When Senior Writer Michael Demarest wrote his first TIME cover story on travel in 1956, some 500,000 U.S. tourists were expected in Europe. For this week's sequel, Demarest, a specialist on the changing needs and tastes of U.S. travelers, looks at the revived interest in vacations abroad and the enthusiasm Europeans will lavish on a predicted 4.2 million American visitors in 1983.

One of Demarest's own aims in writing about travel has been to interest Americans in meeting a range of Europeans, especially outside the major cities. "I love the capitals with their theaters, their art, their museums," he says. "But some of my happiest travel experiences have been in the provinces of England, France, Portugal, Italy. I discovered many of those places while serving in the Merchant Marine during World War II. I was on North Atlantic and Mediterranean runs, among others, and there were always opportunities to get away into the countryside, where people welcomed me. Even in wartime, they ate and drank well." Demarest has been back to Europe almost every year in the past three decades. But he has also enjoyed traveling to and writing in TIME about more exotic places: the Hawaiian island of Maui in 1979, the Caribbean's pristine Lesser Antilles in 1980. In 1978 he and Photographer Carl Mydans were among the first journalists to travel as tourists through China. Their experiences became a cover story for TIME's international editions and later a book, China: A Visual Adventure.

For this week's story, Demarest was assisted by dozens of reporters and correspondents on both sides of the Atlantic.

Among them was Boston's Sara White, who has vacationed in Europe 22 times and maintains, "The excitement never dims." Rome's Leonora Dodsworth found accosting unknown tourists a daunting experience, made more so by the fact that many visiting Americans no longer wear such distinctive raiment as Hawaiian shirts and polyester pantsuits. Says she: "Now you have to move in close enough to eavesdrop and identify their speech." London Correspondent Mary Cronin, whose desk has been piled with tempting brochures for British holidays, confesses "frustration at writing about tours rather than going on them. So come the weekend, I joined a group going to the upper reaches of the Scottish Highlands. I even went fishing in Loch Maree and came up with a 10-lb. salmon." This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.