OK, so technically, the original lyrics said, “it was 20 years ago today that Sergeant Pepper taught the band to play”. And “Sergeant Pepper’s…” was actually released 57 years ago, but why let facts get in the way of a good story? 🙂 The true bit in my little wordplay title is that it was 50 years ago last month that I got my first passport and went travelling abroad for the first time. To Europe, no less.
Have you ever had the experience where life circles back on you decades later and grabs you by the scruff of the neck and takes you back to an earlier time? Well, that happened to me in 2019, and it was all related to a trip I took in 1974-75.
If you are the same vintage as me, you will know it was the thing to do in the 70s. Take a year off school and go travelling. And I would have to admit that it might be one of the most important things I ever did in my life. It fundamentally changed my view of the world and opened my thinking about how to live my life.
So, why am I going on about this little 50-year-old adventure perhaps when it should be long forgotten? Well, I suppose it may not have been totally forgotten, but it was certainly shelved until something very interesting happened to me in 2019 as we were spending the winter in Fuengirola, Spain. The following email, and my subsequent response, brought those years rushing back into my consciousness in a very visceral and authentic way. Check out this quick little email exchange and then I will share with you a little history about a great period in my life.
Yes, a voice from that distant past reached out and contacted me almost exactly 45 years after the story took place. It initiated a barrage of wonderful memories. In 1974-75, I took a year off from my university studies and spent the winter months in Europe hitchhiking/riding the rails, hanging out, exploring, immersing myself in multiple cultures, enjoying new experiences, and creating memories with two other Canadian guys that I met in London shortly after I arrived in the late fall— Marc from Montreal and Ross from Winnipeg. Ultimately, we ended up spending the final weeks of the winter in Torremolinos, Spain. It was Ross who reached out to me in 2019. Apparently, he was doing some thinking about our trip and launched into a Google search for me.
This initiated a bit of a communication back-and-forth between Ross and me while I was in Spain and after I got home. It also made me think… Duh… Torremolinos is about a short 20 kilometers down the road. I need to get down there and check out my old haunts. So, on a nice day towards the end of our stay in 2019, I convinced the Love-goddess to travel with me on the local train to visit Torremolinos once again and listen to my reminiscing ramblings.
This reconnecting also caused me to do some serious reminiscing about that trip and sent me on a search down in the basement after I got home. I knew I had several artifacts from my travels stashed away down there.
Passport to London
Being a young man in the 1970s, I put very little thinking and/or planning into this expedition. Other than that, I knew I needed to get a passport, book a flight… well, that was about it. 🙂 And when I think about it, that is not a whole lot different from how we travel now. So, here is that passport still tucked away amongst my archives 50 years later. As you can see, it was produced in October of 1974.
I also managed to pick up an International Student Card before I left home; but upon arrival in London, I had to scurry around to find the youth hostel office, get there, get myself a Hostel pass, and then find a hostel in London to stay in for a few days while I sorted out what I might do over the next few months.
Behold … Photographic evidence.
Click on the first photo in each carousel to view them all in a larger format.
Hostel and Skating
After all those tasks were attended to, I headed off to a youth hostel in Holland Park, the King George VI Memorial Youth Hostel. It is now closed, but as you can see, it remained identified in Google Maps on the day I searched for it. You will also see on the map (circled in red) the location of the “Queen’s skate-dine-bowl” multi-sports facility. I was stunned to find this facility on the map and even more stunned to discover it is still in operation.
Not long after I checked into the Hostel, several people who were staying there asked me if I wanted to go skating with them that night. Back then I was a seriously good skater so there was no way I was going to pass up an opportunity to show off on my first night in Merry Old England, so off we went.
When we arrived at the Queens, we discovered that you had to be a member of the club to skate there, and you had to wear figure skates, which they had available for rent. The Reader’s Digest version of the evening was that I laced on the blades and was blazingly faster than anybody else on the ice. This led Ross to convert my last name from McCaughey to McHockey.
The overall experience was quite interesting. This was not a hockey rink. It was a figure skating facility. The boards were beautifully crafted wood… possibly mahogany, and many of the skaters wore skating costumes. There would be a free skate where anybody who wanted to go on the ice and have a go, and then they would switch things up and allow couples who wanted to skate-dance to do their thing. It was all very charming and a very remarkable way to kick off my first trip to Europe.
Yes, because I never throw anything away, I still do have some lovely artifacts from my skating adventure in London, including my membership to the Queen’s.
Our Travels
This isn’t really meant to be a travelogue of my adventures hitchhiking around Europe. I think at its heart it is mostly about how the Boomer generation went travelling in the 1960s and 1970s, and about how similar a lot of people’s experiences probably were. Also, how perhaps this is not a bad time in life to think back over our formative years and how these adventures impacted our then distant adult lives.
So, this is not going to be a blow-by-blow detailing of our adventures, no highlights, no low lights, no embarrassing situations, no romantic engagements, no chatter about interactions with other travellers… just a concept review really. 🙂
That said, I do need to provide a bit of background information on how we ultimately ended up in Torremolinos. At some point, Marc convinced Ross and me that we should head off to Greece, which clearly would be a much more pleasant spot to spend the cold winter months than in some other areas. It required very little convincing to get us to follow him on his pilgrimage to the Greek islands, so off we went. I probably would be remiss if I didn’t mention some pivotal points in the trip, but I’ll present those steps in bullet form.
- Riding the ferry between Dover and Calais was the most extreme weather conditions I have ever experienced on a boat. It was so rough that it was unwise to stand up and attempt to walk around. I actually fell asleep from the rocking and didn’t wake up until we were pulling into Calais. I was in continental Europe.
- I saw Paris for the first time… many VERY interesting adventures.
- We wandered off into Germany. I got to sleep on a bench in a train station and use a squat toilet for the first time ever as we worked our way east.
- Not sure where I was for Christmas, but we spent New Year’s in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland with a bunch of Canadian nurses who were working there.
- At some point, we had decided to go to Torremolinos, Spain instead of Greece. Torremolinos was another well-known hippie hangout in the winter.
- We wandered off into Italy and France.
- We had an extended stay in Barcelona with the family of one of the Spanish women, Lydia, whom we had met in London. Franco was still in power, and we saw examples of his excessive use of power. He died a few months later… I had nothing to do with it. 🙂
Torremolinos & Morocco
After we ended up in Torremolinos, we spent several weeks there hanging out and doing hippie stuff. 🙂 We managed to rent an apartment rather than spending all of our time living in a hostel. How prophetic, given how I now return to the area these many years later and stay in a rented apartment every winter.
At one point, we decided we should go to Morocco, so we hopped on a bus, went down to Algeciras, got on the ferry to Ceuta, the Spanish town in Africa, and then got on the bus and headed off in the direction of Marrakesh. Adventures were had… and of course, I have more artifacts. 🙂
I probably need to tell you at least one little anecdote from our experiences in Morocco. One of my favourite memories took place when we arrived in town. We were just stepping off the bus when a 10-year-old kid riding a bicycle further down the road spotted us, threw his bike to the ground, and ran towards us yelling “hashish, hashish, hashish”!
When it was time to head home, rather than working my way back north, I decided to fly to Montreal with Ross and Marc. I was originally scheduled to fly home from Belgium. Being totally naïve, I thought it was as simple as walking into a travel agent agency and asking them to change it. Fortunately, they took pity on me and, for no extra cost, had me fly from Malaga to Madrid to Lisbon to Montreal. We stayed with Marc’s family for a bit. Marc’s father worked for Coca-Cola, and he gave me this tray. 🙂
Home
After our stay with Marc’s family, Ross and I wandered off to Toronto and stayed with some of his buddies for a few days who had moved to Toronto from Winnipeg to start an advertising company. I think I even remember the name of it, “Audience”. Then we went our separate ways.
It was the good old days, so Ross and I wrote letters to one another. Once again, because I never throw anything out, I hung on to the beautiful letters that he sent me, complete with many beautiful drawings and wrapped up treasures.
One of the wonderful outcomes from him reaching out to me in 2019 was that I was able to send these wonderful papers back to him so that he could share them with his family. And, I assume, tell them about our adventures together.
In 1976, after I graduated from university, a friend and two people that I vaguely knew through my friend invited me to drive out west with them to spend the summer working in Edmonton. This turned out to be pretty much the worst summer of my life, but that has nothing to do with this story, other than I stopped in Winnipeg and stayed with Ross on the way out in the spring and on my way back to Toronto in the fall.
After that, Ross and I lost touch with one another. I used to look him up in the phone book whenever I was in Winnipeg on business over the years, but he never appeared. I think it’s because he had a hyphenated name after he got married, that began with his wife’s surname. I remain absolutely thrilled that he tracked me down all those years later.
Torremolinos 2019
So, my mind awash in memories of that lovely trip those many years ago, the Love-goddess and I wandered down to Torremolinos with me to see what it looked like these many years later. I was not disappointed. Here is how our visit unfolded in pictures.
Getting there took a lot less time than it did in 1975. We hopped on the local train/subway and took the 23-minute ride east to Torremolinos.
Of course, the old town area had not changed all that much, and everything looked to me exactly like it did in 1975. Where I stood to take the following picture, there used to be a raised planting bed that we often sat on watching people while eating “Patatas Fritas con Mayonesa” (French fries with mayonnaise). The fries were sold at that spot where you see the big ATM sign, right beside the bar that was there in 1975 and is still there today, Bar El Toro.
As I stood there pondering the scene, I was startled to see something that drew me over to the Bar. They were still selling French fries all these years later. But they were now selling them out of a window rather than at a separate little kiosk.
The main pedestrian strip in Torremolinos is Calle San Miguel. Yes, the businesses have changed, but the street remains exactly as I remember it. It is still a busy magnet for locals and tourists… Not too many hippies anymore. 🙂
We wandered down San Miguel until we came to this broad staircase that I knew would lead us down to the waterfront.
The Pensión now called Sola on the right was where we stayed our very first night in town before we found an apartment. It had a beautiful view out over the Mediterranean.
My memory is somewhat vague on this, but I believe where the Restaurante La Escalera now exists stood the bar we used to hang out in. I believe it was called the American Bar, but I am not absolutely certain of that. ChatGPT informs me that there was an “American Bar”in Torremolinos in those years. They sold cheeseburgers and played rock ‘n’ roll. It was Bachman-Turner Overdrive that was getting heavy rotation that year.
To wrap up this little outing, we went to Bar El Toro and ordered some “Patatas Fritas con Mayonesa” and a couple of beers. Ahh, the memories. 🙂
