One of the perks of being a service brat was getting to live in some cool places, and visit some other cool places from time to time.

My family was stationed in England in the summer of 1967, and lived there till the late summer of 1970. It was a return trip for everyone in the family but me. My folks had been stationed there in the early 1950s, and my older sister had been born there in '54. Things were pretty good for Americans in Europe back in those days if you were living on the economy. The exchange rate was VERY favorable (opposite of what it is now), so we could afford to go on trips every summer to the continent and see the sights. Pretty amazing situation for a sharecroppers kid and his family from Bell county Texas to find themselves in. Tall cotton.

Our first vacation, summer of '68, was about a week spent driving around Spain in a tour bus. The second, the summer of '69, was a trip to Germany and Austria. The last one, in the summer of 70, just before we packed up and headed back to the states, was a long, 10 day bus trip that took us from Munich, down through Austria to Naples, and then back up through Switzerland to Germany again. That one was a doozie, and I was lovin' it.

As a kid (ages 6 to 9 through those years), I soaked up all the history and culture of Europe, and it was easy to do. living in England would have been enough. Christ, the place oozed history. But it just got ratcheted up when we went to the continent. Hell, it seemed that everywhere we stopped in Spain there were castles and armor and big racks of swords to tempt my adolescent imagination. I used to run up to those racks and fondle the swords, thinking they were all real, imagining all the carnage they'd been involved in. it was bliss. I used to drive my folks CRAZY wanting one. I ended up with two new ones, crossed with a wooden plack. Basic tourist setup. Loved the hell out of it, and hung it over my bed for years. It's probably in my parents attic now.

The trip to Spain was the first major exposure I had to a different people and a different culture. I don't even think of the British as being different, even though they really are. Living there for three years made them folks, and I still feel a huge kinship with them. But the Spanish were different, speaking a different language and having a much more pronounced public religious life. We saw castles and ruins and LOTs of institutions of the Catholic church there, all dripping with history and drama. I remember seeing paintings by El Greco and Ribera, including this picture, which we saw at a museum in Toledo.



It's called The Bearded Woman, and purports to show a bearded woman breast-feeding a baby. I remember looking up at the full length painting, a lot larger than I was at the age of 6, with the tour guide grinning at me, and thinking "Eeew, that's not a woman. That's a old man with tits!" You know that had to fuck up the mind of an impressionable child. Probably screwed me up for life (nice rack, by the way).

Between this and all the other religious images, with the fully painted statues of Jesus bleeding on the cross, and crumpled down and bleeding from wounds off the cross, with blood dripping from his eyes and mouth and everywhere else, I stayed pretty freaked out much of the time we were there. I remember, both in Germany and Spain, being puzzled by the constant representations of Christ on the cross that we saw everywhere we went. Those blood soaked statues scared the hell out of me, effecting me the same way as a scary statue of Dracula in the wax museum in London. It occurred to me later that they were probably intended to do just that - literally scare the HELL out of the viewer. Provide important lessons and messages to a largely illiterate public (back in the old days).

The coolest thing I remember about Spain was the city of Segovia, with the Alcazar castle, the Romanesque cathedrals, and the huge Roman aqueduct.



I'll never forget our tour bus driving under the arches of that aqueduct, and parking outside a cafe where we ate lunch. The pictures we took turned out to be the classic tourist shot, repeated in most of the postcards from the time. The Romans fascinated me then, as now, so anything that was associated with them got my attention in a big way.

Spain was an allied country at that time, and a NATO ally of the United States, but Generalissimo Franco was still alive then, and there was a lot of violent crap going on in the world. I remember seeing the Spanish cops with the interesting, old fashioned hats, and I think I knew that something was up with them, but I was too young to pay close attention to any of that. I was too young, and too wrapped up in ancient violence to pay close attention to what was going on in my own time.

It was the peak of the war years, but I had no real clue that Vietnam was happening, although I knew something was up. I think my uncle Bob was there at the time (Colonel in the Army, Military Police), but my dads job in communications and his work with SAC largely shielded him from threat of being sent there. I found out much later that there had been a chance he could have been sent there when we moved back to the States in '70. He told me later that he'd had the choice of going to Hawaii or Missouri. I said "Hawaii? What the hell were you thinking?" He said that Hawaii was WAY too close to the war, and that it was not uncommon for men to be sent to 'Nam when their families were sent back to the states. I guess he was a bit concerned about it, understandably.

Most the stuff that was going on in my own world had to do with the IRA, blowing up pubs and fighting the British for control of Northern Ireland. I absorbed a lot of that stuff from the British media, and developed some pretty funny attitudes towards the Irish. I could tell you who the prime minister was, and who Bernadette Devlin was, and Ian Paisley, but the stuff in my own country was a mystery. I think maybe I had a vague awareness that a recent President had been from Texas, and that I was from Texas, but I didn't know what the hell that was. Not a clue. Too much movin' around, I guess.

The trip to Germany and Austria in '69 was also full of old castles and opulent palaces. We went to the Linderhof palace, where "Mad" King Ludwig of Bavaria had his famous Grotto, with the swan boat. Now THAT place was cool! We went to Ludwigs Neuschwanstein Castle, that Walt Disney had copied for Disneyland.



The visit to the castle was not without recrimination. There was a winding road going up to the castle from the town (you can kind of see the end of it here), and people were renting carriages and riding up, getting the full tourist experience. Dad would have none of it, so my mom, sister and I were forced to hoof it. God, did we bitch, particularly after every carriage passed us and we got to see people enjoying themselves in comfort. Our family vacations are famous for those sorts of moments. Cheap bastard. Spend a shit load of money on something in one moment and then pinch pennies in another.

Later on in the tour we went up to the peak of Zugspitze in the Bavarian alps (this time by cable car). It's the tallest Mountain in the Bavarian alps, with a beautiful big cross on the top. I was starting to get used to those crosses. Later I went swimming in the lake at the base of the mountain. Snow and sunny swimming on the same day? Good times. Germany was fun, but the best vacation was the last one.

Just before we left for home, mom, sis and I went on a 10 day bus tour from Munich to Naples and back. Dad had to work so it was just the three of us. Summer of 1970, and sis was about 15 then, and old enough to want to be involved in all the adult activities. One night in Germany, at the very start of the tour, some of the adults took the teenagers to a beer hall and got them all loaded. Mom and I stayed at the hotel that night, and I still remember when sis came back sick as a dog. Spent the rest of the night worshiping the porcelain alter. Mom was pissed, but not as much at sis as at the adults who let her daughter get loaded. Needless to say the bus was quiet the next day. The trip through the Alps was amazing. I'd never seen mountains like that before, and they really blew me away. The trip really took off for me though when we got down to Italy.

For about a week, for lunch and dinner every day, I had a huge plate of spaghetti. This was my favorite meal at the time. The standard thing is (to this day) that the meals on the tours offer you ether pasta or Veal for lunch or dinner. I ALWAYS chose pasta. The most beautiful places we saw were Florence, Pisa, and Venice. I'll never forget going to the Piazza della Signiora for the first time. I was reading lots of classic comics back then, and ironically was reading one during the tour about the Italian sculptor Cellini. The comic ended with his creation of the famous statue of Perseus with the head of Medusa. Next thing you know I'm standing in front of the real thing, thinking it's about the coolest thing I'd ever seen in my life.

I remember going to Venice, before the place was flooding, and seeing the gondolas. Beautiful. My favorite thing there was going and watching the glass blowing. Cool as hell. mom loaded up on LOTS of stuff there. That good exchange rate came in REALLY handy. When we got down to Rome, and I got to walk around the Forum, and the Colosseum, and the Catacombs, and the Vatican, and the Sistine Chapel, my socks were officially knocked off. The absolute coolest place though was Naples.

The bay of Naples was a choice vacation stop 2000 years ago, and it's still wonderful. What made it cool for me was a visit to Pompeii, a Roman city that had been buried by ash from a volcano in 79AD. The idea of walking the streets of a real Roman city, and looking at the remains of actual victims of the disaster, floored me. I was amazed by the Colosseum there, and imagined gladiatorial games going on as I stood there watching. A decade or so later, I learned that about a year after I'd been standing on that very spot, the band Pink Floyd had performed a concert there for a British TV special there. The recording of that concert was a hotly desired bootleg for years, and then in the late 1990s the band actually released an audio recording as a bonus to a re release of the album Ummagumma. Years later I found they'd released the DVD! More bliss, I wanna tell ya.

One of the best tunes from that live show was a version of the tune Echoes, from the album Meddle. Here's a video of that performance, in two parts (YouTube doesn't have a good version in one sitting, so you'll need to click on the second video as the first one ends), with a slow intro showing the Colosseum I'm talking about. It's worth a listen.



And it continues here, with an awesome base line.



Love the mix of everything here; the guitar screaming, the base hitting you, the keyboards in the background, and the drums, all combining for an amazing musical experience.

About a week after we got home from that last tour, delivery trucks arrived. Crates of goodies were disgorged onto the floor, and we got to relive the trip all over again. For years after that I'd tell people that I'd been to Rome, and the Idea didn't even seem to ring true in my own head. We moved from England to Missouri a while after the tour, and life moved on. I lived with the relics of these tours decorating my various rooms (in various places) for many years after. The green mountaineering hat from Germany with the pins, the banners, and the postcards tacked to the wall, and the full color tour books on my shelf, all leafed through and well worn. All that stuff is still around here somewhere, but it's mostly been replaced with more recent relics. Funny how the objects of youth fade in importance as time goes by, and yet stay in your heart.

I managed to get back to Pompeii as an adult, when I went out on my first teaching trip with the Navy in 1990. I'd just about given up on having a teaching career, and then I got a call from the folks here at Central Texas College. I took a job teaching History and Government on deployed Navy ships, and the college flew me to Naples, where the USS Thorn was at anchor. I taught a semester in four-and-a-half weeks, having class 6 days a week, and on Sunday I took my two roommates on a tour.

We walked the ruins of the city, and I looked specifically for one statue that I remembered vividly from the earlier trip. Finding it, reconnecting with that earlier time, and that little kid that I'd been all those years ago, proved to be an emotional experience. A lot of feelings washed over me, and I kept thinking back to the trip in 1970, and my folks, my sister, and what my life had been like back then. I'd grown up a lot in the intervening years, and I think standing there again symbolized that fact to me. I'd begun a new journey, towards a fun career, and a full life.

This time I was callin' the shots, and I also looked up another Roman city, Herculaneum. Herculaneum is a much smaller ruin, due to the fact that it's situated under the present city of Herculano. Thing is, the area that has been revealed is very plush, and while Pompeii is huge and hard to really see in one trip, Herculaneum is easy to see in one afternoon. I was a tour guidin' mutha that day. When we got back to the ship and I laid out in my rack, I couldn't help but think back to 1970 again. What a cool life I was having. I'd been able to travel all over Europe and America as a kid, and now the college was paying me to travel all over the world, doing a job that I loved.

We're all a lot older now, but those memories are still there. Dad is still a pain in the ass, but I've learned to get along with him, and we enjoy one another. We'll be hitting the Chinese food place again today, and probably hitting golf balls after. Mom's doing fine, and their house is still decorated with all the nick knacks she picked up along the journey. We all still have lots of crap that we've accumulated over the years. Sis still has issues, but she's working on them. Our life on the road turned us into a tight little unit, and we've found that we don't really like to stay anywhere too long. We all start getting nervous after about three years, thinking it's time to go.

Anyway, it's early, and I've got to go, so take care of yourself this weekend and I'll see ya on the other side. FHB.