Picture it: there you are in a bus with 35 of your new retiree/empty-nester/young parent friends, motoring around the major sights of Europe, being cultural by day and getting boozy by night, going from the Uffizi to the Red Garter, the Piazza San Marco to Camping Fusina, the Jungfrau to Camping Jungfrau.
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You’ll know immediately if you qualify to go on a tour like this. You’re going to need to have (or have had) a Hotmail address. You will know more lyrics to Ice Ice Baby than those I’ve already quoted. You will occasionally catch yourself misreading AI as Al, which immediately makes you think of Al Bundy, or You Can Call Me Al, or Alfie Langer.
This isn’t a tour for 18-to-35s – it’s more like a tour for 80-to-35s. (Though, of course, for consistency with last week’s column, those of any age are allowed to come along.)
I know that people of all ages are still doing organised tours anyway. Book yourself on an Intrepid tour or something with G Adventures right now and you will probably travel with guests who did the big lap around Europe with Contiki or Topdeck or Busabout back in the day.
But it’s not the same now that we’ve become all old and serious. This revival tour needs to be a proper throwback; it needs to be raucous, it needs to be for like-minded former backpackers, and it also – I’m sorry – needs to be a camping tour.
Hotels just don’t offer the right surroundings for Euro debauchery, or even for group cohesion. This needs to be down-and-dirty, sleeping in tents (or campsite cabins, I guess), pitching in with the cooking and the washing-up, drinking €1 supermarket beers in a dusty clearing instead of sipping martinis in some fancy hotel bar.
You’re also going to have to leave your phone behind. Nothing too wild happens when everyone there is capturing it in 4K. Nothing goes wrong, you never get lost or confused or wind up on bizarre adventures when you have your phone to rely on. And we didn’t have them back in the ’90s.
We can also do the ‘red light, green light, orange light’ thing (to signify your relationship status on tour), though with this cohort, wedding rings will probably do. We can draw the bus curtains and all fall asleep while driving through some of the most spectacular alpine scenery in the world if you insist.
But would this sort of thing actually be fun? Would it be doable? Is this the revival experience we’ve all been looking for? And maybe more importantly: would any local European want to get anywhere near a busload of boozy retirees trying desperately to get back in touch with their youth?
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I think we all understand the answer to all these questions is no. This is something of a fantasy among a certain cohort of travellers who did a backpackers’ tour back in the day and loved it. (This idea actually came up while I was chatting to the editor of a very serious travel publication.) But a good revival experience is one that gets you home by 10pm, not one that gets you back to a tent and a blow-up mattress as dawn is breaking.
There are travel experiences that are best left in your memory, that would be ruined forever if you tried to recreate them. Sadly, this is one.
Instead, has anyone got Vanilla Ice tickets?
