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What do you think is better to sit on an airplane in the aisle or the window?
Used to be the window, but now it's the aisle.
I go to the bathroom more often.
This is Rick Steves.
He's been called America's most beloved travel guide.
He's been doing it for more than 40 years.
How many countries have you been to in your life?
I've never counted.
I don't like it when people say I've been to 75 countries.
That has no bearing on what they learned from that experience.
They could have been to 75 airports.
I don't have a bucket list.
What's one sign that a restaurant is for locals versus tourists?
If it's a low-rent place with a handwritten menu in one language that is small, and if it has a boisterous crown, you can bet it's a good value.
The menu, handwritten because it's shaped by whatever's fresh in the market this week.
One language, the local language, because they're targeting a local clientele.
Tourists are welcome, but they're all about keeping locals happy.
You can stand at the door and feel the vibe of a restaurant.
And if it's a hearty, boisterous, convivial, local crowd, you know, it's got to be right.
What's the first thing that you should do when you get to a new city?
Set up your room so you like it and then put a note on the door that says, don't clean this place.
So I turn the room into my little place.
I clean it up and I organize it.
And then I like to just take a walk in the town just to kind of say hello.
I remember stepping out of my hotel in Rome a couple years ago.
It was like I was in a kind of a shell or in kind of a little cave.
And I stepped outside and it was a river and the current swept me away from my eddy.
And I just swam with the river through the streets of Rome in the early evening when everybody was out doing the passeggiata.
And it was almost like it swept me farther and farther away and I just wanted to take a little tiny walk around the block.
It was like to get home.
I had to go upstream and it was all I could do to get back to the hotel room because the pull of all the cultural fun that was happening all around me.
And I finally got back into the room and I thought, yeah, oh baby, I'm in Italy.
Same thing in Turkey, same thing in Portugal, same thing in Copenhagen, same thing in Dublin, same thing in Marrakesh.
Get out and let that river sweep you away, and then somehow crawl back to that hotel and catch your breath.
I like to think of travel as a lot of ways.
Going to school on Monday when you have show and tell in third grade and people are showing and telling And you kind of go wow, that's cool.
I never thought about that.
I'm Phoebe Judge, and this is love.
I've been watching Rick Steves on his PBS show since I was a little girl.
When my mother was dying, we spent hours in her hospice room watching Rick on the TV.
I'd ask my mother what she'd want to see.
More often than not, she'd request his shows on Croatia or the Alps.
We were thousands of miles away from Italy, but we'd turn on one of his shows and talk about our next trip.
My mother loved the idea of northern Italy a stop in the Dolomites and then ending up on the Amalfi Coast.
The episode we watched over and over was about a walk around Mont Blanc in France and Switzerland.
We loved it and talked about taking that trip together.
A couple of months after my mother died, I went on that trip by myself.
I've wanted to talk to Rick Steves for a long time.
Rick Steves lives in Edmonds, Washington, just north of Seattle.
He wears jeans every day.
He likes to drink frozen orange juice from a can.
And on Sundays, he goes to church.
He plays the congas before the service starts.
He's lived in Edmonds for most of his life.
His family moved there in 1967 when he was 12 years old.
Rick's parents sold pianos for work.
His father imported them from Austria and Germany.
One day he told Rick they were going to see the factories where the pianos were made and also visit some relatives in Norway.
Rick was 14, and he said he thought the idea was, quote, stupid.
He'd never been outside the country before.
But once he was in Europe, he started writing.
He'd collect postcards and write down little details of the trip.
On one, he noted that he'd spent 40 cents on fishing gear.
On another, he wrote that he met a man who'd seen the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
He's kept them all.
There's one memory from that trip that stands out, of visiting a park in Oslo with his parents.
I had one of those eureka moments that you really treasure.
I remember I felt like, if I think back, I was really little and I was looking up at my parents and they were looking over me, just taking care of me, making sure I was having a good time.
They didn't have a lot of money.
It was their first time in Europe, first time overseas at all.
They were compromising greatly to take me along with them.
And then I looked out in the park and I saw other parents loving their kids just as much as my parents loved me.
And it occurred to me, wow!
I can't believe it.
Those parents love their kids as much as my parents love me.
And I just thought that was a very beautiful moment because it gave me a broader perspective.
Back home, Rick went to the University of Washington, where he studied European history and business.
He played in the college marching band.
He taught piano lessons to save money to travel.
And I was very, very happy being a piano teacher.
I was the most popular piano teacher in my little town.
I had 50 students, they had the best students and my girlfriend was a piano teacher.
We were going to get married and move our grand pianos together you know how they can nuzzle and um and i was going to take the summers off and travel and and during the school year i'd teach my students.
It was going to be great.
He'd spent one summer backpacking in europe.
After finishing high school he went again.
While he was in college In 1978.
He decided he wanted to take another backpacking trip.
But this time, he wanted to try something new.
He couldn't find any guidebooks for it.
The only reliable information Rick was able to get was a fold-out map of the 3,000-mile route.
We'll be right back.
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In the summer of 1978, right after he graduated college, Rick Steves decided to go backpacking on what some people called the Hippie Trail.
The Hippie Trail was the ultimate road trip back in the 60s and 70s, back when the Beatles were hanging out with the Maharishi Yogi in India.
And vagabonds and hippies and travelers seekers.
They would take this trip from Istanbul to Kathmandu.
Kathmandu is the end of the rainbow for hippies in the capital of Nepal.
It was just something that was iconic and I wanted to do it.
I got my best travel buddy together and we went to Istanbul and we embarked on the hippie trail.
When I went east from Istanbul, I realized there's not a soul between here and Seattle.
Who knows I even exist.
There's nobody I know between here and Seattle.
And I'm heading that way.
It's like behind the dark side of the moon.
No telephone connections with parents.
No safety net.
Just a few bucks in your money belt.
And a goal to get to Kathmandu.
And it was the trip of my lifetime.
And I happened to, I don't know what got into me, but as a 23-year-old, I diligently journaled it.
I wrote in a hardbound book, a 200-page book.
He still has that journal.
He wrote that other travelers he met joked that there were two kinds of people on the hippie trail those who know they have worms and those who don't.
He tried hashish for the first time in Afghanistan.
He smoked a lot during the trip.
And then they took a train across Pakistan to the Indian border.
Rick passed the time reading Animal Farm and swatting away bugs.
He remembers the train car was packed Forget social, what do you call it?
It's one big bouillabaisse of humanity.
Trains in India are just a delight.
As long as you see culture shock as something you're not trying to avoid, but as a constructive thing.
Rick wrote in his journal that there had been moments when he thought the whole idea of the trip was a stupid mistake.
But once he'd arrived in India, he wrote that he'd found a hidden door, turned the key and the world opened up before me.
Rick says it was monsoon season, and he spent a lot of time in the rain.
In New Delhi he went sightseeing, before ending up at a church where a doctor there lectured him about venereal diseases.
They went to the Taj Mahal.
Rick wrote that it was right up there with Versailles on his list of favorite sites.
In Jaipur, Rick rode an elephant.
One night, rick and his friend were the only two people at a restaurant.
After they've been served their food, the kitchen staff came out to talk with them.
Rick says they ended up talking about family planning, castration and indira gandhi.
Someone asked why neither of them had married yet they went to the ganges river.
Rick wrote that it was a holy site.
He learned that many people spent their last years there and when they died their bodies were burned on the banks of the river.
Rick says he wished he'd had more than just a map to guide him on the hippie trail.
While he was on the road, he borrowed whatever guidebooks he could from other travelers he met.
Often they weren't really books, just pages of notes stapled together.
He said he would quote scavenge for scraps of information.
Reading it in any language I could, from anybody else on that bus or in that hippie youth hostel or whatever.
Oh, you got some information.
Printed in Australia, printed in England, printed in Germany.
Let me look at it.
Over the years, he collected a lot of notes on his travels, both on the hippie trail and in Europe.
Back when he was in college, he came up with the idea to teach a class about travel at the University of Washington.
He wasn't sure how many people would show up.
100 people ended up coming.
Students kept stealing notes from his lectures.
So he decided to make a book out of those classes.
He published it himself when he was 25 years old.
He was still teaching piano lessons.
And I thought, I'm just, I can't do both.
And I wanted to do both, but I couldn't.
So it was a tough call.
But back around in the early 80s I let my piano students go and I committed myself to a being the go-to guy to help Americans enjoy Europe.
He'd had a recital hall for his piano students and now was using it to give lectures on traveling cheaply.
He gave people tips on how to find a cheap hotel, how to plan picnic meals instead of eating out, and how to sleep on the train instead of getting a hotel.
When you told people that you were going to become a travel teacher, what was their reaction?
They didn't know what that was.
I mean it was like Well, go for it, but call me back when you're going to get a real job, you know.
And I didn't do it with great intentions at all.
I had no long-term plans.
I just wanted to travel, make mistakes, take careful notes, hit and miss and miss, and hit and miss and come home and bring home the hits, write them up carefully, in hopes that other people could learn from my experience, rather than their own, and have a better time.
He started taking people on tours to Europe.
His first one was on a minibus.
He was also the bus driver.
Another was a 3,000-mile trip around Europe in 22 days.
Sometimes he wouldn't make hotel reservations for his tour group.
He says there's joy in letting things unfold in an unpredictable way.
He still advises people to book a hotel for just a few nights of their trip and then take a look around at hotels once you've landed.
He says this works well if your destination isn't too crowded.
Rick suggests using booking websites for research, but to make a reservation directly with a hotel.
He says it's cheaper because the hotel won't have to pay a commission to the booking site.
He says once you're on the ground, you should call a hotel around 9 or 10 in the morning.
That's when they'll know who's checking out.
And he says that before you settle on a room you can ask to see it to check if it's too hot or noisy.
He's noticed that sometimes Americans in Europe are tripped up by small things like that Europeans write the date with the day first and then the month.
Rick says that discomfort is what he likes about traveling.
He calls it rearranging your cultural furniture.
It's funny when I was learning how to tune pianos and my teacher was a blind man And I'd go to his house and he knew his way around the house.
I had to remind him, Franklin, can we turn on the lights?
I need lights to see.
And he knew everywhere he was because his furniture was in the right spot.
And he could navigate that house without sight.
And a lot of us are that way with our cultural furniture.
And if somebody changes the furniture, you start stumbling and you don't know where you are.
And it's kind of In a way, it's kind of fun, but it's also frustrating.
And when you travel, you realize, hey, wait a minute, somebody's rearranging my furniture.
I thought people do this.
I thought this was the norm.
And then when you travel, you realize, no, that's not the norm.
That's the way we do it, but other people do it a different way, and it's not right or wrong.
It's just they've got their furniture arranged differently.
Rick says that for him, his most rewarding experiences on the road have come from talking to new people.
But sometimes those conversations can be difficult.
Like.
While I was in Turkey in 2007, locals told him how the US war in Iraq was affecting their country.
Do you find that when you're traveling, people often want to talk to you about politics?
There's an etiquette where you don't just jump in and talk politics.
You have to feel somebody out and see if they want to talk politics.
Because Europeans, a lot of times, I think, don't wear their politics on their sleeve.
And once you let it be known that you're a person that enjoys the political back and forth, then you open up the doors to wonderful conversations.
But an American has to be careful of doing that, because they may find that we're not as high and mighty as we are led to believe we are.
You know, we don't have an education system or a safety net or a health care situation that everybody idolizes and wants to have themself.
And a lot of people do it their way and they like the way they do it, which is fascinating to me.
It's just stimulating to hang out with people that don't see the world as a pyramid, with the United States on top and everybody else trying to get there.
And I like that kind of honesty.
It's not insulting to me. to know that we can learn from other countries.
We're on the same school of hard knocks here and it's complicated to run a society.
There's no question about that.
We'll be right back.
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In 2020, Rick Steves had to stop traveling because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Before COVID, he couldn't remember being home for more than 10 days at a time.
During COVID, I really couldn't do my work.
I couldn't travel.
And what was interesting for me is I felt like am I a sponge that can flex back out and do other things?
Or have I been crushed by my workaholism and the joy I have in my work?
I felt like my sponge relaxed and it went out.
And there was all sorts of things that I love to do.
And I did new things.
I learned how to cook.
I learned the beauty of having a dog.
I spent a lot of time on my piano.
I realized that I kind of proved to myself that I could be happy without traveling.
And there's a lot of stuff I could do without traveling.
And it's kind of something I wrestle with, because I'm sure there's things I really would enjoy doing that I've never been able to do.
If I wasn't traveling, I'd probably have more friends and be more of a fun guy to hang around with.
The 23-year-old Rick would look at me today and say, you're out of balance.
You know, the world's graveyards are filled with indispensable people.
You know, that kind of philosophy.
Stop being so high and mighty and thinking your work is so important and smoke a joint and waste some time.
Rick has two kids.
They're grown up now.
He says that he usually traveled alone, without his family, but that they went on family trips every summer.
He says he realizes now that he could be hard to keep up with.
He often tried to get his family to all the major sites in a city in just two days.
Once, when his kids complained, he told them not to come with him.
They spent all day playing video games at the hotel.
They loved it.
But today, Rick's son also works as a tour guide.
Eighteen months after the first COVID shutdown, Rick started traveling again.
This year, he's already been to London, Prague, Barcelona, and Istanbul.
He spends about three or four months of every year abroad.
He says most of the time he's working on updating his travel guides and books.
But even after all this time, some of his tips have never changed.
He still advises people to pack light.
He never checks the bag.
He transfers toothpaste from a regular tube to his travel-size one, so he doesn't have to buy a new one.
He encourages people to rip up his guidebooks and just bring the sections they need.
He does it himself when he's working on an update.
He says sometimes he likes to bring duct tape just in case you need to fix a hole in your bag or your shoes.
He says small binoculars can be nice to get a better look at church interiors.
He always recommends bringing a journal.
Rick says he doesn't have any plans to retire yet.
But the time will come when I will let that sponge release and do more cooking and play my piano a little more.
And that'll be a fun day.
But you know I don't want to sound immodest, but a lot of people uh, rely on those books and it shapes their trips.
This is something they scrimp and save for.
It's a big part of their life and i get to be an intimate part of it because they're going to take my information.
Let that shape their trip.
Travel is an opportunity.
Travel is a privilege.
A lot of people don't have money to ever see their name on a plane ticket.
You know that's just the reality in a rough and tumble uh, capitalistic arena.
But if you can dream about going to Europe or going to Dubai, or going to Fiji or going to Sydney or going to who knows where on your vacation, I hope you don't just go as a tourist.
I hope that you can realize there's three ways to go.
You can go as a tourist, as a traveler, or as a pilgrim.
You can see the road as playground, the road as school, or the road as church or mosque or synagogue.
And you don't need to be just a bon vivant and you don't need to be just a monk, but you got the opportunity to mix it all together.
What's your dream vacation?
That's a good question.
My perspective is skewed by the commitment I have to my work.
So I don't really give a lot of thought to where do I want to go And I like to dedicate the time I have away from home and the energy I have to making that information better.
And I fly home just having had a great time.
But it wasn't a vacation.
It was a great, strangely kind of a great work time, very productive.
And I just love it.
I just absolutely love it.
That's my dream trip.
Long-winded answer, but my dream trip right now is just to take the guidebook of mine that is the most needy and go there and get it up to date.
He did tell us though, that he's planning a hiking trip in the Italian Alps soon, in a place that he doesn't cover in any of his guidebooks.
So there's no reason for me to be taking notes.
I'll just be having a good time in the moment.
This Is Love is created by Lauren Spohr and me.
Nadia Wilson is our senior producer.
Katie Bishop is our supervising producer.
Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Sajico, Lily Clark, Lena Sillison, and Megan Kinane.
Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Simonetti.
You can learn more about the show on our website, thisislovepodcast.com.
And you can sign up for our newsletter at thisislovepodcast.com slash newsletter.
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You can listen to This is Love, Criminal, and Phoebe Reads a Mystery without any ads.
Plus, you'll get bonus episodes.
These are special episodes with me and Criminal co-creator Lauren Spohr telling stories from the last 10 years of working together.
And at the end of each episode, we share things we've been enjoying lately.
On the upcoming episode, we give our own travel tips.
To learn more, go to thisiscriminal.com slash plus.
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I'm Phoebe Judge, and this is love.
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