(gentle music) - [Female] And now Crosscut Festival Main Stage featuring a selection of curated sessions from this year's Crosscut Festival.

Thank you for joining us for "Foreign Travel in a Post-Pandemic World" with Rick Steves moderated by Enrique Cerna.

We would like to thank our keynote track sponsor, BECU.

We would also like to thank our session sponsor, Bloedel Reserve.

Finally, thank you to our founding sponsor, the Kerry and Linda Killinger Foundation.

- Hello and welcome to the Crosscut Festival.

I'm Enrique Cerna and I'm excited to have a conversation today with Rick Steves.

Of course, we know Rick well as a writer and author.

Also as the guy who for many years has given us great insights about traveling in Europe.

And while the pandemic has thrown us a curve ball about traveling these days, there is still much to talk about as we prepare for the day when we can travel once again.

Rick Steves is the best guy for that conversation.

Rick, welcome to the Crosscut Festival.

- Enrique, it's always good to be with you.

Thanks for having me.

- Yeah well so tell me what life has been like as you have been sheltering in place there in Edmonds in your beautiful home and just trying to, I would imagine trying to keep busy during this time, which you probably have no trouble doing.

- I don't know what's going on but I'm busier than ever.

I spend a lot of time talking in virtual get togethers like this, which I really love.

I'm sitting at my breakfast and my dinner table right here.

I've got my view of Puget Sound and the Olympics on a nice day and ships going out to sea and hear the train coming and going and looking out over my beautiful town of Edmonds here.

And it's just, it's really cool.

It's a constant reminder of how we are connected with our community and our world and our environment.

And I've been locked down as a traveler.

I always tell people I can still see my junior high school right there.

I've traveled a lot but I haven't gone very far.

And I walk to work, but I haven't been to my office more than handful of times in the last year.

I've got a hundred people on my payroll.

I'm a privileged person who has a quiet well lit comfortable space and I've got work that I love and I'm totally able to do my work at home.

And oddly, I'm getting more media interest now that I'm the travel guy who's stuck at home than I get when I'm on the road.

Everybody wants to talk to me and go, "Hey, what's it like you can't travel?"

And I'm woven in a love of travel.

I was walking home the other day and I saw a snail on my neighbors white picket fence and all I could think of was escargot.

I mean I'd love to go.

We had 24,000 people signed up on our tours last year when this pandemic hit and we gave back 24,000 deposits.

And I've got a hundred people on my payroll and I want to keep my team together.

It's the right thing to do.

We're still employed.

We're still getting our health care, we're still working, but we're not able to sell tours or sell books.

So, you know, it's a forced pause and I've been making the most of it.

I mean I've been thinking a lot about employing a traveler's mindset right here at home, Enrique.

And I've realized, you know me I've been a travel fanatic ever since I was a teenager.

I've spent a third of my adult life living out of a carry-on the airplane size suitcase hanging out with people who find different truths to be self-evident and God-given, and learning from it and taking notes and writing and making TV shows and guidebooks and so on.

And now I'm home and it's really, a very fundamental thing I've learned is I know what a good traveler should be.

I call it a traveler's mindset.

You know, you're positive, you're curious, you're willing to get out of your comfort zone, you want to make mistakes and learn from them.

You want to try new things.

You want to put more colors on the palette where you'll paint your life story.

And you can employ that traveler's mindset right here wherever your home is.

- What is that?

So what is a traveler's mindset, particularly when you apply it here at home, not in Europe?

- When the opportunity presents itself, you say yes.

In my travels, a lot of times I'm tired or I didn't plan that or it's gonna disrupt that but I just want, you just want to shake things up.

I've been watching the Hemingway special with Ken Burns, you know, that KCTS has been airing and Hemingway had to shake it up.

If there was something going on, he had to be there in order to have an interesting life to write about.

And when you travel you want to say yes to those opportunities, you can do that at home.

Examples I always like to talk about, I never knew how to cook.

It was kind of embarrassing how I had almost never worn an apron, I didn't know how to turn on my stove very well, I mean I wasn't comfortable with it.

I distinctly remember the first time I cut through a nice crispy onion and I was 65 years old.

A whole new world.

My girlfriend loves to cook and we've spent a lot of time together and I have been, I always think, I've got no regrets, I love the way I've led my life, but I have missed out on the joy of cooking and shopping and helping out in the kitchen.

And now I do that.

I look forward to shopping for groceries, managing the inventory.

What's coming in the farmer's box this week?

Talking about what you cooked as you eat it.

I just spent a lot of money on a nice set of knives.

My kids are saying, who is this man?

A reminder not that cooking in itself is important, but you can think you know what your priorities are, and that's because of a lot of odd little circumstances, and my priorities have been travel and I love teaching and that's my niche in life and that's where I'm supposed to be.

But if I can't travel, I can still shake things up, I can carbonate my life even if I don't get on an airplane.

Another thing, Shelly, my girlfriend has two beautiful dogs.

And when I met her, I thought, oh no, this is such a beautiful person, but dogs.

I just didn't get dogs.

I never had time for dogs.

And I thought, well, I'll give it a whirl.

And I love dogs and now I understand why people walk dogs.

I don't even want to say what I thought about people who walked dogs until now, I just didn't get it.

But it's a beautiful dimension of life.

- So Rick Steves has been rediscovering himself.

All right during all this time.

Yeah, you know what I discovered was the joys of an instant pot, 'cause I've learned to do a lot of cooking with an instant pot.

- Yeah, well the cool thing, Enrique, is there's so much to be enthusiastic about life over.

Hummingbirds, I'm really into hummingbirds right now.

I've never even noticed hummingbirds and now I think we're the most popular little stop on the block.

I'm more tuned into the environment.

For me, every sunset is like a devotional.

I just take a moment and I enjoy that sun going down.

In fact, I've got a little routine where I play taps when the sun goes down and I think my neighbors like it.

And I just love doing that.

And it's just that moment when we're all together and we all focus on the environment and look at the sun and when it's done, we all whoop and clap and we go, yeah, we're gonna get through this thing.

- The one thing you've still been doing is that, and you've had thousands that have been joining you online with this is doing a Monday night travel party.

Tell me about that.

- Yeah, yeah, I was just, every Monday, I got about 5,000 or 6,000 people that come into my home and it's fun.

I scurry around and I get set up and I'm cooking and I'm sharing food and drink from the place we're gonna be traveling.

I'm using a wonderful Zoom webinar technology.

It's just a free fun party for travelers.

And I thought, normally I'm in Europe, Enrique, for 100 days out of the year doing my work and then I come home and I'm not, I'm gone a lot when I'm home 'cause I'm traveling around the country giving talks.

Of course, I haven't been traveling around the country.

So I've got that bandwidth to do something in a time-consuming regular way.

So I committed myself to hosting this Monday night travel party and it's just taken off and we really, we probably have about 8,000 or 9,000 people that sign up each week.

I do two shows and every week I go somewhere new and I show, I broke apart our TV shows for a program I made for teachers called "Classroom Europe".

We have 150 TV shows that we've aired here on KCTS for 30 years now and we broke it into 500 teachable clips.

So teachers can scramble and put together playlists, and homeschooling parents and so on.

And that's a program I'm really excited about and proud of and happy to give to teachers.

It's my gift to teachers who I have so much respect for.

And I realized I can cobble together fun little versions of a TV show with a particular playlist and then I've got my finger on the pause button and I pause and I explain to people what what we were doing when we filmed it and what was happening and a few little updates.

So we do that and then I'm eating different things from different countries and it's my Monday night travel and it's vicarious travel, it's virtual travel, but it's the best we got right now.

And I'm just impressed by how many people are really hungry for that.

- And you're still traveling, you're still telling people about what's happening around the, food wise and giving information and keeping yourself active.

How do people sign up for that?

- Go to my website and right on the homepage, you'll see Monday Night Travel and you just click through.

It's totally free.

And you choose, do you want the 5:30 or the seven o'clock show?

I'm a little tipsier and looser on the seven o'clock show so if you can schedule that.

- Is there a little wine going on there Rick?

- Every night.

- I know you like your wine so yeah.

- Yeah.

- Well let's talk a little bit about what's happening in the news.

I read recently in the New York Times that the European Union is saying that they think that people can be able to travel to Europe maybe as early as this summer.

What do you think of that?

You think that's really gonna be possible?

- Well, if you're hell bent on traveling you can travel right now to certain places.

You know, patience is not an American forte.

It's certainly not a Rick Steves forte.

- No kidding.

- For the last year patience has been my middle name.

People are asking me, when can we go?

Can we do this?

Can we game it and get over there before everybody else?

And I'm just saying, take a breath.

This is God's way of telling us to slow down.

Let's just take this little sabbatical from all of our travel.

We will be able to travel soon enough.

And if it's just, if you want to get first out of the gate, you can do it, but I don't want to fly all the way to Amsterdam to eat in a bubble so I don't get somebody else's germs.

For me, social distancing and Rick Steves style travel have nothing to do with each other.

I am the opposite of that.

I go to Europe for the people.

And wherever you're traveling, but my beat of course is Europe.

But if I'm making a guidebook or making a TV show or leading a tour, the measure of how good that the work I'm doing is is how do I connect my people with people in the land we're traveling to?

And you know, there'll be a certain safeguards and changes we'll make going forward post COVID and we can talk about that, but right now I would just say we're on a trajectory towards normalcy.

Without the vaccine it was testing and it was whackable.

But now, once we get to herd immunity, we're gonna be where we want to be, but we just got to get to herd immunity.

Now I'm very thankful that, well, first of all, I was disappointed in how Europe was doing in the last three or four months and I was disappointed on how Americans are reluctant, a lot of them, to take their vaccine, so that's bad news.

But thank goodness we've got capable, good governance, we've got a government that believes in science, we've got these vaccines and we've got to push now to get people out to get that.

We're talking rich country to rich country travel, EU, United States.

When they're safe and when we're safe, assuming we've got the transportation connections there'll be travel.

We won't be traveling to the poor parts of the world because by the nature of our big gap between rich and poor in our world, it's the rich countries that will have their bubbles where they can travel.

I believe New Zealand and Australia already have that.

And the United States and Europe will have that I think a couple of years before Subsaharan Africa or Latin America and the United States will be traveling that smoothly.

Europe is, the biggest employer in Europe is tourism.

We're vital for their economy.

And of course it's a big part of our economy.

I've got a hundred people on my payroll with no way to make any money right now as we're in this pandemic.

I think we're hoping we can travel in the fall of 2021.

We've got tours booked.

We're taking people's names.

We've got our bus drivers and our hotels standing by.

I think it's a little, everything will have to go right for us to be able to travel with organized tours, people on a bus.

Individuals will travel before bus companies will travel I think.

But I would bet on us being able to do our bus tours in early 2022.

That would be a real shock to me if we're not able to travel by early 2022.

But I don't want to jump the gun.

You know you could have every expert in the world on a panel and they wouldn't know when we're gonna be able to travel.

It's just depends on things on how things unroll.

But we're on the right track and that's good news.

And I think there's a light at the end of the tunnel.

- You're basically saying, be patient and do what we need to do so that we can get to the opportunity to be able to travel.

- Everybody's aching to travel.

Everybody's aching to fill up their restaurants and their concert halls and their airplanes and their tour buses and their cruise ships and I'm aching to fill up my tour buses.

I've got a hundred good friends who are my guides in Europe that have no work.

It's heartbreaking.

I've got 24,000 people that gave me deposits last year.

They want to go to Europe.

I mean I'm over worrying about my lost revenue.

I've had 30 good years, I'm having a couple of bad years.

That's just fine.

I'm really, what breaks my heart is all of these people who are in the prime of their careers and they can't do what they are so good at doing and all these people who have saved and dreamed and planned and they have to derail their travel plans.

Our mantra is this COVID can derail our travel plans, but it can't stop our travel dreams.

And I know from 40 years of leading tours around Europe and so on that the demand does not dissipate when you have a hurdle like this.

This is by far the biggest hurdle in my career.

But I know that the demand, it just gets backed up.

And when you're free to travel again safely and reliably, the demand will spring back and there'll be a huge resurgence in travel.

But right now I really think you need to be patient.

I don't want, again, you could go over there early, and you know if you want to, that's fine.

There'll be individuals, highly motivated individuals that will find a way to travel.

I've had people on my staff who have gone to many places in Europe and in Turkey in the last couple of months and they're highly motivated and they go over there and they have to go through quarantines and prove they got a reason to go and all this kind of stuff.

I don't want to mess with that.

I really want to be on vacation when I go to Europe.

It's kind of like when I go to a restaurant I want to relax and not be nervous about, is it safe?

I don't go to a restaurant to be uptight and wondering, is this ventilated correctly?

I go to a restaurant to relax.

Otherwise I'm not gonna bother.

I'd much rather be cold and sit outside and be relaxed than to be sitting inside and be nervous about my health.

So in time, it'll probably take three or four more months than people want, but assuming people can just take their shot, their vaccinations.

I just did kind of a public service vaccination video on my Facebook page and we have 30 needles going into 30 shoulders in 90 seconds, and they're all wearing "Keep on Traveling" tee shirts and I've got my first vaccination and then my second vaccination book ending it.

And it's just saying, You can have your quirky hangups.

I've got my quirky hangups, but if you're a quirky hangups are gonna keep us all down, you cannot do that.

You know, we're all in this together.

This ship is gonna sail, but not until we're all on board.

So we've got to get to herd immunity."

- Yeah you know and there's some concern among experts right now that of us being able to get to herd immunity because of the fact that we have a large portion of the country that still doesn't want to get vaccinated, which I can't understand by the way.

- Well I think the irony is the people who are not, the people who want to, they insist on having their parties and going to their pubs and all this kind of thing, they're the ones that are angry that we're not able to get back to normal.

Well, they're the ones that are slowing us down from getting back to normal.

If everybody would be, I just think it's considerate, it's diligent, it's disciplined.

We are a society.

Enrique, when I got my shot, I remember it was, I was filled with joy.

All my endorphins were doing these little flip-flops, but it wasn't a selfish joy.

It was very, very definitively not a selfish joy.

I was part of a community.

I was part of a herd, I guess, when you think about it in biological terms.

And I was doing my part to get us all to that herd immunity point.

And it just, it was a deep seated feeling.

It was a deep seated feeling that together we're gonna get vaccinated so our lives can go on like normal.

We got to get ourselves vaccinated so we can help the rest of the world get vaccinated.

I mean, this is really interesting for me because in my lifetime I think, I just don't know if we've ever had this, where all of humankind is confronted by the same crisis.

You could have the best military in the world, it's not gonna help you from this threat.

You could have the highest walls in the world, but it's not gonna help you from this threat.

We could get all vaccinated and cool but if the virus is still raging south of the border, we're not safe.

And if you think we are safe, you're absorbing the wrong kind of news I think.

We are all in this together and we can get through it together.

But it's gonna take some high-minded thinking and some real leadership.

And it's gonna take a society that has the discipline and the spirit to work together and do this.

And not in a win lose kind of way.

It's gotta be win-win for the whole planet.

And it's totally within our reach.

We're our own worst enemies when it comes to this job right now.

So we've got science on our side.

We've got plenty of money to get everybody vaccinated.

It's just a matter of why are you politicizing a vaccine?

You know, that's just the question to me.

- Yeah, well I mean you've talked and written books about travel as a kind of a political action or just being able to go and travel and to educate yourself for us and to be able to travel again and to be on a Rick Steves tour or go to Europe on your own or whatever, it's gonna take that action for all of us to get together to get a shot.

- Well about the shots, Enrique, you hear a lot of people talking about a vaccine passport as if that's some big threat.

- Right.

- When I was a kid, I never traveled without my, this was my passport and this was my yellow international certificate of vaccination.

You didn't travel in the '70s without this.

I don't think I could go to Germany without this because they wanted to be sure I had my shot.

You know, if a country has certain vaccine standards, it's not to protect us, it's to predict their people from us.

They want to make sure we're safe if we come in and they want some proof of that.

I think it's very reasonable for a country to want some kind of proof that people have been vaccinated.

Now whether it's gonna be a chip in your passport or something more high tech, or just a simple formal document that proves you've had your shots.

I had this one back when I was a kid.

I got this one two years ago to go to Ethiopia.

It's a vaccine passport.

And I had it before COVID because Ethiopia wanted to make sure I had my, some kind of shot.

I forget even what it was, but they had to- - Well a lot of people get shots before they travel to some places because- - Yeah, that's how you do it.

- So it's not unusual.

It's just like, to me it's common sense more than anything else.

- It just occurred to me, it's unusual to somebody who's never had a passport.

If you've had a passport, you go, well, obviously.

But there's a lot of people who are up in arms about vaccines and a vaccine passport who have probably never bothered to get a passport in their lives.

- Right.

Hey, Rick, we've got about four minutes left before we wrap things up with this conversation.

But I want to ask you in this time, how should we be preparing for the time to be able to travel again?

What should we be thinking about?

It seems like we could be using our time to think about that.

- Well for me again, this is just, I always find myself play the cards you're dealt, you know?

And take this as, for me, this is sort of therapy for a workaholic.

I'm enjoying this break, this pause.

And I don't want to rush it because that's gonna accomplish nothing.

So be patient.

When we do travel again, there will be certain safeguards that help us stay healthier, whether it's COVID or just hygiene in general.

I mean I think we'll have no touch menus.

You know, I like it when you go to a restaurant, and you shine your phone on the QR code and you've got the menu right there.

There'll be those kinds of innovations.

Our tours will have less people on the bus in the future, 24 people instead of 28 people on a 50 seat bus so everybody has a couple of seats.

But we gotta be realistic.

You gotta pack the concert hall.

You gotta pack the plane, the hotel, the restaurant, the tour bus if you're gonna have good business.

- I'm an example 'cause I do bus tours.

But if I was doing a concert hall or whatever, you got to pay your staff well, you got to offer a product that is quality and cost money to provide, you got to have an affordable price so it's considered a good value by your customers, and you got to be able to make money on it.

All of that requires pack the concert hall.

You can't do that with 25% capacity.

So in Europe, we've got to wait for the time when we can have the the airplanes full and so on so it can be affordable.

My big concern is after COVID, how many of the little businesses will still be standing?

That's what's gonna be heartbreaking for me.

And the first thing I'm gonna do, we've already scheduled it, it's gonna be in March next year when we think is gonna be a post-COVID reality that we can research.

I want to know how many little cute guest houses and bed and breakfasts and trattorias and fun little artisan shops that we've known and loved and recommended for decades are still gonna be there.

You know, Amazon's gonna be here and Subway sandwich is gonna be here and McDonald's is gonna be here, but what about these little places?

The reasons I love to live here in Edmond or the reasons I love to go to small towns all over Europe, what will be the impact of COVID?

And it may be minimal or it may be huge.

I've got a friend who runs a museum in the United States and he's been, they were closed down.

And he figures a good percent of the museums that have been closed for so long will never be able to open up again.

So we need to see what that reality's gonna be.

And then I think we're gonna want to patronize little companies to help them stay strong as much as possible through this COVID time and even coming out of it.

Also in Europe, a big problem has been in the past crowds and we were getting to the point where ironically people were actually anti-tourism in places like Barcelona, Amsterdam, Venice, Florence because there's so many crowds.

I think we should spread out a little more just because it's better travel.

There's so much to see and we don't need to all be this Instagram mentality where we go to the same place to get our selfie with the same angle.

Let's not have herd mentality that way.

Let's get our herd immunity and we'll spread out a little more and enjoy Europe on our own terms.

- So Rick, we got just about a minute left.

When you see us getting back to traveling in Europe, do you think we'll still need to wear a mask?

Obviously you're gonna try to put some measures in and protect people.

What do you think?

- You know, Enrique, masks have been the norm in the Pacific Rim for years and I never understood it.

Now I understand it.

It's a common sense thing to do when you're in crowded situations with a bunch of strangers COVID or not.

We'll probably have that sort of Pacific Rim sensibility about masks going forward.

But I do think we're on a glide path to normalcy.

Bottom line, in a couple of years, we're gonna look back on this and we're gonna think of it as old history, we'll have learned from it and I think 2022, we'll be traveling again in the spring.

- Rick Steves, always great to talk to you, always learn a lot and time just goes so fast.

Thank you so much, Rick.

And for those of you that are joining us for the Crosscut Festival, make sure that you continue to join us for more great conversations like this one.

Rick, thank you.

We'll talk later.

- Thank you, Enrique, and as I like to say happy travels, even if we're just staying home for a little while longer.

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