My Hostelling Story

In 2009, Hostelling International celebrated its 100th worldwide anniversary and its 75th anniversary in the US. Amongst a variety of activities, it invited members to submit 500-word essays for possible inclusion in its newsletter. I submitted - and they published, with only two other essays, in their first Hostelling Letter edition. Wikipedia says they've got four million members worldwide. Even half that, or a quarter, or a tenth, would be a pretty big audience for my first published piece. Here's what I wrote:

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I arrived at the hostel, later in the evening, for my first night of this trip to Washington DC. After checking in, making my bed, and packing my locker, I meandered on to the lounge, with my laptop and files, to see if I could muster some energy to already start work on one of my reasons for being in DC. I found a table and asked the lady there if the seat was taken. She invited me to join her and I immediately noticed her German accent, so I mentioned to her that my mother's parents and brother came from Germany. I told her that for the past couple of years I had been very involved with researching and recording my family genealogy and that one of my reasons for being in DC was to do family research at the US Holocaust Museum. I turned on my computer and proceeded to show her a bunch of photographs that I had scanned into the computer, as well as the family tree software that stores a lot of my data. She was all very interested and could pinpoint some of the locales and furnishings of the time for me. That was all very exciting for me, who hung on her every word as she added to the picture in my head about how my grandparents and their friends and family lived back in the 1930s and prior.

Over the next week, I made it to the Holocaust Museum twice and each evening, upon returning to the hostel, I met up with my new friend and showed her my new harvest of family records. She promptly translated and interpreted them all so that I knew what I was looking at. To top it all off, one night in the lounge I remembered that, on my laptop, I had stored a digital conversion of 2½ hours of home movie reels that my uncle photographed in the 1950s. A good portion of it included footage of his term of duty as a US Army translator back in - you guessed it Germany! So my friend and l enjoyed a special kind of movie night at the hostel. And, yes, she did continue to point locales out to me. Her son, the doctor, may even be willing to take some photographs of those locales for me, today, so that I can compare them with the photographs of yesterday and with the pictures in my mind that the history suggests.

She was in town to make progress on getting a case heard before the US Supreme Court. Coincidentally, a Supreme Court case was what brought me to DC - and the hostel - the first time, just in time for the Blizzard of 1996. That same case brought me back a couple of other times and now again twelve years later. But those are all hostelling stories for another time.

— El Dobilla