One of my favorite childhood moments was when my dad decided we’d have a slide show. A white sheet was draped over the TV, the lights were turned off or the shutters closed. Images of happy days would then scroll by, much to our delight. It always ended too soon. That’s when I realized that reliving a trip is actually pretty nice—a second layer... That slide projector from the 1960s seemed surprisingly sophisticated, and it must have cost a small fortune. Recently, an entrepreneur visiting my mom offered her a good sum for it, but she doesn’t know why she didn’t want to part with it. The fear of letting go of a piece of her own history?
After my grandparents passed away and once my mom had her third child—unplanned, that one—there was only one paycheck coming into the house instead of four. Goodbye, cows, pigs, and grand departures for new horizons.
It’s frustrating to only know distant vacations through the glossy postcards occasionally sent by some more or less distant relatives—those were essentially their way of flaunting their good fortune in our faces. The writing, the postage stamp, and the image were as much a mocking provocation as an invitation to dream.
Aunt Jacqueline and Uncle Gérard were the family members who had made it. Both were very intelligent, with strong personalities and piercing gazes, which is why I was a little afraid of them. At the end of his career, he even discovered a technological trick he patented for Peugeot. As a sales rep, he always had a nice, recent car model, and—unthinkable for us—they even took the plane for vacations! A fact mentioned in the family in almost hushed, reverent tones, as if we were talking about royal or imperial privileges. And that’s not all: on top of that, they stayed in hotels! Every single day of their vacations, can you imagine! We all certainly felt that these possibilities were and would remain out of reach. Whether it was the price of flights, the cost of hotels, or even the activities they treated themselves to. These things are for others—those who can afford them.
What made us envious was that they’d come back and tell the funniest anecdotes. Back from Africa—I think it was Kenya—Aunt Jacqueline recounts that while swimming in the ocean, she wanted to play a prank on Uncle Gérard, who was standing a few meters away. She spots his position, goes underwater, and once she reaches him, pulls down his swim trunks. When she surfaces, oh shock, she realizes she’s stripped a different man. I don’t remember the rest, which, in the end, doesn’t matter. Besides, we don’t even listen to the rest—we’re laughing too hard.
They also brought back some good jokes from their vacations. Uncle Gérard tells me he saw the PANOUS PANOUS and asks me with a knowing look if I know what that is. In these situations, at the start of your teens, you have no choice but to play along. I tell him, looking very intrigued: "Aah no." "You see, during the safari, you’re watching for a big animal to come out. Suddenly, you see something moving in the bushes. You point your gun and are about to pull the trigger. At that moment, some Black guys come out of the bushes shouting: not us, not us!" That’s the PANOUS PANOUS!! I can’t be blamed, especially in front of the person, for not being a good sport. It’s mostly that I don’t like making others uncomfortable—it’s often too easy. Let’s say my first reaction was partly to smile while picturing the situation, but my mind struggled to ignore the... how to put it? A kind of superiority complex, a lack of consideration for his fellow humans a little darker due to millennia of sun exposure? Uncle Gérard was happy that I pretended to laugh at his joke, even though I was perfectly hiding the hint of discomfort that was creeping up on me. Let’s put it into perspective—jokes don’t always make you roll on the floor laughing until you choke... it was simply another era.
Me, who had a hard time convincing my mom to give me a little pocket money, I wasn’t about to imagine one day taking a plane or, even more, spending my vacations in a hotel. No, my mom wasn’t stingy—she was thrifty. That’s what she says. However, she compensates for this rather marked tendency by sometimes being philosophical and realistic. For proof, I remember that at times when certain regrets about material things surface, she readily comes out with one of her favorite lines: "Anyway, when we leave for good, we won’t take anything with us."
My first memory of a vacation without my parents was at the age of nine. Our school had arranged, through the Alliance Française, a three-day discovery trip to Paris. I don’t remember why I didn’t know the other boys around me—had I been selected because I was top of my class? In any case, being the youngest and smallest in the group made me its mascot. Especially with one of the accompanying teachers, who had the odd idea of calling me Emile instead of using my real name. Despite my young age, I found his behavior suspicious and somewhat embarrassing—he sought out my company and showed affection out of nowhere. He absolutely wanted to carry me on his shoulders. Sure, I felt a bit rude ignoring him systematically, but part of me must have thought that in doubt, it was better to be hostile rather than friendly—a good resolution I should have applied more often in other situations.
Besides, the parish priest pulled the same trick on me a few years later. Seeing me, it wasn’t rare for him to start singing a song I didn’t know, beginning with: "Joel, Joel, Noël...", his jovial face contrasting at that moment with the severe and even frightening look he usually wore behind his hypnotic glasses, and not just during the homily. One day, he even dared to suggest I become an altar boy and spend Saturdays in the sacristy. He was very disappointed when I told him I couldn’t because I had soccer. I put on a guilty face that didn’t reflect my state of mind at all—another sin I theoretically should have confessed later. One day, while talking about him with my new neighbor across the street, he told me that the priest had once come to see the family to suggest they choose his parish, our street being on the border of the territories of the two main parishes in town. That’s when I learned that competition could also exist in the spiritual domain. My young neighbor hadn’t really liked the priest taking him on his lap, especially since the man unfortunately had very bad breath. Years later, tongues loosened regarding the priests of both parishes—the holy men having since joined a better world or, in my opinion, spent a relatively long stay in purgatory. Sure, Jesus said "Let the little children come to me," but he didn’t mean putting anything other than hosts in their mouths. But I’m digressing—hosts didn’t exist two thousand years ago.
That said, the capital of our wonderful country also planted some seeds in me for the love of travel. The Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, the Musée Grévin, Sacré-Cœur, and the Palace of Versailles left me with the memory of grand discoveries and the certainty that if there were so many beautiful things to discover or admire there, there must be just as many elsewhere. I must have been so moved by the discoveries that I forgot to put postage stamps on the postcards I sent to the whole family and my godparents, which, in addition to the nice surprise of hearing from me, allowed them to rediscover the existence of postage-due stamps, reserved for postage errors and paid by the recipients.
Unfortunately, my adolescence offers me only one travel memory—a three-week stay at a summer camp on the Giens peninsula, near Hyères, not far from Toulon. If I liked it, it didn’t exactly thrill me. My only weakness in my traveler’s journey. Maybe it wasn’t the right time. Still, it was nice to find the sandy beach and the view of the sea. Especially its characteristic iodine smell. When you live more than 800 kilometers from the coast, the smell of the sea is even better than that of the Christmas tree. It’s the scent of an idealized world—the land of vacations. It didn’t start so well, though. There was a long train ride, about 800 kilometers, which felt endless. Once again, I was the smallest in the compartment. Parents were supposed to give the kids something to eat for the evening snack, and everyone pulled out their little sandwich—except me. Indeed, my mom had spoiled me by buying me a small roast chicken. The opportunity was too good for the older kids to tease me—they stole it and tossed it around while I desperately tried to catch it. Okay, they weren’t too cruel, but let’s just say I ate upset. What’s great is realizing upon arrival, in the middle of the morning, that you’ve left familiar places for a very different region: everything is to be discovered, and therefore every moment is rich. Of all that, only a few flashes remain when I activate my memory. The walk through a bamboo forest to get to the camp. The second evening, the only time I called my parents from a phone booth to tell them I was bothered because my willy was burning when I peed. In the end, nothing serious—it healed on its own. Maybe a reminder not to pee against the wind... I remember those big military tents where we slept eight to a tent, and the evening when a counselor came to scold us, forcing himself to look severe, even though I had made the other boys laugh by improvising a salacious version of Luis Mariano’s *Le Rossignol*. Maybe we stay idiots afterward, but we’ll never be as idiotic as we were at that age. I have a vivid memory of that evening when I was hanging around the camp and came across a girl crying her eyes out. Oh, she really personified despair. I wondered where she could be hurting and how much to cry like that. It turned out this young girl was ahead of her peers in terms of physical development. While her tent mates were still undeveloped, she already had a teenager’s body with a generous bust that looked great in a two-piece swimsuit. Unfortunately, this made her the target of a lot of teasing, certainly many unpleasant remarks in the group, and it’s tough when you’re far from home with no one to defend you. Just being a little different is enough to get picked on. Girls can be so mean to each other, too.
As for vacations, the rest of my adolescence and the beginning of adulthood ultimately made me languish in anticipation of better times. One day, Marek Halter said: "A dream of a doughnut is a dream, not a doughnut. But a dream of travel is already a journey." To which I’d add that when you can’t leave, it doesn’t do you much good.
A little after my twenties, my neighbor across the street kindly lent me his camera so I could immortalize some images of my first real solo trip. I had blown all my first savings as a young worker on a round-trip ticket: Luxembourg - Chicago - San Francisco. The fact that I’d met a nice young American from Portland at an Ultravox concert in Strasbourg in 1984 had something to do with it, I admit. I’ll always remember that moment when my friend and I, having arrived early in the front row, turned around to see the crowd entering the venue—our eyes were drawn to that short denim miniskirt revealing a splendid pair of legs. Especially my friend’s reaction, who says to me: "You see, those girls aren’t for us." And guess who comes to stand right behind us ten minutes later, speaking English with her classmates? Perfect timing—I’ve always loved that language, and the young lady was so happy someone was talking to her that after disappearing for a moment, she came back with beers for us. I still wonder how I dared ask for her host family’s phone number or why she agreed to give it to me.
According to her, San Francisco would suit me more than other cities, and luckily, she was finishing her studies there. It was my first exception to my early decision never to take photos, believing that when I got older, it would be unbearable to see myself young or remember the beautiful experiences I’d had. I was convinced it would ruin my mood for weeks. In hindsight, I think I was both wrong and right. Seriously, who enjoys seeing themselves post-adolescence, handsome, muscular, and tanned forty years later? 😎
San Francisco, that city where people said hello when I passed by their homes in the morning, reignited my travel desires and almost made me consider expatriation. If you are going to San Francisco...
Roundabouts are particularly interesting because they feature emblems of Turkmen culture, like the dog, a carpet, the Ahal Teke horse, or Muslim symbols, even though the presence of Islamic artifacts is quite limited.
Why this country?
After visiting Hungary, Slovenia, Romania, and Poland in recent years, I’ve fallen in love with Eastern European countries. I adore the Slavic soul, its Austro-Hungarian villages, the gentle landscapes, the Carpathian Mountains, and that slightly mysterious atmosphere.
Slovakia evokes a certain imagination with its deep forests, medieval castles, and cobbled villages.
After seeing photos of the High Tatras—especially Lake Štrbské Pleso and Spiš Castle—I thought, "Let’s do it! We’re going!"
So, will Slovakia live up to what I imagine?
We’ll find out together.
We decided to travel as a group of six (five adults and a six-year-old child), by car (we needed two).
Here’s the day-by-day itinerary for this family trip, which started with a 3-day stay in Vienna (see the dedicated travel journal):
When it comes to the Caribbean island of Saint-Martin, it's customary to praise its coastline and dreamy beaches—and they certainly deserve it.
But in this story, I’d like to highlight other memories, aspects, and impressions for a slightly different change of scenery.
Enjoy the read—some text and, above all, lots of photos.
« Byenveni sou zile Sen Maten! » (Welcome to the island of Saint-Martin)
Come along, I'm taking you to this country where it's so nice to wander and slow down...
