Fellow Boomers Nervous About Traveling to Europe: Relax, They Don't Hate Us

See what I mean? Barcelona storefront; photo by author

Along with everything else we Yanks have yanking our chains right now, I’m hearing anxiety from my peers about foreign travel — especially to Europe, and particularly to Spain.

And this is from friends who, until recently, have been no strangers to crossing the pond. Folks with the means, the empty nests, and the post-daily-grind freedom to take one, two, or several big trips a year. People who’ve hiked the Dolomites, seen the Northern Lights from Reykjavik, checked out Dubrovnik and then Split (groaner joke, sorry).

In 2025, these seasoned sojourners of my acquaintance are getting the yips, travel-wise. 

Not due to economic whiplash, or at least not primarily. Nor due to the limitations of aging, since these are hearty, active types, nor because they’ve seen all they want to see of the world. Far from it.

They’re worried about the reception they’ll get, especially in Spain. 

“Barcelona?” asked one of my friends when I told her about our travel plans to that city and Seville earlier this spring. “But they shoot water pistols at tourists!”

Well, yes, that was a thing last summer. Given the impact of crowds, skyrocketing rents thanks to short-term lets to travelers, and some obnoxious tourist behavior, you can hardly blame the Spaniards for becoming annoyed. 

Destinations like Barcelona and Ibiza now attract the kind of revelers from elsewhere in Europe who are the equivalent of our spring-breakers who infest resort towns in Mexico every year, where they behave like drunken sots.

Really, though. We’re going to let fear of water pistols stop us? Here at home, we’re potential targets for an enraged rando with a pistol, pretty much anywhere we go. And the rando won’t be shooting water.

Anyway, in our four days in Barcelona this April, we saw not a single squirt gun. And people were lovely to us everywhere we went.

Even the Canadians. Especially the Canadians, in fact, and we met a number of them on our ten-day trip. 

One of the great pleasures of any foreign vacation is striking up conversations with travelers from other locales. Such talks usually start with a shared observation while settling down in a train or a café seat (“Do your feet hurt as much as ours do?”) and move quickly to the ubiquitous, “Where are you folks from?” 

When we’d learn our pop-up pals were Canadian, we’d immediately apologize. “It wasn’t us,” we’d assure them. 

Being Canadian and therefore polite and civil, they were swift to reassure us. “No worries,” they’d say. “We love Americans — but what is he even thinking?”

“We have no explanation,” we’d say, and share a rueful laugh. There was no need to ask who was meant by he or why his purported thinking is in question.

So, see? If anybody has good reason to hold a grudge against Americans, it’s the Canadians, who have been like the perfect neighbor for 200 years but now we want to park our Cybertruck on their lawn and we expect them to like it.

Being mature, reasonable, and emotionally well-regulated (which may be how you can tell a Canadian from a ‘Merican these days), the traveling Canucks we encountered were nothing but friendly and sympathetic.

Whimsical sign on a former fan & parasol factory, Barcelona. Photo by author

So, if you can go, by all means, go.

While the weather (and the power grid) in Europe holds — and assuming your portfolio hasn’t evaporated and your SSA check shows up — this summer is a great time to get out of DOGE, I mean, Dodge.

It’s good for you as an American. Especially as an American of enough vintage to remember when we were the (mostly) good guys, not the villains of the global story.

Otherwise, you can start to doubt your recollection and your sense of history. The U.S. may be the oldest continuous democracy in modern times, but it’s still a young country. Especially in the western states, we Americans don’t conduct our daily lives amid buildings that have stood for hundreds of years, or pass by nearly intact ruins from previous civilizations.

To wax serious for a minute, this makes us particularly vulnerable to having our past rewritten by those who profit from misleading us. Like George Orwell’s ill-fated protagonist Winston, in the novel 1984, muses:

I know, of course, that the past is falsified, but it would never be possible for me to prove it . . . The only evidence is inside my own mind, and I don’t know with any certainty that any other human being shares my memories.

Not that Spain, or anywhere in Western Europe, offers a problem-free Utopia. But spending even a few days in a country where history is so three-dimensionally evident and where reality is not fervently under attack to the degree it is in the States is balm for the troubled American mind.

Nor is this any time to deprive yourself of life-affirming sights, sounds, and experiences that America, for all its shining cities and scenic splendor, lacks. 

Sure, we’ve got coffee houses and restaurants with patios, but no matter how hard developers and city planners have tried, we have yet to establish a true café culture. Especially one featuring cafés that line gracious, pedestrian-only plazas that offer entrances into narrow, winding, balcony-festooned streets. 

Plaza Real, Barcelona, with a portal to mystery: photo by author

You don’t find that in Milwaukee or Fresno.

Here’s what’s most refreshing about a trip abroad: over there, people may be dismayed or simply puzzled about what’s going on in America — if they bother to think about it.

Mostly, they don’t. Life goes on. People get on with doing their jobs, minding their children, enjoying their meals and evenings (go ahead and accuse me of generalizing, but Europeans are SO much better at this than us Yanks), without getting their panties in a bunch about the latest bellicose bloviations from our White House.

We are not the center of the world, regardless of what our Narcissist in Chief believes. Nor is ours the only perspective. It’s good to be reminded of that.

Also helpful to note: based on personal observations from recent trips, Americans can no longer claim to be the most badly behaved foreign tourists. 

That distinction now goes to the English. 

You haven’t lived (or tried to sleep) until you’ve spent a few nights in a city that attracts Brits celebrating their stag or hen parties (bachelor or bachelorette, in American). Their cultivated reserve gets left at home with the tea-trays.

Beyond realigning our sense of where we fit in, travel is a cultural and even spiritual reset. For the world-weary, an excellent prescription is to spend an afternoon in one of Europe’s great places of worship. It doesn’t matter if you’re a capital B believer or not. 

I recommend Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia. It can take you from jaded to jaw-dropped, your sense of awe fully refreshed.

Light emanating from stained-glass windows, Sagrada Familia; photo by author

Why deprive yourself of experiences like that? Go while you still can. In our age bracket, someday is now.

It’s worth the expense, if you can manage it. It’s worth the hassle (even if you have to connect in Dallas-Fort Worth, officially designated as the Seventh Circle of Hell).

It’s even worth risking a direct hit from a squirt gun.