Category: Jugendherberge

Christmas Eve, Dec 24, 1962

12/24/2010

The family.Louie the car on the left, the real Louie on the right

Drove from Bregenz to Winterthur to Zurich. Zurich is a lovely city built on the sides of the hills surrounding the lake. Found the jugendherberge but since it was 1 pm, we couldn’t get in. So we went to a restaurant and called Louie Camenzind. He said he would find a cheap place for us to stay and call us back. He called back and said he had talked to his family and wanted all four of us to come to his home near Wauwil. He met us in Sursee and we followed him to his family’s farm where they havea couple hundred pigs and some milk cows. When we got there we trimmed the Christmas tree with real candles. It began to seem like Christmas eve. There was Louie, his father, his sister Martha and his brother Adolf. We opened our presents, and sang carols. Then Louie’s father played the concertina for us. It was an amazing Christmas eve. About midnight we finally went to bed.

Where were you in December of 1962?

0 Comments

A daily diary of a journey in 1962. Please post comments about where you were then on the Background page.

Currency Converter

1962 was pivotal. This is the background:

It was a year colored by the Cuban Missile Crisis, an escalating involvement in Vietnam, the Berlin Wall and the Cold War with Russia, Civil Rights issues, a nascent space program, Nelson Mandela in prison, Betty Friedan's, The Feminist Mystique, the Beatles, Rolling Stones and the death of Marilyn Monroe.

In the face of all of this, Pat, Judy and I blithely took off for Europe with the intention of traveling through Europe and North Africa until our money ran out. We had a travel guide and a book titled Europe on $5.00 a Day. Since we had all read The Ugly American in preparation for the trip, we thought we were very smart to buy a used Volkswagen with Dutch license plates. We dubbed the car "Louie" since a cute guy from Switzerland named Louie had helped us acquire it.

There was no such thing as a cell phone, a computer, Twitter or Facebook. Our parents didn't hear from us for weeks on end. We wrote regularly, but letters took forever to deliver and we only vaguely knew where we would be next. It was a very cold winter and we followed the sun.

Christmas Eve, Dec 24, 1962

1962 was pivotal. This is the background:

Archives

Categories