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1997: My First Band Performance Trip to Europe-Flying to Europe & Paris

Part 1: Jacksonville to Paris

I’ve always been a little sentimental about memories. When I was a kid in the 1960s, I spent hours at my grandparents’ house looking through old black-and-white family photos. They were kept in what everyone called the “middle room,” in the bottom right-hand drawer of a dresser, and most of them dated from the 1930s and 1940s. My Uncle Bob, my grandparents’ oldest child, had gotten interested in photography in college, and he’d left an extensive collection of photographs behind in that drawer.

I’d sit on the floor and sort through those faded prints, picking out relatives in their younger days: a grandparent I only knew as gray-haired, standing tall and slim in a suit; my parents before they were my parents; or some unknown relative dressed to the nines in their Sunday best. But what really caught me were the places. Every photo was a little window into somewhere else. It didn’t matter if that “somewhere else” was just back home in South Carolina, a Sunday afternoon at the zoo, or a deserted railway line out in the middle of nowhere. I dreamed about distant places and new locales long before I ever had the chance to see one.

Later, when I was in college, Charlotte and I wrote letters to each other, real handwritten letters, and we still have them today. It’s funny: when I read them now, I can recall exactly where I was, what was happening, and what we meant by every reference, even the ones that wouldn’t make a bit of sense to anyone else. Something about putting pen to paper locks a memory in place.

I suppose that’s why, when I was about to leave on a big trip to Europe, I bought a leather-bound journal to record my thoughts, reflections, and memories along the way. I had no idea it would be the first of many journals in which I would scratch out and sketch my memories.

A Band Director with a Plan

In June 1997, I set off with my band students on a performance tour of Europe. This wasn’t my first trip to Europe with students, but it was the first time we packed up our horns and took our show on the road across the pond. In the months leading up to our departure, we spent many Sunday afternoons rehearsing and putting together our concert program. Each rehearsal also included time to learn about our destinations and to work out the details of the tour.

To plan and run the tour, I hired EF Educational Tours, a student tour operator. Those of you who’ve known me for a while know that my experiences with EF ultimately became the reason I started my own tour company, David McGuffin’s Exploring Europe. But that’s a story for another day! Back in 1997, I didn’t have the know-how or the resources to put together a trip to Europe on my own, much less a performance tour with instruments, concert venues, and a busload of teenagers. So I relied on EF to handle our accommodations, transportation, meals, and performance venues.

That doesn’t mean I sat back and waited. I spent most of the year before the trip working out the tour route, the destinations, the concert locations, and even some of the hotels with EF. I’d never done anything like that before; on earlier trips I’d always left it all to “the tour company.” I remember Matt, his dad, Michael Chumbley, and I spending hours at a copy machine, running off pages from Rick Steves’ guidebook so every student could carry a little piece of Europe in their bag. Looking back, I think that year of planning was when the bug really bit me.

June 5, 1997: Departure Day

We were up at 7:00 that morning in Middleburg, Florida, doing all the last-minute things that always make me late. Why Charlotte picked that particular day to get her hair cut and styled is still beyond me, but she did. By 8:30 I was out the door, racing between the bank, the school, and a list of final errands. The most important stop was the bank, where I picked up our American Express Traveler’s Checks, which in 1997 was how a responsible person carried money overseas.

I made it back home around 10:00 and met up with my kids and a few friends for the drive to the airport. We still had to swing by the beauty parlor to collect Charlotte and Brian, and by the time we pulled in, it was pouring rain. After the first of what would become many “passport and money belt checks,” we were finally on our way.

We reached the Jacksonville airport at 11:35 and found the Continental Airlines check-in desk. An agent named Benny took our group under his wing. He was a tremendous help getting everyone checked in and, most importantly, getting all of our instruments on board free of charge. Anyone who has ever traveled with a band knows what a gift that was. By 12:30 the entire group was checked in, and we all walked down to the gate together.

And what a scene that gate was. In those days, before security lines kept everyone but passengers out, families could walk all the way to the gate, and they did. Parents crowded around their teenagers for one last hug, one last reminder, one last photo. One of my students, Sarah, told me years later that her mom cried at the gate and that she was mortified her mother made such a scene. Another, Heather, wondered what the other passengers must have thought as a huge group of excited teenagers piled onto the plane. I’ll admit I didn’t notice the crying parents much myself. I had my own family right there with me: not just Charlotte, Jamie, and Brian, but my mom and my aunt as well. For me, this trip was a family affair, and beyond my own family, I had an extended family of band kids and parent chaperones, too!

At 2:30 we lifted off from Jacksonville, and the adventure officially began.

About two hours later we arrived in Newark. On the approach, the plane passed over Manhattan, and I got my very first look at New York City. The Empire State Building, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, the Statue of Liberty standing out in the harbor: they were pretty darn impressive, especially to a country boy from Middleburg. I pressed my face to the window like one of my students.

When I was writing this chapter, I went back to check my original journal, and sure enough, I had written that this was my very first look at New York City. But then I opened my journal from twenty years earlier, from my first-ever flight and tour in 1977, and found almost exactly the same words. So now I don’t know which is true. Could I have forgotten seeing the New York skyline from an airplane window twenty years before? I’ll never know. But I think we can all agree that New York Harbor was an impressive sight in the days before the world changed on September 11, 2001.

To get into the European spirit, we ate pasta at Sbarro in the Newark terminal, then settled in for a two-hour wait. We boarded Continental Flight 56 at 7:25 and were off the ground by 8:30, pointed east across the Atlantic.

The flight itself was uneventful, at least for me. I took two Bayer PM, put in my earplugs, pulled on an eye mask, and slept most of the way. The students, I learned later, had a slightly different experience. Kara and her friend Jessie were seated directly behind Charlotte and me, and Kara wrote in her own journal that night that they couldn’t move around much, “or else we’ll bump their seat and they give us dirty looks.” I have no memory of giving anyone dirty looks. I was asleep. But I’ll take her word for it.

Looking back: When I reread those first pages of my journal ten years later, and again now, nearly thirty years on, I was struck by how much had changed. Traveler’s Checks, Bayer PM, eye masks, quick airline check-ins, walking family and friends all the way to the gate, and the World Trade Center are all things of the past. Now I use my debit card to pull local cash from an ATM, tap to pay with contactless cards, have a glass of wine instead of a sleeping pill, and wear my cap in place of an eye mask. And the Twin Towers I marveled at from that airplane window are gone.

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Tour Highlight:

Germany, Austria, Switzerland