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with John Bermont * * * Mastering Independent Budget Travel * * * |
Q. Who is John Bermont? A. There is no such person. John Bermont is a pen name. I invented John Bermont after deciding to self publish my book How To Europe. I also created the Murphy & Broad Publishing Company to produce and market the book. After graduating from high school in Midland, Michigan, I worked my way through the University of Detroit and earned my degree in chemical engineering in 1965. At UD I was elected to the Student Council twice and President of the college Young Republican Club. My first post-degree job was in Chicago where I was a project engineer in the industrial gas industry. Carbon dioxide and hydrogen plants were my specialty. I also attended DePaul Law School evenings while working full time. However law school is a demanding endeavor and the job required so much travel that I could only finish two semesters. I flunked out by a fraction of a point, but I aced torts. A few years later I started an evening MBA program. That met the same fate. A lesson in life: jobs which require a lot of travel are not conducive to continuing education. However, I tried to make the best of it. I've studied foreign languages on my overseas job assignments — Dutch in Haarlem, The Netherlands and German in Aschaffenberg, Germany for a couple of years each. I did this while holding full time jobs and I reached a passing ability in each. In between those jobs I spent about six months in Paris as a full-time student at the Alliance Française on a couple of my self-made sabbaticals. Life is too short to work all the time, you know. Since I have traveled in almost every European country, plus a few countries in Asia and Africa, I can also say "beer" and additional critical words in several other languages. If you can't say "beer" and "toilet" in the local lingo you are in trouble. There are more details of these studies in my chapter 26, Languages, Numbers, Alphabets: Encounter The Tower of Babel in Europe. That is the formal education part. Then there is the street education. What you need to know about me as a travel writer is that I have traveled a lot. I have lived on both coasts and plenty of the middle — New York City (born in The Bronx), Detroit, Chicago, Baltimore, Wichita, Newport Beach — and have traveled from Anchorage to Miami and San Diego to Boston, not to mention plenty of Texas, on business and for the pleasure. Internationally I've been to Africa, Arabia, and East Asia, in addition to studying, living, and working in Europe for a number of years. I've traveled throughout the Continent from the eastern Ukraine to the Algarve in Portugal, Athens to Narvik in the north of Norway, Istanbul to Reykjavik, Iceland, and most of eveything in between. Most of this travel was on my own cash or credit, but having those jobs in Holland and Germany sure helped along the way. My initial landing in Europe was in June 1975. I was working for an international engineering firm in Los Angeles and was assigned to a project in Al Khobar, Saudi Arabia. On the way to Arabia I had a few hours layover in London before a connecting flight to Rome. I hired a taxi to give me a tour of London. Then it was on to Rome for an overnight layover before my first trip to Saudi Arabia. That lasted 22 days and 10 hours. I didn't need to learn the Arabic word for beer because there isn't any. It is illegal. Arabia is bone dry, literally and figuratively. Later that year my boss asked if I would accept a transfer to the company's office in Haarlem, The Netherlands. Believe it or not but I didn't even know where The Netherlands was. Heck, why would a midwestern boy living at the beach in California want to know that? I've been relocated before, several times, but not to some unknown foreign country. This was something that hadn't happened before. I had to think it over for a few days. I was single so there was just one brain to work on this challenge. It came down to a "what the heck" decision. I decided to go and ended up spending nearly two years in Holland. I had just bought a new Porsche 911S and would have taken a big loss on a quick sale so I shipped the car to Holland. That was a very good move. I drove all over Europe on vacations and long weekends. I toured up to Stockholm, to the mine fields on the East German border, and to the French Riviera on various trips. One Saturday morning I woke up and didn't have anything particularly important to do so I drove to Paris. I had no francs, didn't know a word of French, didn't have a hotel reserved, and didn't know a blessed thing about the city except that they had a big tower down there. It was dark and raining when I arrived with no map and no idea where to go. Somehow I found a hotel near the big arc in the middle of the big boulevard and then parked right there, overnight on the Avenue des Champs Élysées. I guess if anybody saw it they might have wondered why a white Porsche with California plates was parked illegally right there. No ticket. After two years in Holland I returned to the home office and was immediately asked to transfer to Iran. Those were the good old days of the Shah and the stable 2,500 year old kingdom. Fortunately I declined the offer. About a year later came the Islamic Revolution and Grand Ayatollah Syed Ruhollah Moosavi Khomeini. Native supporters of the pro-American Shah were hanged. All of the Americans fled for their lives. Since the company didn't have anywhere else to ship me at the time I was let go. I took a job with another engineering company. After a few months of putting up with the nit wit president I walked out. I picked up my pay check and expense check, and left my resignation letter at the front desk. On the way home I bought a used IBM Selectric typewriter. Thus was born my career as a travel writer. I immediately started preparing for a return to Europe to gather the information and take the pictures which would be an integral and unique feature of my planned book. In July of 1978 I arrived in Amsterdam. After staying with friends at the beach in Zandvoort for a few weeks I validated my three-month EurailPass and hit the road. With a month in Paris and London at the end it turned into a six month expedition. After returning to California I wrote and re-wrote for several years while holding down another engineering job in Long Beach. Finally, I self-published the first edition of How To Europe in February 1982. The second edition was in print through 1987. In the meantime I moved myself to Paris for the spring and summer of 1986 where I fell for Elizabeth, a fellow student at the Alliance Française. We married and I landed a job as an environmental consultant on returning to California. A couple of years later the company was bought up by huge German multi-national and word was leaked that they were going to do some over the Atlantic transplanting. I raised my hand and was one of the chosen few, the lucky seven. This time it was a family move to Germany for a few years with wife Elizabeth and daughter Stephanie. Living in Bavaria opened up great opportunities for additional travel, including most of the former communist dominated countries of eastern Europe. I drove around Poland and straight into the Ukraine in the summer of 1992, just a couple of years after the fall of the Wall and the implosion of the Soviet Union. What an impact that has had on the world. It is unbelievable. I also made biannual purchase trips to Burgundy where I would fill the trunk with over 100 liters of the ruby liquid. Even though the rear of the car sank by three inches due to the weight, German customs never stopped me for inspection. I bought it en vrac and bottled it in the cellar of our home in Aschaffenberg. We finished off the German job transfer with a month on the road. We left Stephanie with the parents of her kindergarden friend. Elizabeth and I drove south and east through Switzerland, Italy, Croatia, Slovenia, Greece, and Turkey. We returned from Istanbul through Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, and the Czech Republic to Germany. Fortunately I had the company car at my disposal. I went into the office on my last day to return the keys and buy our plane tickets. After all that driving I needed a vacation. The next morning, in July 1993, we flew back to California. The job lasted about eight months before the idiots threw me overboard. Then I was back to independent consulting and contract engineering in Southern California. To make some serious money, in 1996 I took a tax-free assignment in Saudi Arabia for a year. This brought down the marriage. I made another Eurailpass expedition throughout central Europe, then a couple of months living and working without papers in Geneva, Switzerland, and then I was back in my "home town" of Haarlem, The Netherlands living with a friend to finish off the century. I returned to Michigan in 2000 and took up high school substitute teaching. That is fun, but not very profitable. It wasn't until 2003 that I returned to Europe. I made a short trip to Haarlem. I noticed that the only thing that had changed significantly was the money. The euro has had a profound impact, making it much easier for travelers in the original 11 countries, now 16, where it has been adopted. I spent Christmas 2005 and the month of January 2006 with a Eurailpass scooting around Europe from Holland to Portugal to Austria, ending in Finland via Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. From there I took a ferry over the Baltic Sea and traveled by bus through Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania to Poland where I was able to use the trains again. Passing through the Czech Republic and Germany, I returned to Haarlem for my flight home from Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport. This was another EurailPass trip and one on which I learned the fantastic value, comfort, and convenience of overnight trains. See part 3 of chapter 17. In April 2008 I went back for a week to help the Dutch celebrate Queen's Day and the blooming of the tulips at Keukenhof. These are quite different events but are both spectacular in their own way. Click the links to see my photo logs. Then I was in Holland again for four days in October, including a day trip to Antwerp, Belgium. That was my shortest back and forth trip ever. In mid December 2008 I flew out to Paris for five days of non-stop walking and photographing. My trip of 2009 was a three week journey through London, Cambridge, Cardiff, Cork, Dublin, Belfast, Glasgow, Edinburgh, York, and back to London for the return flight in early May. I'll post a photo log of Paris, Britain, and Guinness Island soon. In 2008 I continued sending my daughter Stephanie to Europe to help research my site and provide a next generation look at things. Stephanie just turned 22 at the end of 2009. She spent 6 weeks at Universidad de Salamanca, Spain, and another month in Italy, all sandwiched in between a few days at each end in Holland in the summer of 2008. I'm still sorting out the 1,300 pictures she took but one outstanding picture that a fellow student took of her is on line at Bull Flight. She went to Milan again for a month in 2009. It helps to have an aunt and a cousin in Europe. She is on her way to Paris in July 2010 to study French at the Alliance Française for a month. If it wasn't for the Alliance Française she would never have been born. There is quite a bit more but I think you get the idea. I love travel and adventure, and writing about it to encourage others to get up and go. Altogether I've spent about a quarter of my last 35 years overseas, mostly in Europe on job transfers, personal moves, or just vagabonding around. My book How To Europe and website enjoy-europe.com are the products of these experiences, all produced in my spare time at my own expense. This is not my day job. I welcome questions and comments. If you have any concerns about your trip to Europe that have not been covered well enough on my site do not hesitate to write and ask. When you write please include as much detail as possible. I will reply in a day or two. My email address is johnbermont@enjoy-europe.com. If you know of someone else who would appreciate this web site please send the link to them. To easily do that, click your "File" tab in the tool bar and scroll down to "Send" or "Send Link." Your friend will thank you, and I thank you. Have a good trip in life. James Broad a.k.a. John Bermont. Home page http://www.enjoy-europe.com. The original do-it-yourself travel guide to Europe SM My book How To EuropeThe Complete Travelers Handbook All thirty chapters updated to May 2010 are on line, free to read. My day job http://www.enjoy-europe.com/brotech/services.htm Genius chemical engineer available for contract assignments anywhere on the planet. Email johnbermont@enjoy-europe.com Questions and comments welcome. |