My brother's girlfriend is a great writer and for one of her classes she was instructed to interview various people and write about them. She decided that our story was something that she would like to write about so she interviewed us. The process of being interviewed was so much fun and reading the finished product was even more wonderful. I wanted to share her beautiful article which is an outsider's take on our trip:
They’ll Always Have Paris
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Last year, Erin O’Dowd took nearly 45,000 of them across Europe—windmills in France, castles in Germany, lighthouses in Scotland, bridges in London. They’re striking, professional. But she still feels like they aren’t enough. Her and her fiance’s five month trip across 19 different European countries is ineffable.
“There is a real challenge in explaining to people how the trip was,” O’Dowd’s fiance, Rob Merkel, said. “A picture of being, say, in the Swiss Alps is a tool for us to remember how it felt….It kind of looks like what it was like to be there…but it doesn’t express well enough what it was actually like."
“It’s hard because sometimes people are not interested, and that’s fine,” O’Dowd said. “But it’s something that’s so much a part of us right now…this is what our life was for five months."
O’Dowd and Merkel are inseparable—her peaches-and-cream complexion and his coffee-brown eyes are like paints irreversibly mixed on a pallet. His arm is easy across the back of her chair, brushing unfazed against her thick, brunette tresses. They had been dating for two years before their trip, and returned engaged after Merkel proposed on the last day—a sunset proposal on the Arc de Triomphe.
“I think travelling is a metaphor for life,” O’Dowd said. “If you can travel together, you can really live together or be together long term."
She and Merkel decided to take the trip while waiting on food at a Wendy’s drive-thru. O’Dowd asked him, “What if we just move to Paris for a couple of months?” And Merkel jumped at the idea, without any hesitation or irony.
O’Dowd was teaching third grade at a Catholic school in Union, New Jersey, but wanted to apply for a three-month teaching position in Paris. She and Merkel started saving vigorously for the trip, planning stays in other countries before and after the anticipated time in France. O’Dowd began working aftercare at school, and Merkel, working for a valet company, took on extra shifts. Everything seemed seamless, until the teaching position started to unravel.
“The application process and everything started being a little more complicated than we expected,” O’Dowd explained. The person renting them an apartment in Paris called things off over the phone. “When she cancelled, I guess we could have just said, ‘Oh well, the trip is off.’ But we were really invested in it….We decided that we would stay in crappy places if we need to. Eat ramen.”
The saving intensified. O’Dowd and Merkel were forgoing nights out, shopping trips, restaurant dinners, and morning coffees. Everything was going away, into their joint bank account. “Paychecks would come in, we’d book Airbnbs with it,” Merkel said. He estimates the trip cost upwards of $20,000.
O’Dowd and Merkel are both 28, just a month shy of each other. They knew they didn’t need their parents’ permission to take the trip, but both still live at home and were concerned with how their parents were going to react.
“I didn’t know how they were going to be able to afford to pay for it, O’Dowd’s mother, Jean O’Dowd, said. “I was very concerned and skeptical. But then Erin reassured me and said they had planned out the budget….she convinced me they were going to make it work. And they did."
On June 18, O’Dowd and Merkel left their hometown of Cranford, New Jersey and embarked on a European odyssey across Denmark, Germany, the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Austria, Switzerland, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, San Marino, Monaco, Luxemburg, Liechtenstein, England, Scotland, and Wales.
Their first stop was Copenhagen. They left their hostel early, renting bikes to make their way to the Latin Quarter for cinnamon buns at Sankt Peders Bakery. “I had read about [it] and knew that it was one of the oldest bakeries,” O’Dowd said. The sticky cinnamon rolls, known as “Wednesday snails,” sell at around 4,000 a week on their titular day. O’Dowd and Merkel ordered four and brought them to a nearby park. People were at work and school; the park was quiet, save a group of children taking a walk with their teacher, enjoying the blissful June day. Merkel told O’Dowd, “If this is how the next five months are going to be, I’m perfectly fine with that.”
Their trip was comprised of those poignant moments, which they seem to carry much more tenderly than any of those expected, monumental experiences.
“If I’m just closing my eyes and thinking of the trip, it’s him and I sitting underneath the Eiffel Tower…and it’s sparkling and we’re drinking wine and eating pastries…We’re just talking and getting tipsy and...saying, ‘Are we really here? This is so incredible,’” O’Dowd reflected.
After a bothy in the Isle of Skye, lavender fields in Provence, and Conegliano’s balconies, coming home was difficult. “The reality is, we were there every day and we can hardly grasp the whole thing….there’s no way we can get to the bottom of all that we saw and all that we did and felt. That’s kind of hard—to not be able to fully share it with people,” O’Dowd said.
By the time they were back in Cranford, they were struggling to put gas in their car, and struggling to reconcile their two planes of reality—an idyllic life in Europe, and a life at home weighed down by student loans and job hunts, and skepticism.
"Feeling judged for this choice was something we encountered often during the planning process, people can't believe we would leave stable jobs to travel. We had many comments from people who would never do the same." O'Dowd remarked. But she and Merkel would never change anything about the path they chose. “It’s something we worked really hard for and something we should be happy and proud to talk about…The reality is that we have those memories and those pictures and those moments, and it doesn’t really matter what other people think.”
I absolutely loved reading this article and thinking back on our amazing trips. I liked that she hit on some of the realities of our experience. Unfortunately there was a word cap so she felt a bit restricted. She has mentioned wanting to write more about our trip and I really hope she does! Either way this was an unexpected way to sum up our indescribable adventure.
