Icelandic Airlines Poster
Photo: Björn Larsson

In the summer of 1968 my brother and I formed a student travel group to Europe for $99.00 round-trip. What did you get for 99 bucks? A round-trip airline flight to Luxembourg via Icelandic Airlines Prop-jet. That's PROP-jet. If you are too young to know what that means, it means the plane had propellers. While most flights to Europe with an all-jet in 1968 took about 7 hours, with a prop-jet the time was more than 13 hours with an hour stopover in sunny Reykjavik, Iceland. But it was worth the extra time considering we saved hundreds of dollars on a normal flight. We plopped you in the middle of Europe in late June and the rest was up to you. The only thing we asked was that you be in Luxembourg at the end of August for the return trip to JFK Airport. For filling up the charter flight my brother and I got our tickets for free.

We took the train from Luxembourg to Paris, went to the Renault Automobile factory and picked up our Renault 6 that we pre-purchased before we left for Europe.

Here's the deal: we buy a cheap car for about $1600, use it for three months traveling throughout Europe and bring it back to the factory after about 8,000 miles and sell it back for about $1000.00. In this manner we get the use of a car for the entire summer for less than $200.00 per month.

The factory makes out because they can sell a 3 month old car easily for $1300.00 doubling their normal profit of $300.00.

I suppose we could have tried to sell the car ourselves at the end of our vacation, but then we would have had to put ads in the papers and wait for someone to buy which would have been tough to do with a non-refundable, noncancellable return flight. Besides, car buyers would not pay us as much as they would to a factory that could give them the original warranty beyond the mileage we put on it.

When my father found out we were going to visit Poland that summer, he asked my brother and me to stop in the small village where he was born not far from Bialystok, Poland and to look up our family home which was taken by the Communists. He said that when we got there we could ask anyone where the Golombs lived. Well, we thought that was funny. My father left Poland in 1947. What were the chances anyone would remember where he lived twenty years ago?