Jeff Fehr worked it out when he got back. “We went through seven countries on three tanks of gas.”
France, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland. “Everything’s so close,” he explained. “Going to the Netherlands is like popping into Missouri and back. The [European Union] has opened up the continent. You can see where the checkpoints used to be; now, they’re rest stops. Bill? He kept pushing for Liechtenstein.”
“Would have made it eight,” said Peeper. “Liechtenstein.”
Last spring, the Iola High School teachers — Peeper, history; Fehr, special education — earned a $10,000 travel grant through the Rural School and Community Trust’s Global Teacher program.
Given three days’ notice, the instructors scrambled to satisfy all of the program requirements before deadline. “It was a pretty big ask,” said Peeper. “No one from Kansas had ever won one before. But we just kept thinking: ‘What’s it going to hurt? Somebody’s got to win this thing.’ And I’ll be darned if we didn’t get it.”
Peeper and Fehr recalled their trip in an interview with the Register last week.
UPON LANDING in Paris, the teachers settled on a 6-speed Audi A3 for their journey. After some fumbling with the foreign auto (“It only took two days to learn how to turn the lights on,” said Fehr), they were off.
First stop: the Palace of Versailles. The travelers had made a promise to their wives not to linger long in Paris, and so, their senses still blurry with jet lag, the pair headed straight from the airport to the suburban chateau for their first taste of old-world pomp.
From eastern France, the duo charted a course that would take them, in time, to Peeper’s ancestral home of Beckum, a small town in northwest Germany, before delivering them, toward trip’s end, to Hilzingen, the Swiss-border town from which Fehr’s clan hails. Their goal was to hit as many of the marvels of European history along the way as they could manage.
“It was a cram-packed nine days of travel,” said Peeper, who, with Fehr, designed the itinerary to span the topics they teach at IHS.
“It was French Revolution one day. Then World War I, then World War II. Then you’re back to Christianity’s rise in Europe,” remembered Fehr. “You’re at a castle one day, then later in the afternoon you’re looking at the first things that were ever printed on a printing press.”
Peeper had never been out of the country before. Fehr had only ever ventured into Canada and Mexico.
They’d read the tourist guides before their departure and imbibed their fill of Rick Steves, the excitable everyman from the PBS travel show. But it took actually being in Europe to convince Fehr and Peeper that they’d made it.
“Rick Steves says: At some point you’re going to have that oh-crap-I’m-in-Europe moment,” said Fehr, who had his own oh-crap moment early one morning in France. After waking, Fehr threw open the window of his hotel and saw this: “A French lady, wearing a skirt, on a bicycle, with a loaf of bread, riding past. I’m like” — Fehr grasps his head with both hands — “I’m in France!”
“But then there were also things that connected you to back home,” said Peeper. “For instance, it was wheat harvest time in Germany.”
“And the fields there are just gigantic, rolling,” said Fehr. “The day we went into Luxembourg, there was a kid outdoors throwing hay.”
