I don’t have any pictures to go by, nor can I refer to my agenda because I always covered every page with perfume commercials and other glossy 80s clippings, as soon as the week was over.
But I know I was young, very young.

Yet, I was one of the hundreds of thousands of teens who bought a card to travel the country by train, on a shoestring budget.
And pre-mobile phone, so largely untraceable.

And it was actually meant for very young teens.
I remember this because there was also the follow-up card, which was to travel internationally.
This one was way more expensive, probably due to international collaboration with railway companies who had little to gain from grooming Dutch teens into becoming lifelong train users.
The international card for young adults was less popular, but I think it did help to get the national one more accepted, since it downgraded it basically to a baby card!
Something no parent could refuse.

The best practice at the time was that parents were left a travel schedule, containing sleep-over addresses of their offspring, in particular if it were relatives of the friend you were traveling with, and not their own.

The days of free traveling were a tremendous confidence boost for any teen who was given this chance.

And in retrospect, I think this can be traced back to two reasons.

First of all, it showed you were deemed responsible enough to travel alone.
It was a vote of confidence from your parents, in your capabilities.

And secondly, because of this, it also provided you with a protective umbrella.
Teens who did this were not runaways, nor lost.
The card provided you with the status of a real traveler, who was backed by both parents as well as Dutch Railways.
That, is powerful.

And it makes me think of all the situations where we have started measuring exclusively to the benchmark of SAFETY.

Losing sight of values like personal power, resilience and growth.

Values like standing on your own two feet.
And taking on the world.

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~Suzanne Beenackers
Catacombe
become the Rock Star you were born to be

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