In the Begining

The first passport picture of a callow young man with puffy eyes and a ridiculous mustache

“In the beginning…the earth was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep.” Well no, before I set off traveling the world, my life wasn’t totally grim, empty, and formless, but it did possess those elements in small doses. I didn’t start traveling until sixteen years after I graduated from college, though I desperately wanted to do so during all that time. I knew that many of my college friends, and even some of my high school classmates had backpacked across Europe while I was living at home, surviving on odd jobs, and trying to imagine what to do with my life. I had heard many romantic tales of “what Europe was really like” from these people. Though I dreamed of following in their foot steps, I couldn’t even afford  a backpacking trip across Canada, much less one across Europe. When I did acquire my first legitimate job as an English teacher, I earned only $6000 a year, none of which I was able to save. I eventually landed a job with the Department of Labor, and began my slow climb to prosperity, however I became too busy with my new career to take any extensive vacations. Still, the feeling that I had missed out on an important rite of passage floated around in the dark part of my brain like an embarrassing stink all the while I was engaged in my scramble to succeed. Responsibility and ambition were perpetually pulling at my leash. They wouldn’t allow me to just run off and explore the world and myself. I felt that such freedom would be foolish since my future promised to become brighter if I stayed right where I was. I unconsciously waited for something bad to happen on the job that would cut me loose or make me want to cut myself loose. Only then could I be free to find out what I had missed..

One strand of the leash may have been cut when a young lady with whom I thought I was having a serious relationship rolled over one Sunday morning to ask:

“Did you enjoy last night?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Good. Remember it, because it’s the last you’re going to get. I’m getting married in two weeks”.

She then pulled out two paper bags with all the stuff I had left at her apartment over the previous three years, all washed and neatly folded. (She had planned the moment carefully for the greatest effect). In case you are wondering, I wasn’t invited to the wedding. I know, because I asked.

Lest you judge the young lady too harshly, the fact that until that moment, my belief that our relationship was fine and satisfied both of us does not reflect kindly on my empathy, sensitivity or understanding of the relationship either. I probably deserved the breakup, though, I think,  not the way it was done.

I suppose, dear reader, that you surmise that it was this shock that set me loose to explore the world. If you think this, you would be wrong. I am not an “Eat, Pray, Love” kind of guy. At the time of the breakup, I had just received an important promotion and a transfer to a new location. My ambitions were being fulfilled. I felt like I was on top of the world, and with no need to explore it further. The breakup, did, however, make it easier to set off on extended travel when I later became disillusioned with the new job.

My new boss was an incompetent whose only skill was spouting complete bullshit, (sound like any president we know?). Since I took the job, and perhaps myself very seriously, I found the situation intolerable and began to plan my escape. I saved my money, studied for and received a Chartered Financial Consultant degree, (I would start a fee only financial planning business when I returned from my first trip abroad), passed my probation, and submitted a request for a leave of absence rather than quitting outright. (This turned out to be a very wise move). I was ready to explore what was for me, the exotic continent of Europe.

I bought a tent an sleeping bag, acquired my first passport, (see passport photo above), and bought a round trip ticket to England on Virgin Atlantic airlines, (which I think was appropriate for my first trip).

Perhaps it was a bit unusual for a man in his mid thirties to be backpacking through Europe, but I was intent on experiencing what I had missed earlier in life, and since I had a business to start when I got back, and no certain income to support myself, I needed to travel cheaply while experiencing as much of Europe as possible.

After landing outside London, I made my way to a bed and breakfast on London’s Russell Square. This was the area where the Bloomsbury group had congregated from before the First World War until just before the Second. I had read some of the novels by members Virginia Woolf, Ford Maddox Ford, and E.M Forster, and had certainly heard of John Maynard Keyes. I enjoyed sitting in Russell Square Park inventing discussions with them about the latest ideas in philosophy, economics, politics, art, or literature. I imagined that I could say things that they would find both original and interesting. Such day-dreams made me happier than I had been in a long time. The Russell Square area also housed the British Museum where I spent a full day perusing the Elgin Marbles and other booty the British Empire had looted from the rest of the  world. While the morality of the whole enterprise may be sketchy, the British Museum IS magnificent. Anyone visiting London MUST visit it.

I liked the area so well that I kept coming back to Russell Square on subsequent visits to London where I stayed at dormitories rented out by the University of London during its school vacations. They were spartan, but also very cheap in a city where lodging is otherwise extremely expensive.

I spent a couple days walking around London and visiting the usual tourist sights: Harrods’s, Hyde Park. Green Park, Carnaby street, and the Tower of London. I was disappointed with none of it! Samuel Johnson once said that he who tires of London tires of life. I quickly came to realize that I was in no way tired of life. My most memorable moment in London during this trip, however, did not involve any of the usual  “must see” locations. It occurred while I was wandering along a street lined with Georgian townhouses on a bright Sunday morning. There was no one else on the street, and no sounds of traffic. With rare London sun falling on my face I was already in a good mood when I thought I heard a faint sound of music. It didn’t seem to be coming from inside any of the townhouses, and at first I thought my imagination and good mood were teaming up to play tricks on me. The music slowly became louder and louder. It was marching band music. A parade maybe? It didn’t seem likely since no one was waiting on the sidewalks to view a parade. The music of this ghost band was almost on top of me  before it swung into view from around the corner. It was a Salvation Army marching band with fifty or more musicians. They didn’t seem to care that I was the only person listening to them. In fact they ignored me. The whole point of the parade seemed to be to express themselves to something greater than any random human.

After several days in London I took the train up to the ancient  city of York, and pitched my tent at a campsite in the small village of Stanford Bridge which is located a couple of miles outside the city, and was the site of a famous battle. (Look it up!). I haven’t retained any strong memories about York except that most of the city was grey, damp and a little gloomy. That night I decided to experience pub life in Stanford Bridge. A couple in their early twenties over heard me order a beer, and asked me where I was from. Apparently not many Americans made it to Stanford Bridge back then, because they were full of questions, and were very friendly. They were married and both worked in the village. She was a cute blond with bobbed hair who pumped gas at the local ESSO station. I don’t remember what he did for a living. They showed me how to play a “skittles” bar game where pins were stood up in a box divided into small rooms with open doorways. A top was spun using a string at one end of the box. The person whose top knocked down the most pins won. I sat on one side of the game table and they on the other. The beers were going down easily, and we were all laughing and enjoying the game. (The secret to the game, if there is one, is to get that top spinning as fast as possible so that it travels around the rooms as long as possible). At some point I felt something soft massaging my crotch. I looked down to see that the blond had taken off her shoe and was slowly rubbing her foot there. I looked up, and she gave me a quick smile while scrunching her toes a little.  Since I’m a bit shy, and had no idea what the proper response should be, or what she (or he?) expected of me, I finished the game and gulped down my beer. I thanked them for the wonderful conversation we had had, and hobbled back to my campsite alone. It rained during that night and I had camped in a low spot. My air mattress was sitting in about a inch of water when I awoke the next morning. The backpacking trip wasn’t turning out quite the way I had hoped, and it appeared to be my own damned fault.

The next day I took a north bound train to Hexham and Hadrian’s wall. I spent a full day exploring the wall. It was cold, windy, and a light rain followed me around as I walked miles along the wall. It was a mammoth construction project with ditches, watch towers, forts and barracks. I wondered if Rome ever made enough money from whatever businesses it operated in Britain at that time that allowed the wall to pay for itself. They stayed in Britain for a couple hundred years, so I guess it must have been worth their while. The wind and the cold ignited my metabolism to such a degree that I couldn’t fall asleep in my tent that night. My body acted like a small space heater that made the tent feel like the inside of a sauna. I laid on top of my sleeping bag with sweat running off me, and condensation forming on the inside of the roof. Camping was proving to be an uncomfortable lodging option.

The next day I explored Hexham itself. It was an interesting little town with a small bowling green, a few restaurants, a labor exchange, and a betting shop. Its most interesting asset was a Border’s Museum which provided dioramas of local border history which appeared to be primarily criminal in nature. Theft, murder, and general mayhem was apparently par for the course. I recall one story where a cattle thief stole a local farmer’s cattle that happened to have hoof and mouth disease. The stolen cattle then infected the thief’s cattle, and he became so enraged that he came back down from the hills and murdered the farmer. It was also interesting to note that most of the noble families in northern England were founded by cattle thieves. Looking for a common thread that linked these early criminals with their later mover and shaker descendants, I found only that both the criminals and the later nobility were willing to take chances, whether it be stealing a neighbor’s cattle or leading a rebellion against a king.

I had bought an Eu-rail Pass that also covered the cost of the ferries to and from Ireland, so after two days in Hexham, I made my way to Stranraer, Scotland and took the ferry to Larne in Northern Ireland. A pretty girl sat across from me on the boat looking at her hands and grimacing. When she looked up, I smiled, and to my embarrassment, she didn’t return the smile. I looked around the cabin to see if anyone noticed, and found everyone else wore a sour or sad expression. I thought of the start of Woody Allen’s “Stardust Memories” where Woody boards a train bound for the beach and finds that everyone else on the train is morose, sobbing, or half dead. On the next track there is another train also bound for the beach that is filled with happy people who were laughing, dancing, and partying. The Woody narrator says that finding himself on the wrong train pretty much summed up the story of his life. It seemed like I had gotten on the wrong boat. I was soon to learn that all boats to Northern Ireland probably carried the same type of passengers..

The bus from Larne to Belfast was late because it had to wait for a Protestant parade of drums and pipes that was proceeding through a Catholic neighborhood. By the time the bus reached the Belfast station, it was getting dark, and I didn’t have a place to stay. I saw a phone booth in the station where I looked for campsites in its phone book. There were none. I had been in the phone booth only a couple of minutes, but when I came out the station was completely empty. The bus was gone, the other passengers had been immediately picked up and whisked away, and the ticket booth was dark. I walked out onto the street not knowing which way to go. I considered finding a park somewhere and sleeping on a bench, but thought better of it when I saw that there was no one out and about, no one walking on the sidewalks, and no car traffic, except for a small convoy of British soldiers in jeeps that passed me as I headed for a faint glow that peaked over the tops of buildings at the end of the street. I figured maybe there would be people where there was light. Thank god I was right.

After walking about ten minutes I turned a corner and saw…The Europa Hotel. It had already been bombed once or twice and a cinder block wall with barbed wire on top surrounded it. There was a cinder block guard house out front that I entered to inquire about the availability of a room and if there were any hostels or campsites nearby if I couldn’t afford the room. The guard/receptionist just laughed.

“No. I’m sure you’ll find our rooms reasonable”.

He was right. I think my room cost around the equivalent of $30: a bit of a splurge for me back then but it provided the additional value of allowing me to clean up and dry out. The inside of the hotel was very different from the outside. It was a clean, modern, and comfortable hotel whose interior belied its true situation nestled as it was behind barbed wire and cinder blocks. There were not many other guests, however. The elevator advertised a rooftop lounge and disco. I went up to check it out at 11 o’clock to find there were no customers and it was getting ready to shut down. This was a Saturday night. I later learned that Belfast did not allow bars to operate on Sundays.

Despite the clean sheets and a hot breakfast, I decided not to spend another night at the Europa. Instead, I quickly headed to the train station to take the first train south out of Belfast and into Dublin.

On the train I shared a compartment with an Australian backpacker, (You found them everywhere in Europe at the time), and a pretty girl in her 20’s whose father was a pharmacist in Belfast. She liked to talk and gave a very animated description of what life in Belfast was like. She admitted that there were problems, but that basically life was pretty much like that of any other first world country. I was buying most of what she said, (pretty girls are easy to believe), until we reached the border. She suddenly became very quiet, and kept looking anxiously out the window. After we cleared the border she relaxed. She said there had been some sort of bloodshed at the border a few weeks before. From there to Dublin, Belfast she completely forgot Belfast and spoke only of how much fun she was planning to have visiting her friends at Trinity College.

In Dublin I said good bye to my new friends, and began looking for a hostel to stay in. The streets of Dublin were very different from those in Belfast. They were full of smiling people, and despite it being Sunday, the pubs were open. I easily found a hostel and began tracking down all the sights I had heard about in my college literature courses. I found Trinity College and viewed the Book of Kells. I walked past the Abbey Theater, and looked for some of the locations described in Joyce’s Ulysses. The two things I best remember, however, were much more mundane. I remember how I could smell roasted barley as much as three blocks away from the Guinness brewery. (With also the faint smell of urine wafting up from the sidewalk under my feet). I also remember a restaurant, more of a burger joint actually, where waitresses put your order in a wire baskets that ran on cables hanging from the ceiling. They would then pull a cord and the order would zip over the customer’s heads to the kitchen. I don’t remember if the food came back from the kitchen the same way. Probably not, the baskets moved really fast and there would have been the possibility of food being dumped on diners’ heads.

If I had taken pictures I would probably be able to remember more of what I experienced there. I do remember that I loved it. After a few days in Dublin I hitch-hiked to Waterford, where, (I believe), I took a ferry to France. While hitch hiking, a Volkswagen Beetle drove by me full of people. They turned their hands up to indicate that they had no room to pick me up. A priest sat in the back seat and waved at me and laughed as they went past. Later I had a ride and saw the priest hitch hiking. We had no room either so I waved. This series of passing and waving continued a couple times more until I was let out at the same spot where he was hitching. We walked along the road and started talking. He seemed very friendly and despite my being an agnostic, I had entertained a number of questions about Catholic theology for a long time, and started to ask him about transubstantiation and other arcane beliefs. He didn’t seem to understand the questions, and finally he said, ” Look, I’m not really a priest. I wear this collar and cassock to get rides.” I laughed. He may not have understood religion, but he certainly understood human nature as a true holy man should.

I eventually made my way to Waterford and walked around the village that afternoon. It was a cozy, work-a-day kind of place where kids stopped at the local general store to buy candy after school. That evening I boarded a ferry to France from somewhere near Waterford, ( I don’t remember where). My Eur-ail pass again covered the passage, plus it offered a bunk in a dorm type room. I had discovered a trick that I have subsequently used on many European trips: my Eur-ail pass has provided me with a night’s hotel room on long route ferries and trains. It has saved me a great deal of money over the years.

I don’t remember much of the voyage.  I do, however, remember arriving in Le Harve late in the afternoon. I immediately  boarded a train for Paris, but soon figured out that I would never be able to find an affordable place to stay there, and disembarked in Rouen where I found a one star hotel near the rail station. The room was just large enough to hold a bed and was lit by a single light bulb hanging from the ceiling. The toilet was out in the hall, but everything seemed clean enough. I asked the Algerian couple who ran the hotel where there was a good place to eat and they sent me around the corner to a North African restaurant that was filled with local families having dinner. The fixed menu included couscous and other items that were previously unknown to me. The meal cost about $4.00 and was delicious. The dessert was a single orange, but it was perfect. Perfectly round, and perfectly sweet. This was the exotic experience I came to Europe to find!

I rose early the next morning to take an express train to Paris which I explored through out the day. As expected, I couldn’t find a reasonable place to stay, and that night I took a train to Nice. I figured there would be campsites there. I had a bunk on the train, and after a long day hiking around Paris, I slept like a baby.

The next morning I arrived in Nice, and found its beach, made of pebbles instead of sand, a bit disappointing. I wondered if rich people really enjoyed lying on such an uncomfortable surface, (It turns out they don’t. They lie on beach furniture). The one campsite I found was full. I started looking for a cheap hotel. I found a worn out one star hotel that was about six blocks in from the beach. I asked the desk clerk if they had any rooms. He looked at me, smiled, and said, “For you we do”. I felt lucky that the desk clerk was so personable. I had been told that the French were very snooty and officious. He didn’t even ask to see my passport, as hotels were required to do.

I got onto an old elevator that was encased in sort of an open cage and began my assent to my room. As I passed through each floor I saw men wandering the halls and knocking on doors wearing only bath towels. On my way up to my fourth floor room I saw no women, no families, only men and bath towels. What had I gotten myself into? I found my room, entered, locked the door leaving the skeleton key in the lock, and canted a chair under the door handle. I looked around the room. It possessed the air of decayed gentility. The bed was a four poster with canopy. The windows had faded floral curtains, with both running from floor to the ceiling. The rest of the furniture appeared to be in an over-the-top baroque style. Well, this was certainly more of an exotic European experience than I had expected. As it turned out, none of the other residents bothered me while I was there. They were to busy meeting things and doing people they already knew to bother with me.

While in Nice, I spent a little extra on lunch in a high end French restaurant, and visited the Marc Chagall museum. I spent a nice enough day, but found Nice’s alleged beauty and elegance to be greatly exaggerated. I left after one day to take a night train to San Sebastian, Spain.

The following afternoon I had to wait a couple of hours in the Hendaye, France train station for a connecting train to San Sebastian. While there I had my first encounter with the hole in the floor toilet. The hole in the floor toilet usually has two foot shaped depressions on either side of…well, a hole. It seemed like no one who had previously used the toilet had been able to hit the hole. This is the usual circumstance. In all my subsequent exposure to such toilets, they were always filthy. I’ve come to believe that people miss the target on purpose as a sort of a middle finger to all those who are unlucky enough to have to use the toilet later. Thankfully, these have pretty much disappeared from Western Europe, though you may still stumble on one every now and then.

The distance between Hendaye and San Sebastian is about 18 kilometers but the train took several hours due to bad track. In some spots I could have jumped off the train and passed it while walking. I became impatient, but San Sebastian proved to be well worth that day’s inconveniences. It is a beautiful city that lies in a half moon along a large bay that has a large island in its middle. The sea food and pastries I sampled there were both delicious and cheap. An old Basque lady grabbed my arm at the train station and asked if I needed a room. It was about as cheap as a campsite and only a few blocks from the bay. My luck had changed. I threw my gear into my room and began to walk off squares of city blocks in order to experience most of what the city had to offer.  I found it to be an extremely interesting and alive place. I would have liked to repeat my experiences in San Sebastian, but over the years have not been able to do so. Perhaps after I take my last waltz, an ambitious trip across Eastern Europe, I will spend the remainder of my life taking quick visits to the places I liked best in my youth. San Sebastian will be at the top of that “redo” list. I’m a bit worried that such a revisit will be a major disappointment, or at best, a bittersweet experience since both San Sebastian and I have probably changed a lot, but I’m willing to take that chance if there is any possibility of reliving my first experience of the  Spanish practice of “paseo”. In the evening almost  everyone came out onto the streets to conduct a “paseo” in order to see, be seen, and visit with people they knew well or hardly at all. Those with a little money  would visit a bar, drink a small wine, eat some interesting tapas, and converse with the people around them. Then they would walk around a bit more, wave to their friends, gossip, or perhaps stop in another bar for a different type of wine and tapas. It all seemed much more civilized and friendly than a typical evening in the United States, though the presence of special police with silly three pointed hats, and less silly automatic weapons indicated that anger was hidden somewhere under all those Basque smiles.

Two days later, I boarded a train for Lisbon, another city I came to love. I shared a compartment with a Portuguese woman who had been living with her French husband in Biaritz, France, and was taking her three year old daughter to visit her mother in Lisbon. I suspected that she was making a one way trip, because she seemed to sigh with relief once we crossed the Portuguese border, and became more animated and cheerful the closer we got to Lisbon. There was also a man from Biaritz in the compartment with us who the husband may have assigned to keep an eye on her. She spoke only French and Portuguese. The man spoke only French and English. I remembered some French from college, so we all tried to talk in French, though clearly I was slowing down the conversation since the other man sometimes had to translate what was being said into English so that I could understand what was being said.

The train was slow and creaky. It took almost a full day and night to travel from San Sebastian to Lisbon, and did not provide bunks. I slept on the floor with the others sleeping on the seats. It was still a remarkable journey. The country south of Salamanca, Spain grows thousands of acres of wheat. The harvest had recently occurred, and farmers were burning their fields to eliminate weeds and improve fertility. For hours after we left Salamanca we could see fires burning in the night on the hilltops. For mile after mile we saw nothing but lines of fire surrounded by pitch darkness. It was malevolently beautiful!

As we were entering the outskirts of Lisbon, the woman leaned forward and asked me if I’d like to accompany her to one of Lisbon’s flea markets the next day. Before I could answer, the man looked at me sternly and said in English, ” Her husband is a Basque. If you go with her, I will tell him and he will find you”. The idea that her husband could travel from France to Portugal and somehow find me in Lisbon was laughable. However, if her invitation was innocent, and if she was indeed planning to return to France after visiting her mother, then accepting her invitation would be giving her a lot of unearned trouble. I politely declined. She asked both of us what the man had said to me. Neither of us gave her a straight answer, but I think she knew.

Lisbon is another city I would like to revisit. Arriving in Lisbon was like stepping back into the 19th century.The streetcars were ancient and the most modern structure I saw in downtown Lisbon was a large two car elevator constructed by Gustave Eiffel. Lisbon also possessed some of the tiniest drinking establishments I have ever seen. They were about the size of broom closets that were open to the street. They had no chairs, and sold only one type of cherry or berry flavored liquor. There was a shelf that would hold a couple bottles of the liquor for sale and one glass. When you bought a drink the proprietor would take an old rag and clean out the glass before pouring you a drink which you tossed down while standing up.

My hotel was brutally hot both day and night, its air conditioning consisting only of slatted shutters that could not be thrown open. I shared a bathroom that was across the hall with the other guests on my floor, but it was so clean I believed that I was the only guest who used it. Other pleasant surprises occurred on a regular basis. In one restaurant I was seated with German tourists at a long table for a “family style” meal. They spoke good English and were both friendly and full of information about Lisbon. They introduced me to my first caldo verde, a kind of cabbage soup, and my first vino verde, a white wine that is bottled before fermentation has completely finished. Both were delicious. I have since found a Portuguese restaurant in Montreal that sells a good vino verde as its house wine, but have never found any place that could match my first taste of caldo verde.

I also stumbled onto several other unexpected experiences in Lisbon. One morning I walked up a hill to ruins of a castle that a 17th century earthquake had destroyed. From a distance I thought I could see the walls move a little. I blinked thinking I was experiencing some sort of heat mirage. As I moved closer I could see that the walls were pock marked with holes where hundreds of feral cats and kittens had taken up residence. They were jumping in and out of the holes or simply looking out from them. I saw no birds any where among the ruins.

One day I took a boat across the Tagus river and then a bus to a beach south of Lisbon on the Atlantic Ocean. Here I was exposed to my first top-less beach. I was pleasantly surprised by the girls’ abbreviated swim wear, but I found their lack of self-consciousness even more surprising. All around me were  topless girls playing paddle ball, chatting with their friends, or applying sun tan lotion. For them it was just another normal day at the beach. I was surrounded by an innocence that I could only associate with the Garden of Eden. My fascination with the tableau before me probably made me the serpent in the garden but my occasional side-ward glances seemed to have no effect on the girls’ innocent vibe.

I stayed in Lisbon for a couple more days before heading back to France by taking a different route that passed through central Spain. There are parts of Spain’s interior which look surprisingly a lot like Mexico or the American Southwest desert. It is filled with cacti, adobe ruins, and desolation. The Spanish lawyer with whom I shared a train compartment looked wearily out the window and said “We Spanish have a saying to describe places like this: we say this is where Christ lost his crown of thorns.” I looked out the window again. It looked like Christ had lost more than one crown of thorns.

After crossing into France I changed trains and spent a night sleeping on a train to Geneva, Switzerland. I found a campsite a few miles outside of the city on the south side of the lake. It was a posh campsite with hot showers, a laundromat, and a little store. It convinced me that maybe I hadn’t made a mistake by hauling a tent and sleeping bag to Europe after all. As a result, I persuaded myself to do the same the next time I visited. Only after making the same mistake twice did it finally sink in that there was no point to pack a lot of useless weight to places that had hostels, bed and breakfasts, and one star hotels that were almost as cheap as campsites. This was especially the case in Southern Europe, where the ground is harder, and the rooms are cheaper than further north.

The most memorable aspect of the Geneva campsite was a large wharf festooned with colored lights. Ever half hour or so a steamboat would chug in to pick up or disgorge passengers. Each brilliantly lit boat seemed to be hosting its own little party with passengers sipping drinks, laughing and conversing with each other. I sat on the wharf for two hours watching each party come and go.

I spent another two days at the Geneva campsite while taking side trips to Lausanne and Montreux on the lake’s north shore. My next stop was Amsterdam which, for some reason, I don’t remember very well. I do remember going to a bar called “Milky Veg”, ( Milky Way ), where at five foot ten I was the shortest person, male or female who entered the bar all night. I remember walking back to my room at around 3:00 a.m. when a guy pushing two bicycles tried to sell me one. I remember smelling the sweet perfume of soft caramel sandwiched between two sugar wafers that street vendors were selling all over the city. They made the wafers on waffle irons while you waited and the final product was always warm and gooey. I remember finally going to a flea market like the one I missed in Lisbon where I bought an old magazine cover that I had framed after I got back home.

Somehow I made it back to London – It must have been by boat because there was no Chunnel back then – where I caught a flight back to the US. I was tired. My sleeping bag was dirty. I had lost all but one pair of socks. W blue ceramic tile I bought in Portugal was broken. Yet, I considered the trip a rousing success. Yes I experienced some disappointments while on the trip, but  also felt happier for having survived them. More importantly, I stumbled onto some marvelous surprises. I saw things I could never have seen in the US, tasted new foods, heard new music, and met interesting people. I knew then that I was hooked on travel, and would need larger and larger doses for the rest of my life.