Rick Steves Has Been Packing the Same Carry-On Since 1973

Rick Steves was a teenager giving piano lessons in Edmonds, Washington, when a family trip to Europe rearranged something in him that never got put back the way it was. He went back on his own as a college student, kept going every summer after that, and by 1980 had turned the note-taking habit into a self-published guidebook, Europe Through the Back Door, written for travelers who wanted the actual place rather than the version built for tour buses. That was forty-six years ago. He is still, as of this writing, spending roughly four months of every year on the road in Europe, the same as he has since 1973.

Most successful travel writers eventually stop traveling and start managing the business the traveling built. Steves runs a company that takes more than thirty thousand people to Europe a year, hosts a long-running public television series, and publishes a guidebook line most American travelers under sixty have used at least once — and he is still, every year, back on the ground himself, walking the same back streets he was walking before any of it existed. The business grew up around the habit. The habit never got replaced by the business.

He’s also spent the last two decades making an argument that travel isn’t a reward you cash in once you’ve earned it, or a box to check before life gets too busy or too short — it’s closer to an ongoing practice of paying attention, one he thinks a person owes themselves regularly rather than occasionally. His own words for it: travel broadens your perspective personally, culturally, and politically, and he considers it one of the last remaining sources of a kind of freedom and adventure that’s actually still legal. Not a once-in-a-lifetime trip. A repeated, unglamorous, four-months-a-year habit that happens to add up to a lifetime, one ordinary summer at a time.

That’s the part worth sitting with longer than the impressive numbers. A single big trip is a story you tell for the rest of your life. Fifty-plus consecutive years of taking roughly the same trip, on purpose, without needing it to be the last one or the biggest one, is a different kind of story — one where the point was never to finish, because there was never a version of “finished” the plan was building toward. He is seventy years old and still packing the same carry-on he’s packed every spring since he was a teenager, not because he hasn’t gotten to everything yet, but because getting to everything was never actually the goal. Going, regularly, was.

Most of us save travel for the vacation we’re still saving up for, the trip we’ll finally take once the timing is right. Steves has spent five decades quietly proving the timing question was the wrong question the whole time. The right one was just: are you going again this year?