A Letter From The Publisher, Oct. 25, 1948

If you happen to be planning or debating a vacation trip abroad with your family* during the forthcoming year, the following account of TIME Inc. Bureau Chief William Gray and family’s two-month sightseeing trip from Shanghai to New York City via Europe may serve to help or inspire you.

After three years as head of our Shanghai bureau, Bill Gray was coming home. He decided to combine his return with a vacation for himself, his wife, and their children: Bruce, 4; Larry, 7; Margrethe, 11. Fortified by smallpox vaccinations and inoculations against plague, typhus, typhoid fever and cholera, the Grays set out for a 15,000-mile journey via eight different national airlines and a steamship company. Their departure from Shanghai resounded with exploding firecrackers set off by their Chinese servants to remove the evil spirits from their route. Says Gray:

“As a talisman, it worked very well. Despite the diversity of our route through the 15 countries we visited, we were off schedule only once. The children turned out to be good travelers, resilient and resourceful, standing patiently through 26 customs examinations in 68 days on our way through southeast Asia and India, across a corner of Africa and into Europe, to Scandinavia, London and, via the Queen Elizabeth, New York.

“For reasons unknown to me, the management of the Peninsula Hotel in Hong Kong, our first stop, put us up in the bridal suite ($25 a day U.S.), and the airport customs inspector gave me a quick frisk—for guns or opium, no doubt. At Rangoon, where we landed in monsoon weather, I was met at the airport by a little brown man wearing a red skirt and sandals who politely informed me that the Government guest house awaited us. That was news to me—until I found out that he was looking for a United Nations man named Green. The Chinese airline attendants, having no Mr. Green aboard, gave him a Gray instead.

“Having covered my share of wars, insurrections, uprisings, etc., I was prepared for a certain amount of trouble en route. But the Burma rebellion now in progress broke out after we had left, and the minor war around Kashmir didn’t bother our seeing the Taj Mahal (a not the least overrated spectacle) at all. We had been warned that Cairo was no place for tourists this year, but, aside from one explosion near our quarters when some Arabs planted a bomb in a Jewish-owned department store, we made it safely out to the pyramids and back. Before we got to Rome, Communist Leader Togliatti had already been shot.

“By & large the food was good all along our route, the hotels had plenty of clean towels and hot water (we supplied our own soap), and occasional nursemaids were available for the children, who can stand just so much sightseeing and no more. Our only fiscal misadventure occurred in Paris, where I had to pay the hotel bill in a hurry to make the airport. It seemed rather steep, and I found later that they had inadvertently thrown in all the previous day’s laundry bills for other tenants of the small hotel. The matter has since been adjusted. By the time we got to London the children’s shoes were worn through and, shoe rationing having gone off for the first time in seven years, we reshod them there.

“Our younger son, Bruce, who, having lived most of his life in China, speaks Shanghai dialect, pidgin English, and seems to have more of a Chinese than an American view of the world, achieved a moment of notoriety before Buckingham Palace by insisting that he was there to ‘watch the guards change the king.’ He was struck dumb by his first view of the silhouette outlines of lower Manhattan and all that his older sister could say was ‘Ai yah!’ which is Chinese for Gee whiz! Oh boy! and Wow! all rolled into one.”

* The 1,500,000 families who read TIME are great and veteran travelers. According to a travel survey, 700,000 of you have been to Canada, one out of four has been to Europe, 54,000 have toured the Far East, 400,000 have taken vacation cruises for anywhere from one week to a year.