The First Time

My first trip to Europe was a twelve-day bus tour with my sixteen-year-old daughter. Four countries in less than two weeks — the kind of itinerary that travel purists would dismiss as too fast, too much, not the right way to do it. They are not entirely wrong. But they are missing something.

We moved through cities at a pace that left us breathless. A morning in one country, a border crossing by afternoon, dinner somewhere we could not quite pronounce. We were tired most of the time and exhilarated all of it. But the greatest pleasure of the trip was watching my daughter throw herself into every new landscape and adventure — with no hesitation, no reservation, just pure delight — was something I had not expected to be the best part of the trip. It was.

What I remember most is not any single monument or meal, though there were plenty of both. It is the accumulation — the way Europe kept revealing itself in layers, each country different in ways I had not anticipated, each city carrying its own particular light and smell and pace. Twelve days was not enough to understand any of it. It was exactly enough to fall in love with all of it. I fell in love with Europe on that first trip, and nothing has looked quite the same since.

What Europe Does

Europe does something to the senses that I have not found anywhere else. It is partly the density of history — the way the past is not behind glass but underfoot, in the walls, in the names of streets that have been called the same thing for a thousand years. You walk through it rather than looking at it.

It is also the scale. European cities are built for human beings — for walking, for sitting, for the particular pleasure of a square where people gather in the evening for no reason other than that it is a pleasant place to be. The piazza, the plaza, the place: these are not amenities. They are the point.

The Accumulation

The love is cumulative. It builds from small things: the weight of a coffee cup in a Parisian cafe, the smell of bread in an Italian bakery at seven in the morning, the sound of a church bell in a village where you are the only visitor and the bell is not ringing for you but simply marking the hour as it has marked every hour for five centuries.

None of these things is remarkable on its own. Together they constitute something that I can only describe as a feeling of being exactly where you are supposed to be — which is, I think, the definition of a place you love.

Why We Keep Going Back

I have been asked many times why I keep returning to Europe when there is so much of the world I have not seen. The honest answer is that I am not finished with it. Every trip reveals how much I missed on the last one. Every country contains a dozen regions I have not visited. Every city has a neighbourhood I walked past without stopping.

Europe is not a destination. It is a practice — something you return to, something that changes as you change, something that gives back differently depending on who you are when you arrive. I fell in love with it on that first trip, somewhere between the English countryside and the Alps, with my daughter asleep in the seat beside me. I am still falling.