Two Dummies Went to Europe

I haven’t posted in a very long time. This is for two reasons. One is that I genuinely have so little free time that whenever I get a sliver of it I can’t bring myself to sit in front of a computer. The second reason is that I haven’t been sure what to write. I have so much to say. At least to myself. But I never have the time to do what I’m doing now and turn it into coherent sentences (disclaimer: at no point does this constitute a claim to coherence).

Work has been going great. I’ve been a cabinetmaker for over a year now. I love it. I’ve never woken up eager to get to work before. It has been many of the things that make my life feel correct, and I’m gratified that my decision to pursue it has been the right one. That’s something I might go into another time, if I can think of a way to make it semi-interesting. But I do have something I think might be interesting. Or at least fun to read. If literally nothing else, it will help me write something because words are beating against my brain all the time.

I’m going to start writing a story that I’ve had in my head for 15 years now—one that I didn’t ever think to tell in writing, because I had other concerns going, but one I’ve told in pieces many, many times in the decade-and-a-half since it all happened. I’m not sure this blog is the best place for it. I think it would actually make a very funny book. Problem is, I have no idea if I know how to write “funny.” I sometimes can talk funny. Like, people seem to commonly laugh at my intentionally funny remarks. But you never know if someone’s just blowing smoke up your ass. And writing a good story and telling one after a few drinks are quite distinct (and hard-earned) skills. I’ll give it a shot.

When I was 22 I went to Europe for three weeks with my best friend. Our plan such as it was was to backpack and camp through most of it. By many measures, it became an unmitigated catastrophe. So many absurd things happened to the two of us in those three weeks that I look back now in awe of both my bravery and my abject stupidity in facing them. It was also perhaps the most important three weeks of my life before my children were born. I know that’s a steep claim but I can’t think that it’s false. Dumb suburban white kids like to talk about “finding” themselves in the most self-involved way. My life was and is often so mundane that I sometimes think I actually need to create adversity and discomfort on purpose just to feel growth. But that’s what this trip was, I suppose. I learned a lot about myself. That sounds incredibly boring but before you leave I promise this story won’t be (that) trite. But it’s going to take a while to figure out how it should go.

When I was in my last semester of college in the spring of 2005, my best friend and housemate, John, had decided he was going to Europe with his little sister after graduation. I remember being jealous of the trip they had in mind. But I didn’t ever think I would be going. I had never been off the continent, and the notion of being in Europe was like imagining another planet. I was also broke. Shortly before graduation, however, John’s parents had given a final word: his teenage sister would not be allowed to go to Europe. He was upset and was considering going alone. I piped up, suddenly and almost unconsciously, “I’ll go with you.” He stared at me certainly imagining I was being flip. Maybe I was. But as I played the words back inside my head I realized I meant it.

John had a grand plan to camp across Europe while otherwise staying in cheap hostels when camping wasn’t an option. He thought we could pull the three-week trip off for three grand each. I somehow got my folks to commit $2,000 to the plot—an enormous sum for my parents, who were and are far from well-off. I had about $1,000 of my own to contribute. It was all the money I had in the world. It suddenly seemed like I should burn it on a trip to Europe. So we started “planning.” If I could make those scare quotes larger and more frightening I would. Because we were 22 and dumb and had no idea what we were doing but in that clichéd attitude of 22-year-olds we were blithely confident we had it under control. This was also before smart phones and before every small hotel and business had a website. And it was before travel-booking sites had come into common usefulness. In short we winged it.

We discussed both our priorities. We decided on a whirlwind tour: First to London then, in order, on to Belfast, Dublin, Paris, Normandy, Nice, Rome, Venice, Munich, and Berlin. We had no more than two-ish days in each location and mostly it was just one. As I write that out now it has me nonplussed.

It’s an insane itinerary.

We were morons.

It was glorious.

We didn’t ask anyone’s opinion. We didn’t care for experience. We were gonna do this.

When it was done, in July 2005, the trip had broken me. Looking back with the perspective of age and experience the memories are hilarious and honestly magical. The trip was magical in real time as well. But that magic was tempered at the time by my state of abject terror nearly the entire time I was outside the United States. I mean I was genuinely terrified. When I wasn’t terrified I was angry, which for me is kind of just another way to say I’m terrified.

I’ve written a quick outline. The following is a list of literal, actual things that happened over those three weeks, which can serve as a sort of preview for my first installment of the full story to come at later dates:

1. My trip began when I took a train to Vancouver, British Columbia, from where I would meet John at the airport and fly to London direct. The flights from Seattle were more expensive but John opted to fly from Seattle to Vancouver anyway. So in order to save like a hundred bucks, for the first leg of the trip I was on my own. When I got to the station in downtown Vancouver, I tried to buy a metro ticket. My plan was to meander around for 5 hours waiting to go to the airport to meet John for the London flight. The metro ticket would be first purchase of the trip. My credit card was rejected. Turns out I had left home with an expired credit card and didn’t realize it until it was too late.

2. I spent most of a week using calling cards (remember those?) inside British, Irish, and French phone booths talking to my mother (who was eight time zones behind me) and to Visa trying to get a new card sent to me even though I had generally no idea where we would spend any given night.

3. Our first hotel room in London in Earl’s Court had a dead fish in it. We asked for a different room and got one literally on top of the overground Tube tracks, where the trains passed every five minutes.

4. We split up one night in London and I got lost after the Underground closed and had no real idea where our hotel was. I made John move to a new better ($) hotel in Elephant and Castle.

5. Because I did not have the credit card, I burned through all my cash and was quite literally broke about 5 days into the trip at which point I began “borrowing” from John.

6. From London, we flew into Belfast with no idea what we were going to do there at a time in my life when I knew next-to-nothing about that wonderful city. I still regret it. We took an expensive cab into the center of the city and then sat down and planned how to leave it.

7. We didn’t really know how to get from Belfast to Dublin so we took local buses, ad hoc, as far as they would go then walked to the next local bus route—usually a few miles—and took that one as far as it would go and so on. We rode with all locals, mostly kids in school uniforms who stared at us.

8. We spent the first night in Northern Ireland in a one-person tent in a mobile home park in the middle of Nowhere, County Down. We walked a mile or so and shopped at a local convenience store to more stares and side-eye and bought some food. We cooked leeks and some sort of beef that was on sale next to the magazines together on a propane powered mini-stove while the Northern Irish residents of the trailer park stared at us. One brave kid about 9 years old came and asked us “where our camper” was. I didn’t really understand a word he said beyond that. We parted ways forever just as puzzled by one another as before we’d met.

9. When we got to Dublin, I begged John to let us stay in a “hotel” and the only one we could afford had no functioning toilet and the bed sheets looked like unshowered coal miners had slept in them the night before.

10. We flew from Dublin to the outskirts of Paris and had to quickly find a place to stay for the night. The hotel we found had an all-automated check-in, which was weird as hell. You’ll notice at this point that we’re mostly staying in hotels we couldn’t afford instead of hostels or camping as planned. That’ll be a theme.

11. In the morning, we walked five miles from the hotel to the train station to go into central Paris, only to find when we got there that there was a planned train strike for the next two days and there was no affordable way to get into the city. We decided on the spot to skip Paris and go on to Normandy instead.

12. Normandy is rural France and the trains were spotty. It took us all day just to get there after three train transfers.

13. We finally camped at an honest-to-god campground in Normandy. It was there that an entire jar of Nutella broke open inside my backpack. I didn’t notice until we set up camp at which point everything I had with me was covered in chocolate hazelnut spread. I spent the evening laundering clothes and my backpack in a small coin washer and a sink.

14. We took the train to Lyon but got off at the wrong stop in the middle of the night. It’s possible we were tricked into doing this by a seemingly friendly local who told us which stop had the most places to stay nearby. There were none as it turned out. We had to take a very expensive cab back to the middle of town and stay in another hotel we couldn’t afford.

15. We made it to Nice the next day and had a truly wonderful day of food and sun on the Mediterranean. John got food poisoning and we both got extremely sunburned. The morning we were to check out the hotel (yep, another hotel) had let us place our bags behind the desk in the lobby and we could pick them up before our early-evening train to Rome. When we returned hours later to grab our bags and head to the train station we learned that just moments earlier and under the noses of the desk staff who didn’t know any different our backpacks had mistakenly been loaded onto a tourist bus bound in the opposite direction. I was now in the south of France with only my wallet, passport (thank god) swim trunks, and a t-shirt. I wasn’t even wearing underwear. The hotel was very genuinely apologetic. But neither we or they had any idea what to do. We got the hotel’s phone number and boarded a train to Rome. They promised to track the bags down.

16. The train to Rome was an overnight. We couldn’t afford a sleeping car. It was a sweltering summer in southern Europe. I spent one of the longest nights of my life in a hot humid un-airconditioned train compartment designed to sit 6 people. I was packed cheek by jowl with John, six other people who didn’t speak English, and—I shit you not—a large adult German Shepherd. He seemed friendly. I decided at about 2:00 am that when we got to Rome, I was going to the airport and buying a ticket home with all the money I had left.

17. When we got to Rome, I spent more money I didn’t have to buy a change of clothes, a new day bag, and, mercifully, underwear. We stayed in another hotel we couldn’t afford. John and the wonders of the Eternal City in daylight convinced me not to fly home.

18. After several truly fun days in Rome (except for when John almost died of heat stroke when we decided to walk back from a trip to the catacombs which had roughly been in North Africa as far as I could tell by the walk back), we headed to Venice. But first we stopped at the small town of Vicenza where a friend of a friend had generously agreed to put us up. Incredibly the Nice hotel had indeed tracked down our bags. They were sitting forlorn on a platform in Lyon, France. They helpfully sent them to Vicenza via Fedex. Even more incredibly I got all my stuff back. Nothing was missing.

19. We spent most of our day in Venice walking around with an open laptop, looking for an unsecured wifi signal so that we could email another one of our friends, Caitlin, who would be meeting us in Venice and spending the rest of the trip with us. The wifi was necessary because we of course had not coordinated how we would meet up in Venice, which turns out to be kind of a big place. We finally found wifi by a small Venice café and ordered food in order to use the internet. John ordered. Not sure he knew what he ordered. It was all fried seafood. I didn’t eat. John did. He got food poisoning again. But we managed to contact Caitlin.

20. From Venice, the three of us flew to Frankfurt, where we rented a car that couldn’t go in reverse. Yes I’m serious. We drove to southern Bavaria.

21. We spent that night literally parked on the side of the Autobahn. John and Caitlin slept in our one-person tent in the grass by the road. It rained. I spent a sleepless night in the car. In the middle of the night I accidently kicked something strange stuffed deep under the front seat. It was a photo album. I opened it and it took a moment for it to dawn on me what I was looking at. It was full of dozens of original photos of the liberation of a German concentration camp in 1945. From the inscription in the front page, it had clearly been lost and left in the car by some American World War II veteran here on a reunion tour of some sort. The man had helped liberate a German concentration camp and these were his priceless photos. Deciding what to do with that photo album is a long story. I still think about it at least once a week.

22. We drove to Munich, where I finally got good and drunk in a beer hall. Joy.

23. We made it to Berlin, where we dropped the car. By this point John and I were so sick of one another that we were essentially fighting with each other inside our heads most of the time. At one point, the two of us had an angry shouting match over whether technology would ever allow humans to preserve digital archives the same way we keep traditional paper archives. Again, that’s not a joke. What is also not a joke is that it is now 2020 and we have things called the Cloud and I’m not going to gloat.

24. I left Caitlin and John in Berlin to return home to Seattle. I flew alone from Berlin to London’s Stanstead airport, which was on the opposite side of the city from Heathrow from where my flight back to Vancouver was departing. I was almost literally out of money and my credit card was maxed out. I jumped the turnstile and took the Underground from Stanstead to Heathrow via central London. It took something like two hours. Later, when I was in the air leaving the UK, the Underground station I had been in just hours earlier was literally blown up by an Islamist terrorist in the July 7 Underground Bombing of 2005.

25. I landed in Vancouver in the late afternoon. My train to Seattle wasn’t due to leave until 6am. So I spent the night in the Vancouver airport. I couldn’t afford food. When it came time to catch a cab to the train station I had only enough money to get two-thirds of the way there. I told the cab driver I’d get out after I ran out of money and walk the rest of it. He took pity on me and drove me all the way free of charge.

26. I got back to Seattle exhausted with a maxed-out credit card and something like $3 in my checking account.

27. All of that happened in three weeks.

There is so much more in the grainy details. More to come.