Mr. and Mrs. Andressen both visited Italy for the first time in the summer of 1988, but they were then just two strangers whose youthful adventures started out from distant points on the compass. Having just graduated from their respective colleges, they had decided, like so many other students before them, to celebrate their freedom with a summer backpacking trip across Europe.
Each of the young travelers possessed brand new, unstamped passports because neither of them had ever before been outside of the United States, except to visit Canada which did not require a passport. And each of them had purchased Eurail passes entitling them to two glorious months of unlimited train travel throughout Europe.
On a cloudless Monday morning in June, an excited Roger Andressen flew from Seattle, his hometown, by way of Atlanta, to Paris, where he had booked a room at a hostel on the Left Bank for an indeterminate period of time. Two days later, Sally McGrath, as Mrs. Andressen was then known, eagerly embarked on a somewhat shorter route, driving down from her childhood home in Vermont, with her college roommate, to catch a flight from Boston to London, where she and her roommate spent their first week abroad with welcoming family members that she had never met, before the two friends took the ferry from Dover to Calais to catch a train headed for Paris.
to be continued...
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