With nearly unlimited funds, aristocratic connections and months or years to roam, they commissioned paintings, perfected their language skills and mingled with the upper crust of the Continent. No one knows who came up with it, but their adventures soon had a perfectly appropriate name: the Grand Tour. This summer, I embarked on a Grand Tour of my own, reinventing the classic European journey as a budget-minded, modern-day jaunt.
As I faced 13 weeks of travel, I was feeling somewhat less than grand. Nightmarish visions of doner kebabs and seamy hostels flashed through my head. Would I dine solely on supermarket bread and cheese? Do midnight battle with mosquitoes in un-air-conditioned attics?
Would my only companions be year-olds obsessed with cheap booze and Dutch ''cafes''? But as readers of my blog nytimes. In Calais, I slept in the artistic luxury of the Cercle de Malines bed-and-breakfast.
In Malta, I plucked capers from the roadside, feasted on braised rabbit and dove into crystalline Mediterranean waters. I courted composers in Rome and fl? I even gambled the night away at the worthy Monte Carlo Casino in Monaco. Along the way, as I journeyed across a final tally of 16 countries, I discovered that the high life was easily within the Frugal Traveler's reach -- as long as I followed a few simple guidelines:. Everyone wants to shop like a Parisian, eat like a Roman and party like a Berliner.
The trick, I learned over a summer spent trying to absorb European culture, is to ignore the guidebooks and magazine articles, and to simply adopt the persona of a local.
