TRAVEL: Invasion, 1952

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Not since D-day had Europe seen such an American invasion. From Land's End to the toe of Italy, tourists established beachheads at bars and hotels, and wave after wave of reinforcements came ashore.

In Britain, they hunted down the graves of ancestors, drove about the Lake District, walked the streets of London with tireless energy. Outside Buckingham Palace, they stood with cameras at the ready, as if waiting for the Queen to wave to them from the windows. They toured the Tower, St. Paul's and Westminster Abbey ("Is this really the coronation throne? Kinda beat up, isn't it?"), carefully watched out for cars on the "wrong side" of the street, crowded into Dirty Dick's Fleet Street pub and the Prospect of Whitby on the Thames. Wherever Americans went sightseeing, they saw that reassuring sight—other Americans.

Texas Week. Paris, their favorite city, seemed like home. Whether strolling the Champs-Elysées, primping at Elizabeth Arden's, or downing Martinis ("Très sec, avec le Gordon's gin") at Harry's New York Bar, they would always find some familiar face. They took their cigars and baby Brownies into Sacré-Coeur, climbed to the top of Notre Dame, brushed shoulders with Bohemia in cellar nightclubs on the Left Bank, gave free advice to street artists painting in Montmartre. They drove down the Loire valley searching out new restaurants and old châteaux (now floodlit at night for American eyes), and tried not to notice the scrawled Communist signs, "Americans, go home."

Prices were shockingly high, although France had a group of "Vacation Villages" around the country in which a 10-ft.-square cabin and three meals a day cost only $1.50 to $1.80. For Lone-Star Staters, Southern France made frantic preparations for La Semaine du Texas, an eight-day week, when imported Neiman-Marcus models in ten-gallon hats will roam the ranges of the Riviera.

"Everything Was Divine." In Switzerland, Americans climbed the Jungfrau (by railroad), sailed on Lake Geneva, took pictures of each other quaffing beer from giant steins. In Italy, as one enthusiastic female put it, "everything was divine." Prices were low, the food & drink excellent, and waiters now know what "on the rocks" means. Tourists explored catacombs, craned their necks at the Michelangelo ceiling in the Sistine Chapel, where a sign cautions: "Visitors are forbidden to lie on the floor." In Venice, they fed the pigeons in St. Mark's Square, drifted down the Grand Canal in gondolas, and pointed out to each other the palaces once lived in by Byron and Browning. They rolled through the hill towns of Siena, Perugia and Orvieto in air-conditioned motor coaches of the government's CIAT Travel Agency (Florence to Rome: $6.50), equipped with radios, lavatories, bars and pretty hostesses.