Expect to hear a lot more from travel guru Rick Steves on Boston Public Radio, with the addition of a brand new monthly segment called “Day Tripping with Rick Steves.”
For their inaugural conversation, Steves talked about his entry into the world of travel writing, his lifelong love of the piano, and what he envisions for the inevitable return of European travel.
To the latter question, Steves said to expect restrictions to come with plenty of "false starts and retreat.”
"First of all, it’s gonna be regional travel,” he said. "It’s gonna be, as I like to envision, French people going to the French Riviera, and it’s gonna be the Italians going to the hilly towns in the vineyards of Tuscany… then it’s gonna be the adventurous individuals that are gonna venture on planes and into the other countries, risking quarantines and… finding frustrations with the transportation connections.”
The Rick Steves’ Europe host noted that, for many Europeans, life in quarantine has been particularly difficult.
"I think they’ve been a lot more seriously locked up than we have [in the U.S.],” he said. "Europeans live in very confined quarters — in Europe, the living room is the pub, or the living room is the piazza.”
For American tourists, however, Steves expressed some worry about how our own failures in containing the virus could inhibit our ability to return to our neighbors across the Atlantic.
"My concern is, if the United States is not really smart and diligent and responsible about this, the irony will be that the rest of the world will be opened for tourism, but they will not want to accept Americans,” he said. "And that would be a very, very disheartening thing.”
Rick Steves is an author, television and radio host, and the owner of “Rick Steves' Europe” tour group. You can catch "Rick Steves’ Europe" weeknights at 7:30 on WGBH 2, and his radio show “Travel With Rick Steves” Sundays at 4:00 on WGBH.
