My daughter’s European backpacker odyssey is nothing like mine. That’s her loss

August 8, 2026 — 9:30am

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“I can’t believe,” says my daughter as I navigate our rented manual car around the narrow, cobbled streets of Nazaré, Portugal, “that you used to have to read maps to travel.” As the gears grind yet again under my rusty touch, I glance at her and laugh: “But we were using a whole part of our brain that you guys don’t touch now.” She shrugs, tapping on her phone.

Remember maps? Calling from a phone box? Aerogram letters? Post-school travel for those born in the ’70s meant disappearing into Europe like a gumboot into quicksand, swallowed whole by different cultures. We were not being monitored, surveilled, tracked: we were finding our own paths, new ones. We didn’t have mobile phones with location data, downloadable maps, apps to make bookings. This, too, confounds my daughter: “But your parents wouldn’t know if you were dead.” I guess they just waved us off and hoped for the best.

There was something delightful about the invisibility, being out of range and absolved of all responsibility. We were just gone, and we’d be back in a few months. Sure, I’d call home every week or two – collect, to the eye-rolls of my parents – and send the odd postcard, but that was it. We took photos on little cameras and mailed the film back home to be developed: they were unfailingly blurry, unflattering, often tilted or poorly framed.

But it wasn’t about how we looked, it was about what we were looking at. There are few things as genuinely thrilling about........

© The Sydney Morning Herald