TEA let me continue to morph from a math education student into a physics teacher. I organized the lab to enable the students to proceed pretty much on their own, which they were delighted to do. That experience probably helped get me into grad school. Later I learned I’d been part of an experiment by the Berkeley physics department in which they ignored their usual requirements. Together, we failed.

But TEA taught me resilience, so in June '66 I followed my Swedish girlfriend to her home country after my draft board decided I was too old to be drafted for Vietnam and allowed me to leave the US. The relationship soon fell apart, but I had found a job working on an archeological dig near Stockholm. The Swedish government had a law at the time that if you wanted to develop land which contained a Viking site, you had to pay the government to come in and excavate the site before construction. 

TEA had also emboldened me about travel, so when the ground froze and the job shut down in December, I headed south - mostly hitchhiking, but partly by public transport - through Denmark, Germany (including West Berlin, surrounded by East Germany), Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and finally Israel. In Israel at that time, tourists, including Gentiles, could work as laborers on a kibbutz. I did agricultural work - picking bananas, oranges, avocados, and so on, for a couple months, departing in late April and missing the 6-day war by several weeks.

Then it was on to Greece by air, followed by Yugoslavia and Austria. As I recall, I hitched straight through from Salzburg to Copenhagen in 24 hours. From there, I used most of my dwindling resources on a passenger ship to Iceland where I got a job, first packing up an Eastern bloc trade exhibit, then on construction, and earned enough money to get back to the States.