Folded away in my collection of maps is a well-folded and slightly yellow youth hostel guide map of Europe, vintage 1983. Even if I hadn’t carried that map around Europe in the summer of ’83, I would know the date.
It’s fairly large, 24 x 34 inches, and a little cumbersome to use except in your room, as you planned a future stay. We had guidebooks that might (or might not) mention a particular youth hostel, but there were no websites to tell you what you were getting into, though I never did stay in a bad one, just some mediocre ones. You also never knew whether it had a vacancy, unless you figured out how to call ahead, which could be an involved process. Even in the high season of summer, however, I remember that being an issue maybe only twice, and in those cases the hostel staff recommended somewhere else to stay.
One side includes most of northern Europe, including insets for Ireland and West Germany, where youth hostels were thick on the ground. But not in East Germany in those days. Guess the DDR didn’t take kindly to youth traveling around.
Interestingly, most of the other communist countries, at least those that weren’t the Soviet Union, had a system of youth hostels. Bulgaria seemed to have been especially fond of them. Maybe they still are.
The other side features southern Europe and northern Africa, including a fair number in Tunisia and a scattering in Morocco, Egypt and Libya, of all places.
The map is relatively simple, noting national borders, some of the larger cities and roads and rivers, and each IYHF-affiliated property as a blue triangle to stand out against the browns of the rest of the map.
The German inset.
I took a few notes on the map, such as these between Devon and Brittany.
Looks like I was working out my travel schedule from August 3 to 9, as we headed north from Switzerland to the coast at Oostende. I wrote “Brugge” at the end, but for reasons I don’t remember, and can’t fathom now, we didn’t stop there.
We stayed at hostels in the UK, West Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Denmark. All the more expensive countries, in other words. In Italy, which had any number of cheap guesthouses, we didn’t bother, and sometimes the hostels we stayed at in northern Europe weren’t affiliated with the IYHF.
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