Rick Steves Is a Secret Teacher

Before he became the travel guru, he was a teacher. May his journey in education inspire others like it did for me.

Note: This is a new series that I call Secret Teacher. Teachers and educators are often maligned in our society, blamed for things beyond their control. It’s a tough, yet rewarding profession, and we need more people doing it. In this Secret Teacher series, I will discuss a celebrity or well-known person who had previous experience as a teacher (or in education) prior to becoming famous or successful. I will explore how teaching impacted their future career and life. I’m hoping that sharing these stories will inspire others to become teachers or educators. If you have any suggestions for this series, please send me a nomination.

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• Tupac - Biggie

• Super Nintendo - Sega Genesis

• Anthony Bourdain - Rick Steves

These were the debates in my house growing up. Well, at least they were debates happening in my own head then. I cannot lie, I was always more of a Bourdain guy. But I still appreciated Rick Steves’ work.

I definitely watched his PBS show on lazy Sunday afternoons and thumbed through his guidebooks, wishing I were there exploring those European townscapes. The imagery he painted helped me consider Italy for study abroad as a dumb 20-year-old who didn’t know anything.

I also still own a copy of his book Travel as a Political Act that I read right before I moved to South Korea to teach English abroad. It was in that book that I first came across the quote “Don’t tell me how educated you are, tell me how much you’ve traveled,” which is attributed to Muhammad. His book and that line spoke to me.

This is why I was excited to see Rick Steves speak at the Los Angeles Travel & Adventure Show last week. I was hoping to even do a short interview with him. Alas, the media handler said Steves wouldn't do any interviews, unless with public media. Plus, he was being mobbed by hundreds of people asking for autographs or photos at every turn.

I did end up meeting him after one of his seminars, where I thanked him for inspiring me to study abroad (I didn’t mention the Bourdain thing). He was great in that seminar, too, so I will be using that event along with materials from his books, videos, and websites to discuss Rick Steves as a Secret Teacher.

Teaching Dad and Traveling Mom

Rick hails from a musical family. His dad was a high school band director in Seattle schools and eventually opened a piano shop called Steves Sound of Music, where his mom worked as a tech—passing on the musical legacy to their son. It would seem that his path would lead him to music.

“I thought I would be a piano teacher!” Rick posted in response to a question about what he wanted to be when he was growing up.

Rick studied European history at the University of Washington for his undergrad and worked as a piano teacher throughout college. He thought he would continue that career after he graduated, even opening a small teaching studio.

“I was a piano teacher on 4th and Main in Edmonds, and I had 50 students. I wanted to be a piano teacher all my life,” he said in a recent book tour interview.

But life took him down a different path.

You see, since his parents owned a piano shop, they would travel to Europe to import supplies. Rick would accompany his parents on these trips, incepting the travel bug into the future travel guru.

Rick credits his mom as his “travel partner” early on in this part of his life. “As my Dad was busy doing business with European piano-builders (he imported pianos), Mom was my first travel partner,” he wrote in a loving obituary for his dear mother when she passed in 2012.

“I would have had a very, very beautiful life being a piano teacher, coming home every night for dinner and mowing the lawn, and joining clubs, and, you know, being regular and reliable,” Rick said in a recent interview. “But I've chosen a different path, and this is a path that is — it's a mission for me.”

Teaching Piano… and Travel

He continued traveling and visiting Europe through school and college, becoming quite the expert at a very young age. Given his background in teaching piano, there was a natural spillover into teaching travel, a rare opportunity in the days before the Internet.

“I traveled each summer back when I was a piano teacher. On a super tight budget I made lots of mistakes and learned the hard way,” he recalled. “My passion for travel showed itself in a powerful interest in teaching others from my mistakes.”

Being a teacher allowed him to travel during the summer (which is a great reason to become a teacher actually). It was initially somewhat frustrating that he could not get students to practice piano with him in the summers, so he turned it into a blessing by simply jaunting off to Europe instead.

Upon his return from his travels, he realized he had all this experience that could be useful to others. He was already teaching piano, why not add a class on travel? At the time, the University of Washington had an Experimental College where community members could teach their own courses. Rick called his class European Travel—Cheap.

An early Rick Steves newsletter to go along with his classes.

He initially thought a handful of students might join his class, but he ended up with up to 100 parents. The cost was $8 per person, meaning Rick was making a killing for an undergrad. He admits that he felt like a “thief or con artist” as he was “just telling stories and showing slides.” But his class was a hit.

“I made enough money to pay for a plane ticket to Europe. I thought, this is too good to be true. So I taught like a madman, anywhere I could,” Rick admitted. He makes it sound like the money montage in mafia movies like Goodfellas, Scarface, or Blow.

Walking quickly across a dark campus after those first classes with a bookbag full of money, I realized there was a business here. At first I was happy to earn enough to pay for my annual plane ticket. But as enrollment grew, I began making more teaching travel than I did teaching piano. As my class evolved, so did my delivery. By responding to my audience and constantly experimenting, I learned what worked. -Excerpt from Rick Steves' Postcards from Europe.

His class, though, was all legit. He was giving lessons that could not be found anywhere else in the area during the late 1970s or early 1980s. His business grew, and, upon graduation, he was able to not only teach piano at his small studio but also travel lessons, too.

This presented him with a fork-in-the-road moment: “I finally had to decide: teach piano or teach travel. I chose travel and the rest is one very well used passport.” The travel teaching won out, and these classes became the impetus for Rick Steves’ travel guides that are beloved today.

Travel Teacher to Guru

It was in his classes where Rick honed his skills and knowledge on how to teach travel. “Over several years of lecturing, I developed a sixth sense of what people needed to know and what they didn’t,” He wrote in Postcards from Europe. “By fielding thousands of questions, I learned which fears and apprehensions were most troubling as departure day neared.”

He essentially became an expert teacher at his subject, just like great teachers who love math, history, or any other subject. They need the passion, experience, and reps—these are what make great teachers. Rick had all of it, and it led directly to his books.

“I wrote the first edition of Europe Through the Back Door by simply writing out my lectures,” he wrote in his blog. “The book came out almost effortlessly.”

An early edition of Europe Through the Back Door (which you can buy on eBay!).

As he got better at teaching, “The book matured and its structure tightened with the class.” A relative noticed his innovative teaching and suggested he write a book on the topic. He admitted in Postcards from Europe, “My first thought was, ‘You’re crazy.’ Then I realized it was already there. I just needed to transcribe it from my mind onto paper.”

Europe Through the Back Door captured the same realness and freshness that his classes had, so it was a hit. At that point, he was just excited that people were reading his work, famously telling readers they could use any parts of it for reprint.

Still Has Heart of a Teacher

Rick doesn’t label himself a guru, he mentioned in the seminar that other people thrust this label onto him. Instead, he considers himself a teacher.

It’s right on the bio page of his website (so perhaps it’s not such a secret): “above all else, Rick considers himself a teacher. He taught his first travel class at his college campus in the mid-1970s — and now, more than 40 years later, he still measures his success not by dollars earned, but by trips impacted.”

Rick does not think of himself as a travel agent either. He still sees his main duties are to teach. “Travel can be our teacher — and the road, our school,” he tweeted. Likewise, in another tweet, he echoed this sentiment, “A tour guide is a teacher of culture. In Europe, each country’s open-air folk museum provides the perfect classroom:”

He even still claims to be a teacher officially when asked his occupation at border crossings! So I guess that makes him legally a teacher then.

He hasn’t abandoned us fellow teachers who are still in traditional classrooms, too. His website offers a range of resources specifically for educators called Classroom Europe Media. It is a free library of “3- to 5-minute clips” and “playlists to enhance their lesson plans.” He doesn’t even run ads on them.

I can tell Rick is a teacher because he understands the right length for a class video. Just a couple of minutes is ideal. I cannot tell you how many times I have been looking for a video and everything is either a bulbous 45-minute lecture or a TikTok-like 30-second clip (neither good lengths to share in a lesson).

Plus they are ad free! If teachers use typical YouTube videos, there are bound to be ads for Shampoo or whatever in the middle of class. In the public seminar I attended, he said he doesn’t care about selling content because he only cares about getting people on trips.

“This project is a joy for me to offer and a small way of saying "thank you" to our teachers,” he said on the release of the Classroom Europe Media. I can tell he means it.

Bad Teacher and Hippie Abroad

Rick has been promoting his most recent book On the Hippie Trail: Istanbul to Kathmandu and the Making of a Travel Writer, including at the travel show where I saw him. I had no idea that Rick was once a hippie who traveled across the fabled Hippie Trail, and one of the last to do it, as the countries on it descended into chaos right after the summer he completed it.

His amazing story has been chronicled in his new book, mostly just from his own journal entries from that time. He somehow had the foresight to write down everything back then. The website even has a digitized version of those journal entries online for free, meaning he is essentially giving away the book.

An old English bus route on the Hippie Trail, similar to Rick’s journey. He went through Turkey, Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, India, and Nepal.

My favorite part of this story is that he was inspired not by a good teacher but by a bad teacher.

When he was considering going on this journey, he had tried to do some research, but there was little information out there at the time. So he was naturally nervous. Luckily, like Rick on Europe, there was an experienced Hippie Trail traveler teaching about it at the Experimental College. Unlike Rick, though, this guy was a terrible teacher.

“He didn’t care about our experience. He didn’t organize his information. He had first-hand experience. We needed it, and he didn’t share it at all,” he bemoaned. “It really angered me. This was wrong. He had the information; we had the opportunity for the trip of a lifetime, and he didn’t share any of it. It illustrated, to me, the value of good travel teaching.”

A good teacher can easily sniff out a bad teacher, especially one who simply does not care. And it forced young Rick to embark on the trek a bit blindly, inspiring him to make sure he always cared about what his students were learning, offering them meaning, along with good advice.

So, it gave me a good appreciation for the importance of travel information and the importance of a teacher who is thoughtful about it. That’s what we are at my company right here in Edmonds, where we employ 100 people. We are mission-driven about the importance of good travel information to help people turn their travel dreams into a smooth and affordable reality.

He doesn’t even have malice for that bad teacher he took classes from so many years ago. In fact, he credits that teacher with giving him inspiration: “I’m very thankful for it. I’m thankful for the lousy teacher at the UW Experimental College who taught me a class that was a total waste.”

Cancer Free

I must close by mentioning that Rick Steves just announced that he is cancer free. After some scary news recently, it was good to hear that he has overcome this challenge.

Rick Steves shared this joyous news on social media.

He sent out the message just hours after I saw him speak at the travel show. It must have been weighing heavily on him there. But he was still animated and upbeat, taking photos with people, dancing around, and generally sharing his joy for travel.

I have long been eyeing Rick Steves for a nomination as a Secret Teacher. So I think him being cancer-free is as momentous an occasion as any to include him as the very first entry in this series. His career from piano teacher to travel guru (who is still a teacher at heart) will always be inspiring. I know it has been for my own trajectory, and I hope it does the same for others.

And here is me meeting the Secret Teacher himself, if only briefly.