Travel Guide Rick Steves - 'Cancer Is My Unexpected Adventure'

THE TV HOST AND TRAVEL GURU SHARES HIS UPBEAT OUTLOOK AFTER BEING DIAGNOSED WITH PROSTATE CANCER

- EILEEN FINAN

Rick Steves makes a point of avoiding easy journeys-"la-la land travel" is what he calls it when everything is perfectly planned, perfectly comfortable...and perfectly bland. "I like bumps," the travel guru explains on a recent Zoom call from his Edmonds, Wash., home. "I like surprises. I don't want everything to be figured out in advance. Travel isn't supposed to be smooth. It's supposed to be transformational."

This summer, between trips filming the 13th season of his PBS series Rick Steves' Europe, Steves, 69, embarked on his most surprising-and most personal journey yet, when he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. "This was something totally new," says Steves, who underwent surgery on Oct. 4.

"All of a sudden I'm confronted with an existential challenge-and it was kind of exhilarating." For more than four decades Steves has been encouraging fellow travelers with his brand of goodhearted optimism to embrace roads less traveled through his guidebooks, a long-running PBS series and his travel company, which brings 30,000 people each year on tours to Europe. "Travel carbonates your life," he says.

"It broadens your perspective." It's a lesson Steves first learned as a teen. The oldest of three children raised by parents Dick and June, who owned a piano import business in Edmonds, Steves first traveled abroad with his family at the age of 14. "One day I came home from school, and my dad said, 'We're going to Europe to see the piano factories,"" Steves recalls.