switzerland and dancing with a greasy Italian guy and walking down a street in Rome late-late or early-early and swinging around the light pole.  Two or three of us did that out of a group of 12-15.  We'd been to a few bars that night too..... hey, I was with my mother!!  Another fun memory is being in Nice, France and looking out of our window late at night.  Our hotel was in the red light district.  My mom and I watched the ladies attracting men and the guys almost running after the women down the street.  My mom knocked on the wall to my aunt next door saying, "Did you see that one?"  I guess that was my first exposure to prostitution.