Rick Steves, mild-mannered travel expert, wants to radicalize you

If you could take a road trip with your younger self, how well do you think the two of you would get along? Would you have an admiration for each other? Would you even recognize each other? 

Rick Steves, the one-man brand behind a European tour company, dozens of travel books, and some of the most soothing content on PBS, has, of late, been getting reacquainted with the person he once was — and the fork in the road that set him on a path he’s remained on ever since. Before marriage, before children, before divorce, before cancer, before becoming, in his words, “filthy rich,” Steves was just a 23-year-old heading off on an adventure with a buddy. 

But like generations of pilgrims, dropouts, and merry pranksters before him, what he discovered on that journey was his mission.

Steves is in New York today to launch the tour for a book he describes as both his latest and his first — the travel journal he wrote during a galvanizing journey in 1978. “On the Hippie Trail: Istanbul to Kathmandu and the Making of a Travel Writer,” is an unvarnished peek into the notes Steves kept and the photos he shot traveling with his friend Gene Openshaw along a beloved backpacker route of the '60s and '70s. 

Rick Steves in Afghanistan, 1978. (Photo credit Rick Steves' Europe)When I meet Steves at Salon’s studio, he is every bit the elder statesman I recognize from PBS, soft spoken, gracious yet authoritative. But as soon as he starts talking about his time on the hippie trail, the t-shirt-clad kid who once wrote about discovering the pleasures of "Shiva's favorite weed" emerges. "When I left Istanbul with my buddy heading east, I remember thinking, ‘I don't know a single soul between here and Seattle,” he recalls with a smile. “We were heading off into the unknown. We never knew we were going to lay our heads the next night. We never knew how sick we'd get.”

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Along the way, he soaked in the public baths in Tehran, visited temples in Nepal, and smoked marijuana for the first time in Afghanistan. And while he admits there were moments he considered bailing for the more touristy pleasures of Greece, he says, "I cannot think of a more productive use of two months of my life than to take a trip like that. It was the time of my life." 

As his old friend Gene Openshaw, still hewing close to the vernacular of the time, tells me, “After experiencing a strange new world of beggars, bandits, bearded holy men, a living goddess, and the mecca of freakdom, Kathmandu — our minds were, like, totally blown, man.” 

Steves knew he had to capture it all. "It was like all these experiences fluttering by me," he says, "and I was netting them with my pen and writing them down, so I could always have a memory of them." His book is, on one level, a relic of a lost moment — a time before the Iranian revolution, when Afghanistan was a place a young traveler could "wander down a dreamy side street." It's also, for anyone else who's ever pored over their early diaries with a mixture of embarrassment and wistfulness, a study in how much a person changes over time, and how much one remains exactly the same.

There's no doubt a fair segment of Steves's loyal fanbase that associates him exclusively with fairytale castles and scenic boat rides, as the genial television host who describes Iceland as a "dang popular" destination. But Steves is also a staunch advocate for drug law reform, a man who peppers his videos with warnings about the looming threat of fascism, who has said, "I believe if you’re going to bomb a place, you should know its people first." 

He has devoted his entire career to sneaking the vegetables of his values into the creme brûlée of European travel. Recently, he wrote on Facebook, “Palestine is my Valentine,” and called on his followers to help him raise $200,000 by Valentine’s Day to rebuild a bombed-out school in Gaza. He replies with his gratitude to nearly every comment.

"My whole mission," he tells me, "is to equip and inspire Americans to venture beyond Orlando." 

It’s a daunting task. His eye has long been fixed not toward bold, backpacking students, but on the Disney and Vegas tourists who want guidance with just enough jolt. "I never want to steer people away from culture shock," he says. "I want them to see it as a way to become more comfortable with the world and less fearful."

That Steves would ever have attempted such an ambitious quest is a testament to his eclectic background. He still lives and works in the Washington state town he grew up in. His appetite for travel sparked while journeying around Europe with his family, where his father, a piano importer, scouted for inspiration. 

In college, he earned degrees in both European history and business administration. His first career was as a piano teacher. But after returning from the hippie trail, he was galvanized. He turned his recital hall into a lecture hall, as he describes it, and started offering travel courses and self-publishing his first book, "Europe Through the Back Door." 

His approach was distinctive — a call for fellow travelers to become what he calls a temporary local, laden with advice on how to do it. By the early '90s, and already an industry unto himself, Steves launched his long-running PBS travel series. Today, in addition to his guidebooks and tour company, he has a radio show, a YouTube channel with nearly 2 million subscribers, and an array of advocacy projects. His company takes over 30,000 people a year, from seniors to children as young as 8, around Europe.

The hippie trail did for Steves what he wants travel to do for everybody — it gave him purpose.

"Every year since, I've spent a hundred days in Europe making mistakes, taking careful notes," he says. "When I get ripped off, I celebrate because they don't know who they ripped off. I'm going to come home and tell everybody about that scam." He looks absolutely delighted at the thought.

It's that ebullient zest for discovery that's kept Steves such a durable resource in a field now glutted with dubiously qualified influencers. Steves’s publisher, Avalon Travel’s Jaimee Callaway, puts it simply. "He truly, deeply cares,” she says. “He is pounding the pavement four months a year, collecting this information for travelers. That's why he has such staying power. He's really doing all this, and people have learned over the years that they can trust him." 

That trust is built on his acumen to educate, but also, his talent to radicalize you. 

I carried an edition of “Europe Through the Back Door” in the 1990s when my college roommate and I set out with our youth Eurail passes and no plan beyond a starting point in Rome. And I carried the lessons from that book and that experience with me a year ago when I lived a few months in France, spending my weekends in off-the-beaten-track towns rich in history and scant on tourists. It was Steves who first gave me the confidence to get lost, to strike up conversations, to stand still for a while in one place rather than tickling off landmarks on a list. These are skills you’re never too young, or old, to develop.

"The world's a beautiful place to be a part of," Steves says. "I'm just trying to get Americans to venture beyond our borders, and Europe is the wading pool for world exploration. I want to be the go-to guy for Americans who are out of their comfort zone to have a great time in Europe — so that they can then use that to go swimming in the deep end."

For him, the deep end means places in the world that push you a little harder. His favorite destination is India, though he says, "I don't even write about it. I don't teach it. It's too personal." 

For one, as a music lover, he honed in on how different the music sounded. “I know Mozart, I know Beethoven, I know meter and I know mode. And in India they have music without that same concept of meter and mode. It was fascinating to me the way they treat time is totally different — let's just play with it." 

Rick Steves and Gene Openshaw consult their map of the Hippie Trail, 1978. (Photo credit Rick Steves' Europe)

His first trip to India on the hippie trail and each subsequent trip there has humbled his self-assuredness, he says. “If you want to be stimulated, if you want to be inspired, if you want to be humbled, if you want to get over your ethnocentrism, go to India."

Steves's imperative to help Americans get over their ethnocentrism feels especially urgent in our current era of increasingly alarming isolationism. "Who are the most frightened people in our society?" he asks me. "I would bet it's people with no passports, whose worldview is shaped not by personal experience but by commercial TV, fear-mongering news." 

Getting past the fear means travel that is not merely transactional or feeding into overtourism. "People want to convince their friends that they're having fun and that they're successful and exciting," Steves says when I ask him about tourism in the Instagram age. “My mission," he says, "is just to let people know that the world is real."

Steves uses the word "mission" a lot. It appears frequently in his writing and comes up often today in conversation. His mission to "take good, or at least mindful, trips." His mission that "Good business is good business." Steves is a lifelong Lutheran, a Christian who, during our Salon photo shoot, scribbles a postcard to his Grandma Grace on "Long Gone Ave., Heaven."

 Rick Steves signs postcards at Salon's New York studio (Salon)

He was galvanized early in life by liberation theology, a logical philosophy for someone who recognizes Jesus as the altruistic, peace-loving hippie he is depicted as in the New Testament. It's an ideology so far afield from the radical evangelicalism of the contemporary American right that I have to ask him what he thinks about what Christian identity looks like in our country right now. 

Steves pauses to think before he responds. Then he gets going. "There's nothing Christian nationalist about Jesus," he says firmly. "Jesus is not, 'Put a flag next to your altar.' Jesus is not about, 'Make your country great again.' Jesus is, 'Love thy neighbor.' I've got to say, the most outspoken Christian voices in our society have nothing to do with 'Love thy neighbor.' So it haunts me," he continues, "to think that in the privacy of the voting booth, the typical American, Christian or otherwise, votes for 'What's good for me.'" 

Running counter to the American worship of self-interest doesn't mean that Steves doesn't embrace success. But unlike scores of other mediagenic entrepreneurs, he's always resisted selling off his brand and his name, preferring to remain independent in a world of conglomerate consolidation. 

"I'm so thankful I don't have to answer to a bunch of people who own pieces of my business," he says, "because likely in our corporate world, they would own pieces of that business to make money in a frantic short-term sense.” 

The strategy has been lucrative for him. In 2019, his company had an estimated annual revenue of $100 million. But it's also been a resolutely counterculture choice. 

David Preston, Steves’s longtime friend and VP of Member and Viewer Services at Twin Cities PBS, cites his "earnest helpfulness" as a key element of his success. He cites the charities that Steves backs and how he kept his staff employed during the pandemic and paid them out of his pocket. “They're all just signs of a really good person," Preston said.

“Our business world is being powered by this frantic need to get the money now at all costs. We've conned ourselves into thinking this is the way for us to make America great, and I think it makes America sad, frankly. I'm pretty perplexed right now how many people are filthy rich like me," Steves observes, "and aggressively trying to get richer, compromising all their values, selling out entirely so they can be richer." 

Anyone who's ever been young and idealistic has probably had their own reckoning with the notion of selling out. When does someone first ask you about your backup plan? When do you stop chasing the dream and recalibrate your moral compass? 

In many ways, Steves seems to have found the best of both worlds, becoming the CEO of a business with his name on it while staying close to his belief in, as the title of one of his books puts it, "Travel as a Political Act."

He admits there have been tradeoffs. "I have been workaholic to the point that I don't have as many friends as I should have," he acknowledges, "and my marriage lasted for 25 years. Two wonderful kids, a great part of my life, but I've got to be honest, this work did not help. I've had loved ones say, 'You're family to strangers and a stranger to family.'" 

Still, he has no regrets. "This is why God put me here, to do this work."

Rick Steves (Salon)

"This work" includes his outspoken support for reforming America's marijuana laws and for wider drug reform. He first got high on the hippie trail, in Afghanistan, and today, he's on the board of directors for NORML (The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws), where his respected reputation aligns with the organization's longstanding goal of destigmatization. 

"People are generally surprised to learn that Rick is a regular marijuana smoker," Randy Quast, fellow board member and Acting Executive Director of NORML tells me, "and his clean-cut public persona serves to overcome the traditional negative impression of those who smoke." 

Steves affirms this. "If I work hard all day long, and want to go home and smoke a joint and just stare at the fireplace for three hours, that's my civil liberty," he says. "It's also a practical fight for efficient use of law enforcement and to take racism out of the equation, because something that powers me in this whole discussion is I'm a privileged white guy." 

But even the most privileged white guys in the world are still subject to the constraints of aging and illness. In 2024, Steves went public that he was in treatment for prostate cancer. 

When he was diagnosed, he remembers, "I said, 'I've been on a lot of trips. This is a new trip.' So I learned a lot about prostate cancer, and I was a good traveler. I got through this storm, and now I'm on the open sea." 

This month, Steves announced that his doctors had declared him cancer-free. He used the news as an opportunity to open up about the humbling experience of having “lots of pee problems” and an “ED situation,” and to affirm that “efficient, affordable, and accessible medical care is a civil liberty.”

As a cancer survivor on the cusp of turning 70, Steves acknowledges that his role as an active travel leader is evolving. "When I can't do it anymore, I can't do it anymore," he says matter-of-factly. "I'm totally cool with that." But he admits, "I'm starting to think now about legacy. How long will this last beyond me? Having said that," he interjects, "I love what I do. I spend a hundred days a year in Europe, and I can hardly wait to get on the plane and go over there again." 

It’s a love affair of his lifetime, one that ignited somewhere in the space between Turkey and Nepal, between youth and adulthood. Looking back on that hippie trail trip, Gene Openshaw says, "It changed our lives completely. Rick went on to start a completely unconventional travel business and I pursued the path of the bohemian artist. It awakened a right-leaning Rick to an eventual life of political activism, cannabis reform, and philanthropy."

Steves's activism and philanthropy have not been compromised by his becoming a celebrity and a multimillion-dollar brand. Instead, they’ve become a tool for exercising his principles. It's a business model that runs counter to our notions that individual prosperity is only possible if somebody else is suffering, and it's a rebuke to a message that 23 year-olds have been hearing since time immemorial — that growing up means selling out. 

It's also made Steves probably the least frightening rich Christian in America today, one who understands that experiencing the world makes you want to take better care of it. "We're all children of some heavenly creator," he tells me. And his job, his mission, is just to help us "get to know the family."