“A charming read, full of warm humor and humanity, very rich and enlightening. It’s the sort of book you put down but don’t forget. The discoveries of this remarkable (and may I say not at all times enviable) journey become part of the reader’s experience as well.”
--Catherine Ryan Hyde, author of Pay It Forward
In 1960, at the height of the Cold War, Vernon Johnson decided to take his entire family--himself, his wife Anne, and their eight children ranging from age two to seventeen--on a trip around the world. He hoped that the direct contact of an American family with people of the Soviet Union might do more for understanding than power politics.
It was difficult to travel behind the Iron Curtain under the best of circumstances, but Vernon chose to do it the hard way: in his converted Santa Barbara city bus, which had a habit of breaking down whenever it could get away with it.
Anita Ekberg led them on a two-week romp around Rome. During a Bastille Day parade in Paris, their two-year-old had an adventure while the family looked frantically for the lost child. They spent a winter in Sweden, where both parents wound up in emergency surgery. They met Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow, where the food was scarce and the people were friendly. Japan was a bureaucratic nightmare and a personal triumph. Finally they sailed into the San Francisco harbor and were greeted by the press as returning heroes and ambassadors for international goodwill.
All over the globe, the bus broke down, the kids got sick, and the family nearly ran out of money several times. But Vernon Johnson believed “There’s no such thing as a problem,” and his family’s two-year odyssey proved how wrong he could be--and how right.
Anne Beckwith Johnson lives in Santa Barbara, California. She is a frequent contributor to the Santa Barbara News-Press and the Santa Barbara Independent. Her stories and essays have been published in several literary magazines, including Connexions and The Sun.
