Women Who Travel Podcast: One Listener Stumbles Across Kodak Slides From Her Mother's Long-Ago Euro Trip

24.08.2023 - 17:37 / cntraveler.com / Travel Podcast / Long

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In another special mini-episode of Women Who Travel, Lale gets on the phone with listener Margaret, who's retracing a trip her mother took through Europe. Using a treasure trove of recently stumbled upon Kodak slides and notebooks her mum left behind, Margaret gives us a glimpse into the romance of the past and how the discovery inspired her own travels.

Lale Arikoglu: Hello. I'm Lale Arikoglu, and welcome to another mini-episode of Women Who Travel. This month, we're taking a break from our typical episode schedule. Instead, you'll be hearing some phone calls between our listeners and me, about travels they've taken in search of something.

On our last mini-episode, we heard from listener, Jamie, about her many failed camping attempts, but why she still wants to love camping. And today, we hear from Margaret, who's retracing a trip through Europe her mother took, more than 70 years ago, using a recently discovered set of Kodak slides and a notebook her mum left behind.

Margaret: She said, "Oh, we only had one map." She always seemed to want to find that one map, but she could never find anything else, which was always a curiosity to me. And she passed away suddenly, in 2013, and I searched, and I still couldn't find anything from this trip. And, after she passed away, I went through all of our trip slides, as a family. It wasn't there. And a year later, I thought, oh, I'm gonna clean out some of the closets, and I'm sure this box holds, you know, the, the, the gargantuan hand lotions that you get from big box stores.

LA: [laughs]

Margaret: And, uh, there was a Kodak projector box under plastic shower curtain liners, and I opened it up, expecting to find hand lotion, and it was her trip slides and some notebooks that she had written in, and some letters which were completely gold, to me.

I got the letters transcribed, the notebooks transcribed, I got all of the slides digitized, and then, I took a look, and started reading. My mother talked about, "Oh, I wrote a postcard to Richard W.," who was my dad. "I wrote a postcard to Richard S.," who was not my dad.

And then, there was, we knew about this, uh, Italian doctor, Enzo, and he was from Genoa, so there were some glowing, glowing things about Enzo and the, the moon over the, the Mediterranean, and my mother was never flowery like, like that. So, I thought, wow.

LA: And you're like, different side, never seen that. Amazing. Oh, Enzo. 

I was really intrigued to talk to you about this travel story you have, because my mother, when she was in her 20s, took this really formative, defining trip for her, where she and her boyfriend [at