[In 1976 when I was seventeen, I traveled to Europe with a group of fellow high school students. I wrote the essay European Tour 101 in 2023. This essay was published in Tales of Travel by the University of Minnesota-Duluth. I’m publishing it to my blog in five parts.]

Lesson Five: Serenade Your Tour Guide

Our train left Salzburg in the evening, shortly after nightfall. The station’s platform was written in romantic darkness, punctuated with street lamps. Our Austrian tour guide had come to the station to make sure our travel arrangements were in order and to say goodbye. We were headed to Paris.

I no longer remember the guide’s name. She was a university student, kind and soft spoken, with a gentle smile and a lilting laugh. Warm blue eyes sparkled behind her gold wire-rimmed glasses. She had accompanied us to a salt mine, to museums and art galleries, and to the Alps where the mountain scene for the Sound of Music was filmed. We stayed in Adnet, a farming village, thirty minutes from Salzburg. The small village had a well-lighted, welcoming restaurant, and we ate our evening meals there as one large group. After dinner we sang songs, and one night someone taught us the words to “Edelweiss” from the Sound of Music.

After we boarded the train, our tour guide stood on the platform waving at us. Someone in our group began to sing “Edelweiss.” Spontaneously, voice after voice, the rest of us joined in, and on a warm summer’s night as the train eased its way along the track, we leaned our heads and hands out the windows, and as one rhythmic beating heart, over and over, we sang the words about a small white flower, about meetings and greetings, about remembering and forever.

Our guide cried, wiping tears from her cheeks before they could splatter on the concrete beneath her. We sang and waved until we could no longer see her. And as the distance between us grew, one by one our voices drifted off, and we pulled our heads and hands inside the windows, and settled in our seats, bound for Paris, the City of Light.

I sang “Edelweiss” to both of my children when they were babies, and it became my youngest child’s favorite lullaby. After all these years, I remember the gifts we traded with our guide at the station: our song for her — and her tears of delight for us. I wonder if she ever plays the memory in her mind like a scene from an old movie as I still do.

Be spontaneous; express gratitude.

[Coming soon: European Tour 101 – Part 4, Paris]