A Six-Week Holiday

DAY 1: BRIGHTON

We made it to England, and she is embracing us with a sloppy, wet, open-mouthed sea bass kiss. It’s raining, and it’s 50 degrees, which feels more like a frigid 30 with the wind coming off the English Channel right outside our window (right). The people so far look like Midwesterners in February… walking hunched-over, trying to avoid the rain and stay warm…

We found our hostel, St. Christopher’s Inn in Brighton, and order #1 of business was putting on every single piece of clothing in our bags. We’re both wearing 4 shirts right now. I’m even breaking my ONE fashion rule: wearing socks with sandals. Desperation trumps fashion.

I’m not exactly sure what day it is. Food keeps appearing at strange hours…I woke up at midnight to eat my in-flight meal of chicken, rice, and carrots. Then, I had a bagel and O.J. at something like 4 a.m. I think it’s Tuesday. My watch says “TU,” but I don’t know what to believe. It’s 2 p.m. here, which means we should be eating again soon…although it feels like we’ve eaten 34 meals today.

The streets here just inside the pier are windy, skinny, Seuss-like cobblestoned pathways. Wide bay windows on colorful facades line the sidewalks that curve up, around, down, and sideways, almost funneling down to what appears to be nothing more than a small crack. We’re inside a pub right now, The Druid’s Head, trying to stay dry, sipping on our English tea. Smoking is still allowed inside public places; although, it doesn’t seem quite as repulsive when words tinged with an English accent flow from the same lips as the smoke that will kill us.

We’re planning on making it to bed early tonight, and I’m going to put my complimentary Delta eye pillow and in-flight blanket to good use again. We’ll be leaving Brighton at 4:15 a.m. Wednesday morning to make our 6:50 flight to Rome. Luckily, the bus stop is about 50 yards from our hostel door.

As I reread this, I think it’s communicating some negativity. I don’t know how to fix that. I’m really excited and so happy to be here. But, we’ve more or less been up for 27 hours (it just took me about 3 minutes to do the math there), and stringing these uncreative sentences together is painful – for both the writer and the reader, I’m sure. My apologies. I think I’m hallucinating…

Domani, Roma!

DAY 2: ROME

After a day in beautiful Roma, I can now say with certainty that illiteracy puts a new spin on traveling. I spent the entire day trying to pronounce words in my head – for absolutely no reason, since I didn’t even know what they meant anyhow. TJ wowed me with his Italian, though, and it helped us find our way around this huge city.

The only way I can describe the feeling of walking down the sidewalks and the uneven streets here with their old mixed with their new is to be aware of everything all the time.

I learned that itty bitty Italian women are extremely strong – especially when they are heading for the doors of a train. I can’t stay mad at them, though. They had me at ciao.

I’m at an Internet Cafe/Laundromat right now, and this computer is painfully slow…and my fingers are sticking to the keys. Ick. At 15 minutes per euro, I’m oging ot cut this post short, try to find another cafe in Positano, our next stop, and write some more then.

Util then, ciao!

DAY 3: ROME AND A FEW OTHERS ALONG THE WAY

By the way, if you were wondering what happened to that old Apple computer you donated to the Salvation Army in 1988, it’s sitting at the back of a place called The Laundromat in Rome. Yesterday, After deciding I could chisel my post in stone and mail you the slabs faster than that computer could load a web page, I cut my post uncharacteristically short and said ciao!

After a quick stop at St. Peter’s, and a brilliant business idea (t-shirts that read “I got pooped on at St. Peter’s”), we headed for Positano.

How do you get there from Rome?

1. Take the train from Rome to Naples. No one checked our passes when we got on the train, and halfway through the ride a young (hot) Italian man in a green suit asked for our passes. We played stupid (since we hadn’t had our passes validated). He informed us that our passes were Eurail passes, and the train we were on was a Eurostar train (faster, nicer, and more expensive). He said he would “close his eyes” and not fine us, but we had to pay for the tickets on that train.

2. Then, take the subway from Naples to Sorrento. A man at the ticket counter wrote a jumble of letters on a piece of paper, pushed it to us, and pointed in another direction. We followed his finger, and found a sign with the jumble of letters he had written on our paper…Customer Service, more or less. We climbed on the subway, and the smells kept our minds busy – they changed form from urine to burning plastic to whatever else you can imagine. A man with a scratched and dented accordion pushed a little gypsy girl along, holding a silver cup for change.

3. Last, take the bus from Sorrento to Positano. Positano is built on a cliff, with buildings stacked on buildings stacked on rock stacked on more buildings and more cliffs. The bus ride did a number on our guts…one small mistake and you’re hurtling down what looks like a 6-mile cliff face. It was breathtaking.

Our hostel, Hostel Brikette, overlooks the Mediterranean and the entire town. We’re at the very top of the cliff (more or less), which means the walk down to the beach is basically a 2-kilometer stairway that twists and turns downward. Everything here is beautiful. The people, the scenery, the food…

DAY 4: POSITANO

This morning, we awoke to the sun shining on the Mediterranean outside our balcony. To be as cliché as cliché gets, it just doesn’t get much better than that.

Italians, besides being bee-yoo-ti-ful, make tasty cappuccino (and their sugar packets are HUGE – my kinda people, here in Italy). This morning, we stopped by a little café for cappuccino (where the owner, a tiny old man with teeth imitating the cliffs here, tried to charge me 1 extra euro for using my computer (no internet, just for looking at my own computer). We won, by the way.

We stopped by a little grocery on our way to the beach this morning, and collected cherries, tomatoes, oranges, and a basil, tomato, and mozzarella sandwich for lunch. TJ flirted with the “anybody’s grandma” behind the meat counter, taking her picture and saying, “bella.” She grined, and somehow our food cost half of what we thought it would.

It’s interesting how everything costs money here… you pay to sit at the beach, you pay for toilets, you pay for internet (5 euro for 30 minutes here at the beach), etc. Being the tightwads we are, we ventured farther down the beach, searching for a good (free) spot for lunch. Along the way, I decided to wade out into the water, just far enough so the waves could trickle over my toes. As I stood there smiling, a strong wave came in higher than I’d expected. As the top half of me turned to run back up the beach, the water kept the bottom half of me from moving. I tipped over sideways, and all of the food we bought went under.

TJ, standing there with his camera, yelled, “Save the sandwiches!”

No “Are you ok,” or “Let me help you empty the water out of the two shopping bags.” It was fun, though, and we laughed at it later on our own private (free) little rock jutting out over the sea. I’m dry now, my belly is full, and the air is a perfect whatever degrees.

I posted a bunch of pictures on my flickr account (on the right side of this screen). We’re trying to figure out where to go to next. Talk to you then! Ciao!

DAY 5: FLORENCE

Today, we are traveling via train to Florence.

Fatigue is hitting us in the face like a speed bag. Muscles are tight, eyes are heavy, necks are stiff, and our 50-pound backpacks make it feel like we’re running a marathon in quicksand.

While sitting in the Naples train station – run by stern, wrinkled grumbling men in green pointing you in yet another direction with the same leathery hands that they just used to throw your change at you – we talked about our trip so far. Although it sounds like self-induced misery, this fatigue hanging from our eyelids is actually invigorating, given the cause of our symptoms.

For once, we are at the mercy of everyone else.

We leave when the train leaves. We use the bathroom when one is open. We try to wash our hands in an eyedropper-sized stream of water in the unsteady train bathroom. We use the internet when it is available. We sleep close to the train station for fast travel. We eat when we get a chance, and when food is free, we gobble, gobble, gobble.

We have very little control over the daily activities that we once controlled so closely, which is tiring. As we navigate a world without the coziness of convenience, even the smallest tasks require planning and forethought: packing our bags every day, taking a shower, going to the bathroom, finding food, etc.

This process requires patience, and there’s no faking patience. Because every action is so closely tied to another, and another, and another, it takes patience to plan ahead. The quality of my experience on the train ride is based upon how I chose to pack my bag before we left the hostel. How I decided to pack my bag at the hostel depended upon if I gave myself enough time between waking up and when the bus left. Patience, patience, patience.

I know, you’re thinking that these things happen at home, too, and you’re right. Actions have consequences regardless of where on Earth you are, and patience is necessary any time. However, being out of your element, outside the protective walls of convenience, you get to see this lesson more clearly and literally.

So, if fatigue is the theme of the day, I’m glad it’s from thinking.

By the way, we love reading your comments! Please keep them coming! The most communication we’re doing is with one another, and…well…we’re ready for some fresh words!

DAY 6: NICE

Before I move on to day 6, let’s revisit day five.

We strolled around Florence, TJ’s old stomping grounds. Since TJ knew the city well, we decided to only spend one day there and hit some nostalgic spots quickly. I must say, having your own personal tour guide, and foregoing the map, is nice!

We then returned to the train station, ready to take the overnight train to Zurich (this is after we just bled 3 euros for a liter of water…water has ranged from .60 to 3 euros so far). We waited for our 23:00 (11 p.m.) train, during which time I suffered a mini emotional breakdown. Seems like all of that fatigue I was enjoying got me a little more drunk than I’d thought. It’s funny how when your body is exhausted, what’s left of your energy seeps out of your body in the form of tears. I wasn’t sad about anything at all. Just really, really tired. Crying was the only function my body was capable of performing, I guess. It came and went within a minute. Not too bad. Like a fat, white pimple festering on an adolescent’s face, my fatigue eventually came to a head. The pubescent pimple finally popped. Ahhhhh.

So, when 23:00 arrived, we asked people which train was going to Zurich. A conductor’s reply: “You have made a large mistake.” The train we wanted was leaving from the OTHER train station in Florence in 5 minutes.

What do you do when you miss the train to Zurich? Hmm…check the departures board…look around…You take the next overnight train to…oh, hey, let’s go to Nice, instead!

I never in my life thought I would’ve been faced with the decision of “France or Switzerland tonight,” but I must say it’s fun! So, those words I spoke about enjoying being at the mercy of others were tasty…although they were a lot to digest at once.

NOW on to day 6:

Nice was the antidote to our fatigue. It was relaxed, slow, warm, and sunny. We sipped cappuccino at a café, had lunch in a park, and sat along the shore while TJ joined the ranks of the “dirty man with the camera at the topless beach” club (by the way, Grandpa – TJ has some pictures to show you). TJ lit a candle in a church for grandma Catherine. We ate dinner in the park again. I got to speak what French I could remember.

Nice was absolutely perfect – our reward for weathering the storm of the unorganized Italian train system (really, Italy, you’ve gotta tell people when trains leave from a different station).

At 21:00, we boarded the night train to Collioure in our very own bunk with beds and pillows and everything. It’s absolutely amazing how quickly your standards change. After visiting the bathroom in the train, and realizing it wasn’t covered in pee and wet toilet paper, I ran back to TJ to exclaim how wonderful the bathrooms were. Never thought that would happen. Ever.

Oh, and we finally realized what the little old man in Positano was trying to say when he demanded an extra euro for my coffee. He kept repeating “comperto,” which we thought meant “computer.” Looks like it is actually a seating charge – a fee to use the table, silverware, etc. Oops.

DAY 7: COLLIOURE

Knock, knock, knock. “Bonjour. Parlez-vous Francais?”

In those first few seconds of the morning, when you pass through the revolving door from the dream world to the real world, your brain is flooded with sights, thoughts, smells, and tastes as it lingers right over that line in-between worlds. Imagine the confusion as your brain interprets that you are on a train, in the dark, wrapped in the complimentary chartreuse sleeping bag on your top bunk to this question from a beanpole conductor. You could swear you’re still in the dream side, but the revolving door has pushed you completely out into reality with a little gust of cold wind to follow.

“Un peu,” a little, was all my brain could spit out.

The conductor was there, not for our wake-up call, but to inform us that they forgot our wake-up call. They overshot the station we wanted, Collioure, and we were supposed to get off at the next station and ride two stops back to Collioure. Thankfully, we packed the night before, which meant simply grabbing our bags and hopping off the train. All of this within the first five minutes of our day. That’s a wake-up no cup ‘o joe can ever imitate.

Luckily, the next train to Collioure came in 45 minutes, and we were exactly where we wanted to be at 7:00 a.m. Honestly, it worked out better than the original 5:30 a.m. arrival time, had they remembered our wake-up call.

It’s safe to assume their oversight was purely accidental. Although at 6:30 a.m., you could swear a pointy-nosed Frenchman was grinning somewhere, I honestly think it was an accident. Collioure isn’t a hot spot for tourists. The only people we passed on the train and at the train station were students riding to school.

The train station was closed, but a map outside led us straight to where we needed to be. Ahhh. Watching an old fishing town awaken is exactly what we were craving. A cappuccino to come down from the morning jolt led to a conversation with the café guy, who recommended a hotel for 40 euros per night. TJ stayed at the café while I ventured up the hill to secure us a room. The hotel is great, great, great, and the owners, a young family of three (the little boy looks just like a French Mason Sochor), are talkative and charismatic.

Getting what we need is a concoction of verbal communication and an unending game of charades. I wanted to ask the owner of the hotel if it rains often. I asked, “Il pleut beaucooup ici?” The owner and his wife looked at me, I pointed outside, and covered my head with the map. They laughed, and showed me the forecast in the newspaper: sun. He laughed and threw up his hands. Apparently, they don’t have 24-7 pinpoint weather coverage of a Storm Team like we do back home (yes, I’m still sore about that night they cut into The Office and 30 Rock a few weeks back – Lauren, I know you feel my pain).

After lunch, we took a long siesta, followed by a shower with TOWELS to dry off (no chamois for me, today). I finally feel like a real human being with a brain again. The comatose, drooling fool finally vanished. This city is just what we needed. The pace is S L O W. The businesses close for the majority of the midday. One thing concerns me, though. Everyone is pregnant, so I’m staying away from tap water. I guess if you had a family, this would be an amazing place to live. It’s clean, quiet, pretty, and full of artists (the clean type…not the gypsy-with-the-accordion type). The shop owners are playful, and after you decipher their deadpan faces, they crack up – one told TJ that it costs $1,000 to take a picture, held his stare for a few seconds, then lost it laughing.

I’m sitting at the same café I sat at this morning, and TJ is outside taking pictures. I’d be willing to move here for this café alone: coffee, food, alcohol, music, pool table, ancient castle 50 yards to the right, the bay 100 yards straight ahead, a group of men singing “Happy Birthday” in French, the Pink Panther theme song playing now – everything all tied together in one, although expensive, bundle. We’ve gotten good at cutting costs, which means we should be able to enjoy a few days here cheaper than most everywhere else so far.

Now that our bodies have recovered the initial travel gauntlet, we are planning a hike for tomorrow.

Au revior. Bon soir!

DAY 8: COLLIOURE

Today was high time to listen to our screaming clothes and give them the scrub-down they needed. TJ was starting to smell like El Vaquero, and I was getting a “glow.” Luckily, the Laundromat was just a few doors down, and everything we had fit into one washer. At 9.50 euros per wash, we would’ve jammed any amount of clothes into one load. To my surprise, the washers were brand-new. I have no idea why I thought they’d be the old hand-crank washers our great-great-grandparents used. Silly me.

We sat at the beach while our clothes washed, and TJ took more pictures of people in their not-so-finest moments. He’s becoming the reason you shouldn’t have the “what do I have to lose, I’m in Europe” mentality at the beach. His super-duper telescopic zoom can pick out the grains of sand on cheeks from 100 yards away.

I left him to his art and headed back up to put the clothes in the dryer. As I switched the clothes, I noticed something strange on my pants…and tee-shirts…and TJ’s tee shirts. Splotchy stuff. Discolored stuff. Somehow, our clothes changed colors in the washer. Dark blues turned purple. Light blues turned white. Greens turned brown. The box of detergent pictured a shirt “avant” and “après” – brown before, yellow after. I assumed it represented the dirt-fighting power of the detergent. Perhaps it’s actually some magic French detergent. My now tie-dye clothes have joined the ranks of the one-way-clothing club.

Lots of looking, walking, sitting, talking, more looking, etc. today. I can’t say it enough: Collioure is the best. If you’re planning a trip (Arthur and Sarah), honeymoon (Ryan and Sarah – different Sarah, not Arthur’s Sarah), or whatever…stop in Collioure. Stay at Hotel le Saint-Pierre. Drink whipped cream-topped cappuccino at Café Lola. Walk along the almost-deserted beach. Hike up to the windmill, and then venture on to the castle. The village is out of the way, which means you aren’t bumping elbows with tourists, but it’s so easy to find. The pace of life is slow, the people are all very friendly, and there’s not one so-so view anywhere you look.

I’m already sad about leaving tomorrow morning (Wednesday). I know our next stop, Barcelona, will be exciting, and I’m looking forward to experiencing another culture, but Collioure is that first stretch you take in the morning. You feel it from your fisted fingers to your curled-up toes. It makes you smile – silently. Just happy to be.

DAY 9: BARCELONA

The Portbou train station, between Collioure and Barcelona, bursts with color.

The color of over-ripe cherries sits atop the head of the Spanish café guard with the lazy eye that grazes over your left shoulder – perhaps on the lookout for vagabond travelers abusing her café to enjoy food purchased elsewhere. Everything about her is loud: her hair, her voice, and her actions. She moves about as if she is fighting weights tied to her arms and legs.

The color of vanilla sits atop the head of a petite woman, the café guard’s prisoner, who shrinks three inches every time she sees red. The other woman guards her, hangs over her shoulder, moves her out of the way…doing a lousy job at training her. She is a pinball in red’s machine: bouncing, spinning, falling, careening around red’s territory.

The color of mud sits on either side of a café table, smoking, coughing that unmistakable six-packs-a-day phlegmy cough, lusting for a taste of vanilla. Thick gold chains hang from their necks, leading south to smudgy, tattoed chests.

The color of orange fights to break out of the muted gray exterior of an adolescent boy with a mouth of train tracks, doing his best to fight the pre-pubescent jitters. Hovering between that line of adulthood and boyhood, he carries his backpack with a “jeesh” and “uhhhh,” looking from the corners of his eyes for an audience.

The color of bananas walks in a jumpsuit, halfway unpeeled, revealing a bird’s nest of brownish/whitish/yellowish chest hair. Perhaps, is he completely naked underneath that banana jumpsuit? Does he unpeel at the end of the day, from top to bottom, and step out of it, leaving his grizzly bear body exposed to the world?

The color of pink, reproduced six times in the form of sorority sisters whose “s’s” slice through the doors, whistles out into the fresh air of the station.

To my left is the color of blue – policemen crossing the train tracks, climbing the knee-high wall where a sign is posted, prohibiting that act.

The mountains surround me, like an empty soup bowl placed in a kitchen sink. As I look up, the only sky I can see is in front of me, just over the top of a train decorated with graffiti, just under the translucent roof of the station. I look forward to seeing these colors in yet another train station, another city, another country…how they change, how they disappear, and how they combine.

———-

An exchange on the train from Collioure to Barcelona:

A married couple, shrunken inside skin that was once smooth, tight, and spotless, sits in the train as it bumps and bounces along the seaside tracks. She reaches insider her fashionable purse and presents two pieces of candy: one for him, one for her. I can see grins in their eyes…the grins you can see in the eyes of children before their mouths have the opportunity to catch up with what their brains are thinking. The couple manipulates the wrappers with fingers that are rough and shiny all at once. He spies on her method, then returns to his own task. She spies on his method, then returns to hers. They flip the wrappers horizontally, then vertically. He raises the wrapper to his mouth, attempting to rip open the barrier to the sweetness awaiting him. Defeated, he hands his piece of candy to the lanky young man wearing headphones on top and flip-flops on bottom, sitting across from him. He offers up his sweetness, looking for help from the able-bodied hands of youth.

“Gracias.”

—————–

We made it to Barcelona! Good weather, good food, and good friends. Today we met up with our friend, Egan, and his girlfriend, Dasha, who are living in Barcelona. We sipped beer on a rooftop café, Egan gave us a quick tour of the immediate area…although everything is covered in mesh and scaffolding (under construction), and then we all had dinner at a little restaurant just off La Ramblas. The baguettes, cheese, and tomatoes that have been our diet the past few days were replaced with homemade paellas…ah, just the warm, hearty meal we needed! The paellas, mixtures of rice, veggies, and seafood, were served in huge iron skillets. Yum, yum, yum.

Tomorrow, we’ll do some sightseeing and spend some more time with Egan and Dasha. We are so happy to see them and get to experience a little of their world.

DAY 10: BARCELONA

We toured sunny Barcelona today with our very own private tour guide and translator, Egan. He showed us all of Gaudi Barcelona: Gaudi buildings, Gaudi fountains, a Gaudi park. It was all so unique – like Alice in Wonderland times ten. Egan took us to a point in the park where we could look out over the city to the sea. It was quite a hike to get there, approximately 300 meters of stairs (and a couple short escalators), but it was well worth the view and the conversation that sparked from looking out over a city and culture that was relatively new to all of us.

That evening we met up for patatas bravas (little fried potatoes covered in a garlicky mayo sauce – Egan, you’ll have to correct my spelling here), some unique sandwiches, and mushrooms stuffed with ham. We ate, and ate, and ate, caught the very last train back to our hotel, and crashed hard.

DAY 11: BARCELONA

The last two weeks pushed us out of our picket-fenced predictability with a little swat on the bee-hinds into a world that constantly demands us to think, interpret, and decipher. When you think about it, there’s very little about our everyday lives that require us to really stop and piece together a puzzle – a puzzle of a new transit system, a puzzle of a new language, or even a puzzle of how to flush the toilet in your hotel (the one in this hotel has a rope hanging from a hole in the ceiling).

Most of our days at home are surrounded by predictability – in all of the things I mentioned above, but also predictability in the people we encounter. Being the new kids in a new, different town every single day, to predict the town and people is like shuffling together Uno, Old Maid, and Uchre decks and attempting to predict which card you will draw.

Seeing Egan and Dasha made us realize just how much a friendly face means. They showed us a great time in Barcelona. We had a wonderful time laughing and hanging out. Some fresh conversation and friendly faces were just what we needed. We’ll miss you two!

As we left Barcelona on our night train to Strasbourg, we re-entered that world of unpredictability. The night train to Strasbourg slept six to a room, three on each side, and we were on the top two bunks. Sleeping in a 6-person night train couchette is the epitome of unpredictability, if you were wondering. The best way to simulate this back in the U.S., where these kinds of trains and situations are unheard of, would be to walk down the street and grab the first five people you see – then, spend the night with them in a room the size of a closet. It’s a strange dynamic, but one I’m so happy that I experienced.

Our first roommate to enter was a girl from Toronto with a Canadian flag on her backpack (I’m still trying to figure out exactly how I feel about the flag thing…that’s a later post). Her family immigrated from Russia to Toronto when she was sixteen, and she entered high school knowing no English – talk about being the new kid in town! She was studying Spanish in Barcelona for the semester.

Our next roommate popped in about four stops later – he was from France – and he was so much fun to talk to. We talked about differences (and similarities) in education, aspirations, jobs, vacations, and hobbies. We clarified the meanings of the few cuss words we knew. We practiced our r’s – he helped me with the hocker-sounding French r, while I helped him with the English-sounding r. At one point, he asked me to say the word street. I said “street” in my best French impression…putting the hocker emphasis on the r. He laughed…he meant for me to say the French word for street (rue). We told him we were heading to Strasbourg, and he recommended for us to one stop before that, in Colmar, for a relaxing day. He even checked the arrival times with the conductor for us. Thanks, Remi!

Next to enter was a thin French scientist. He boarded with a group of fifteen children, which created a traffic-jam outside our door as the children pushed through the skinny hallway trying to locate their rooms. We laid on our top bunks, laughing, as the kids bumped off one another, shouting the numbers for their bunks in French. At one point, a group of five students overflowed into our room as someone in the hallway tried to fix the jam.

Last to enter was a large French man who spoke no English and stepped into the bathroom every 30 minutes or so to smoke (which is not legal on the trains, by the way).

The young French man, Remi, worked as the translator between all of us.

The train ride with this crew ended up being one of the best experiences so far. We laid on our bunks, Remi sat on the ladder, and we all talked about just about everything. I asked Remi if the French really do hate Americans, and I told him how nice all of the French people have been to us. He corrected me by pointing out that the French people don’t like George W. Bush, and he followed up by saying, “but we are all getting along right here, so it doesn’t matter.”

I like Remi’s view, and it’s a realization that’s growing clearer every day of this trip. Regardless of what language we speak or what kinds of toilets we flush, we’re all really similar in the end. Sometimes it takes stepping outside that picket fence to experience the people you think really are different – only to find out they’re just like you in most ways.

DAY 12: COLMAR

We made it to Colmar, a recommendation from our friend from the train, Remi.

Although somewhat less beautiful than other towns, Colmar has its own charm. The architecture is a mix of those old German buildings with the sagging, cantilevered second floors and stark 80s-esque buildings. Looking down the street, you can imagine Hans Heingledorfen at one end and Streubel Streubelgeiken at the other: they begin building their houses from their respective ends of the street inward, and when their buildings meet in the middle they simply attach the roofs in an awkward way. Then, in 1980, Pierre Frenchy came along and dropped a few modern buildings here and there. I couldn’t quite wrap my mind or eyes around it too well.

However, you shouldn’t let my animosity for Colmar influence you too much. I was quickly jaded by the rudeness we encountered inside the grocery from a few workers, and a cat in an antique store bit me (little f-er didn’t break the skin, though). So, I had a difficult time enjoying the town, but TJ liked it.

Not much else to say about Colmar. Had we seen it first, it might have gotten more than an “eeeh” rating from me…but Collioure set the bar pretty high. We’re staying in a hotel – Hotel Primo – for 27 euros per night…with a condom dispenser on the lobby wall, by the way. There are four museums here, one of which is a doll and train museum. The park is pretty. Everything closes at 9. Everything is expensive.

Tomorrow we leave.

DAY 13: BADEN-BADEN

We finally made it to Baden-Baden, and after a ho-hum day in Colmar, I was itching to hatch from my quadruple-layered clothing and enjoy the town’s natural mineral spa.

The mineral spa is called Friedrichsbad, and it was the sole reason for our visit to Baden-Baden, in Germany’s Black Forest area. The spa is a natural Roman-Irish bathhouse, built sometime in the late 1800s. And it’s a nude spa. I have to admit, I adore TJ even more for doing this with me. He never so much as blinked when I mentioned coming here.

Honestly, I felt a little nervous right before walking through the door – like the moments right before you climb on stage for your piano recital. The only difference is that you are naked…and you don’t speak the language.

When I entered the women’s side (the women’s and men’s sides were separate), it was empty. There was a wall of green doors to the left, so I went through one…to find another door, which led to a wall of lockers. A woman was getting dressed there, so I asked her what to do. She told me to insert my paper card in the locker, which would then release the key, which I was to put on my wrist, along with the plastic massage “pass.”

- – Is this sounding a little fantasy video game-ish? – -

She told me to undress, walk down the corridor, and wait for the attendant. I kept repeating “nude?” to make sure I wasn’t going to walk into a clothed-only area by accident. So, I stripped and waited for the attendant…nude. Well, I had my glasses on…and my wristband with my locker key on it. I understand, wearing glasses inside the nude spa is akin to wearing your trouser socks while having sex…but if I didn’t have my glasses, I wouldn’t be able to read the signs, which told me how long to stay at each stage. It could’ve been disastrous, otherwise.

The attendant quickly reviewed the 16-stage process with me, which is outlined below:

1. Shower. The showers were in a large, tiled room, operated by huge metal levers. I couldn’t figure out how to work it, so I took a cold one, which felt like a cold hand shoved its way down my throat and grabbed my lungs in its fist.
2. Warm-air bath, 54 degrees Celsius. This is where I found out that I forgot my flip-flops, which meant going back out to the shower area, grabbing my flip flops, walking back through the showers, and walking back into the heated room. This stage was nice. You just lie there on a wooden bench to air-dry.
3. Hot-air bath, 68 degrees Celsius. This was intense. I sat in a chair instead of lying down. The only other woman in the room was lying on a table, spread-eagle.
4. Shower. Thank God I saw someone else working this contraption, so I was able to take a warm shower this time.
5. Soap and brush massage. You climb on the table, and a woman scrubs you down with a brush. This was intense, too, but nice. Front side first, flip, then the back side. The massage ends with a wet smack on the butt – your indication to move on to stage 6.
6. Shower. This removes the massage suds.
7. Thermal steam bath, 45 degrees Celsius. This room was just like the steam rooms you see in history books. There was a three-tiered tile pyramid (like the winner’s block at the Olympics), where you could lie down and relax. Funny, I won’t walk barefoot on any hotel bathroom floor, but I laid down completely naked on a steam room bench where other hoo-hoos probably sat and sweated. Ick.
8. Thermal steam bath 2, 48 degrees Celsius. I never found this one, but TJ said the men’s side had one.
9. Thermal full bath, 36 degrees Celsius. This was one of the mixed-sex rooms. You just float around in a small pool for 15 minutes.
10. Thermal whirlpool bath, 34 degrees Celsius. This was a unique bath, which was only about two feet deep. The water was extra bubbly and tickled my skin. When I arrived, there was a couple canoodling in the corner. They crawled over to me, and honestly, I was scared they were going to ask me to join in. Luckily, they were just wondering how many stages there were to the entire process. Whew.
11. Thermal kinotherapeutic bath, 28 degrees Celsius. Good lord, it was cold! I doggie-paddled around to stay warm, but all I could focus on were the stage 12 showers across the room. Eight minutes of a steamy shower was all I could think about.
12. Shower. This was a cruel joke. The shower was set on ice-cold – no hot water possible. I let it run for a while, thinking it would get hotter. Realizing defeat, I only dunked my head under it. The immersion bath would be next…a huge marble bathtub to warm up in!
13. Cold-water bath (immersion), 18 degrees Celsius. This was insane. I went in & ran back out immediately. It was so cold that it literally hurt.
14. Drying off with warm towels. A girl wrapped me in a heated towel, and I dried off.
15. Moisturizing with lotion. This part of the room was full-mirrored, so as not to miss one square inch of moisturizable skin.
16. Resting area/solarium. Amen, this was amazing. I entered a circular room with about fifty beds. The attendant pulled the sheets back for me, I climbed in, and she wrapped me into a cocoon. I fell asleep in here for an hour.

TJ and I met afterward, and he asked if I wanted to go again…like getting off the roller coaster and running around to get in line right away for a second ride. It was well worth the 29 euros per person for 4 hours. We felt relaxed, rejuvenated, and it definitely gave us something new to talk about.

I know, you’re wondering, “So what was it like being around so many naked people?” We quickly got used to being naked and seeing others naked. There were some head-turners (good and bad), but overall it was just water-wrinkled boobies and thingies bouncing around.

DAY 14: AMSTERDAM

From Baden-Baden, we took a night train to Amsterdam. This time, we had the whole six-person bunk all to ourselves. I suppose not that many people are heading to Amsterdam at 11:30 on a Sunday night.

When we arrived, we secured ourselves a hotel at the train station, got a coffee, then headed out to find the hotel. It was a quick tram-ride (cable car-ride) away. Let’s see…where could the hotel be…wait…I think that’s it, behind the mesh and scaffolding…

(If you’re curious about how to pinch pennies on room and board, go with the hotel that is in the middle of remodeling. Our room cost 1/3 of all the others in town, and it’s pretty nice on the inside…windows and towels.)

After a two-hour nap to recharge, we headed out to the center of town. I was surprised – Amsterdam is so beautiful and CLEAN! There are bicycles everywhere, and they even have special paths for the bikes along the roads.

Everything here is SO expensive, though – especially the food. We had dinner, walked around in the rain (it’s 54 degrees here and rainy), got some coffee, got some beer, perused the ladies in the windows, and attended a real, live sex show. Collectively, we paid 75 euros for 1.5 hours of entertainment and four drink tickets. Was it worth it? Well, we sure as heck wouldn’t have another opportunity to see a sex show with a round, rotating bed, so, yes, it was worth it. Although, I’ve heard about some pretty wild shows…this one wasn’t too crazy, though. One of the girls did a “solo” performance on stage, and as she danced, you could actually see her lips counting her dance steps…”one, two, three, four…”

Hey, you’ve gotta give her credit for trying, though.

Wait, no you don’t.

DAY 15: AMSTERDAM

Not too much to report for today. It was even colder than yesterday (we both invested in heavy hooded sweatshirts), so we spent most of the day sipping coffee and writing/updating the blog and flickr pages until the coffee shop manager gave us an ultimatum: buy something or leave. TJ tried to buy a milkshake, but they were “out” of ice cream.

It was an early night for us, and since we blew most of our money on yesterday’s festivities, we tried to scrimp today. We watched the final episode of The Office on our iPods in our very own king-sized bed, fell asleep early, and recharged.

Where to next? Aero Island in Denmark!

DAY 16: AMSTERDAM

Zzzztttt. Brrrrtttt…shhhhhhh. Vrrrrrrrrrrrkkklelele. Bumbumbumbum. Kssssht -

There’s just no alarm clock like the one of a grinder working away at the brick outside your hotel room window. The silhouetted construction legs on the other side of our gauzy, white curtained windows marched back and forth along the scaffolding paced between our second-floor windows and the third-floor windows above us – waists, legs, and steel-toed boots were all we could see.

It was time to get moving – but not without a Thanksgiving-sized continental breakfast in the dining room first. Taking full advantage of this perk, and making up for the breakfast we missed yesterday morning, we not only ate, but we also filled Ziplock baggies with granola, bread, fruit, and meat when the waitress wasn’t looking. Although, a sharp-nosed British family across the dining room didn’t miss it and shot arrows of disapproval my way in the form of dirty looks and blatant staring.

After breakfast, we decided upon a walking tour of the lesser-visited part of Amsterdam. A map purchased at the tourist center guided us through what is known as the old Jewish district part of the city. Luck was on our side today: the sun was shining and our feet were rested and ready for the hike. Although the tour booklet provided loads of information on twenty-plus brick, remodeled, or crumbling historical sites along the way, we realized that primitive, open-mouthed gawking was the best form of entertainment.

The deeper into the district we traveled, the more we saw of real life in Amsterdam – a mother and two daughters riding their bikes with violins in black cases strapped to their backs, overweight, bored dogs sunning themselves in the storefront-like windows of homes, people sleeping in the grass along a canal, cafes assembling their mazes of sidewalk seating, retail store owners snacking on sandwiches in chairs just outside their shops, waiters leaning on banisters, waiting for an early dinner crowd…

We stopped by a park for a snack, and the locals took to us immediately. Perhaps we should be more giving with our hijacked goodies. The way this duck was begging (it even stepped on my foot to get closer to TJ’s sandwich), we almost felt like we were at home again, eating dinner while Maizey gives us that, “I’ll die if I don’t have just one bite of that chicken” look.

This was the Amsterdam that took me by surprise. Before visiting, I envisioned Amsterdam to be slathered in the greasy twenty-four hour neon lights of Las Vegas. “Wrong” doesn’t begin to describe my prejudice.

While Las Vegas is a raging, jobless alcoholic whose home is littered with beer cans and whose couch is scored with cigarette burns, Amsterdam is a woman with a secure job and a yoga habit, who keeps one “junk” drawer in the laundry room at the back of her tidy home.

Amsterdam is beautiful, and the pace of life is slow. Bicycles, pedestrians, cable cars, cars, and scooters share the streets that follow along quiet canals lined with dinghies and houseboats. This was not the Amsterdam I expected, but it is absolutely the Amsterdam I’ll remember.

DAY 17: AERO ISLAND

It seems that Europeans have unique ways of waking up their visitors. So far, we have woken to the following things:

1. A train conductor apologizing in French for missing our stop in Collioure, France.
2. Saws grinding away at bricks outside our window in Amsterdam.
3. And, as of this morning at 2:30, the feeling of our bodies bouncing and slamming against the walls next to our train bunks.

I’m still not sure what happened, supposedly someone didn’t “merry” two of the train cars together correctly, but the force with which our bodies hit the walls made us think we hit another train head-on. It’s strange, but after discussing the incident, TJ and I realized just how many catastrophic “what-ifs” went through our minds at that moment. Here are a few:

1. We hit a cow.
2. The train had been hijacked, and the hijackers were coming to execute us.
3. The driver saw a woman who was tied western-movie-style, lying on the tracks, and hit the brakes.
4. The train broke down, and we would have to carry our luggage through a dense forest to the nearest town.

We were in a six-person bunk, three groups of parties of two, (all three groups of us spoke different languages, which made the initial settling-in process as choreographed as a children’s jazz recital) and I looked down from my perch on top to see if anyone had fallen out of their bunks. Everyone was okay…the old Asian man in the middle bunk snored through the whole thing.)

The next morning, I learned from the overweight vegetarian British geologist/cat breeder who we met in the train station the night before, that the “marrying” process went awry. That evening, she also schooled me on the breeds of cats, the editing processes for scientific British journals, the role of The Netherlands in World War 2, the environmental footprints of specific animals, and the occurrence of dyslexia in her family. Thank god the pothead Nevadian-turned-Australian expert on the lucrative camel-trading business came along to battle out history with her.

Did those descriptions sound strange? Imagine being there. That, my friend, was strange. It was one of those situations where you sit back and think, “Is this really happening? Am I on camera?”

After this train (and 30 more minutes of cat talk from the geologist – who has eleven indoor cats, by the way), we took another train to another city. Then we took a bus to yet another city. Then we walked through town to the harbor. Then we took a ferry to Aero Island in Denmark – our destination.

Why there? Well, Rick Steves said to go, that’s why. The island is tiny – there are two restaurants, one ice cream parlor (the size of a cupboard), a few antique stores, and a tourist center. That’s it. Oh, and cows. And sheep.

The woman working at the tourist center told us about a campground just outside “town.” I’m saying “town,” because you can’t really consider this adorable cluster of buildings a town…it’s tiny. We walked to the campground…camping in Denmark! We got our very own little log cabin with one window and a porch hidden in the woods.

Our first impulse was to sleep. So we slept with the door wide open for two whole hours with nothing surrounding us but trees, grass, and birds – lots of chirpy birds with tweet rhythms I’ve never heard before. The buzzing of a nearby lawnmower topped our mid-afternoon snooze…it felt like we were kids again, enjoying a lazy afternoon during summer break while Dad mowed the lawn.

Later, we walked into “town” and nosed around a bit. There are a few main streets, all cobblestone pathways lined with cape-cod style houses the colors of those little square candies that dissolve so quickly in your mouth – yellow, red, blue, and green dusted with a fine white powder.

Tomorrow bicycle trip through the island!

DAY 18: AERO ISLAND

My parents love to tell the story of my difficulty taking those first steps toward childhood independence: learning to ride a two-wheeled bike. I think they describe the experience as, “It was like she was magnetized to everything – the cars, the trees, the wooden posts of the laundry line…” This was supposedly the first time I cussed, too. Hey, it’s a difficult skill to acquire.

To this day, I’m not a biking enthusiast, and I still cuss when I do it. I want to like it, but my brain and body refuse to coordinate it all. The gracefulness and coordination I exhibit walking on two feet isn’t much different from that I show riding on two wheels. When I push off to start pedaling, the first few turns of the wheels are combined with the squishing, eeeking sound of rubber as I squiggle the handlebars back and forth in a frenzy, fighting to stay balanced, while my forehead glistens in a thin layer of sweat.

This morning, TJ appeared outside our cabin with two pink and white rented bikes. Today was our Rick Steves bike tour of Aero Island. I was physically sick, worrying about the myriad catastrophic possibilities of me on a bicycle in a foreign country – an island, nonetheless.

TJ said, “Just practice here in the grass before we get on the road.” Little did he know that my bike was stuck in third gear – that, coupled with the fact that I was practicing in grass, made it more difficult than helpful. On the road, the few bicycling skills I acquired through childhood on my red glittered bike with the banana seat eventually came back to me.

We headed out of town, following the hand-drawn Rick Steves bike tour map ripped from our book. The lined roads became unlined roads, which then became patches of dirt and gravel here and there. These roads, the main roads for the island’s handful of inhabitants, are just wide enough for two bikes to coast along side-by-side.

As the island took us in and we disappeared and reappeared here and there in its soft hills, I became more comfortable on the bike. The weather couldn’t have been more perfect: sunny, warm, and just enough breeze to keep us cool. We stopped at a small inlet to have lunch and play along the skinny dock where a few dinghies clonked about the clear water.

The best description for the island is organic isolation. You feel as if you are inside a perfectly-planned botanical garden, and you hold the only key to it. Life goes on around you, unmoved by the squishing rubber of your bicycle tires: cows chew their cud in slow-motion, a horse stretches over the fence to you for a snack, a seagull flies overhead with a plump worm…Even the weeds seem like they were placed here and there with the care and forethought of a botanist. You ride and ride, never passing one person. “Where am I” doesn’t matter – you’re in the valley between the cows in the pasture to your left and the salty water over the other side of the ridge to your right, on a road that names the upcoming town composed of five or six houses clustered within a two-mile stretch.

Silence abounds – not the lonely silence of a soundproof room, but the natural silence of an environment without people or machines: frogs babbling in a pond, cowbells clonging, billions and billions of birds chirping, the water lapping against a gentle shore. The land is slow: it slowly appears and slowly disappears from the water so softly that you can imagine the land and the sea whispering apologies for bumping into one another. There are no waves, no foamy water blasting against a cliff, and no jagged shorelines. The land is smooth, and it’s neither in a hurry to climb or a hurry to descend.

To call the island beautiful is descriptive shorthand. To capture its beauty would require volumes for the colors alone.

Riding a bike scary? What? Am I even riding a bike?

DAY 19: AERO ISLAND

Today we cleaned our cabin and said goodbye to Aero Island, its tranquility, its serenity, and its pollen (I suffered the worst case of what the campground manager called høfeber – hay fever – in my life).

Getting to these small towns requires train, bus, and ferry transfers, which means getting out of the small towns takes an equal amount of effort. Today, we wanted to make it to Copenhagen, but first we had to hike to the port, take the ferry back to the mainland, then take the bus to the Svenborg Vest train station, then take that train to Odense, and finally hop on a train to Copenhagen. One long day of travel.

The train from Odense to Copenhagen was surprisingly packed with men in red jerseys drinking lots and lots and lots of beer, and when we arrived in Copenhagen, the town pulsed with swarms of yellow and red bantering back and forth.

“Ha, ha,” we said, “it almost looks like there’s a big game in town.”

We walked through aluminum tunnels of bicycles squeezed together along the streets to the tourist information center to book a room…but everything was booked – hotels, hostels, everything. Looks like that big game was a soccer playoff something or other between Sweden and Denmark – an OSU vs. Michigan football game times ten.

So, what to do, what to do, when the city is booked? Take a night train somewhere else! Our initial plan was one night in Copenhagen and then a night train to Coblenz, Germany. Luckily, we were able to move our reservation up one night and get the heck outta’ Copenhagen before the fans feasted upon our innocent little souls –

Oh, the fans. Try to imagine it like this: a psychiatric ward opens its doors, and the first place the hoard of patients visit is the costume shop. Cackling, they smear paint on one another, try on wigs, tie flags cape-like around their necks, and stretch tights over their burly legs. Before the hoard moves on to the stadium, it stops for a beer every two or three minutes. Apparently, the train station was the end of the sixteen-hour beer gauntlet, and the patients were drunk and thriving to be free, spilling out the station’s doors onto the streets.

And I sat at a little café table outside a bar behind the train station, huddling over my laptop.

Tell me, what would you do if you saw a geek huddling over a laptop outside the Varsity Club on Lane Avenue right before the OSU vs. Michigan game?

a. Ask her how much she would take for her laptop.
b. Sit your bottle of beer on her table, and say “thank you” as if she were the sidewalk attendant.
c. Stumble out of the bar smoking your cigarette, hack up a snotwad, and spit it out next to her feet.
d. All of the above.

The correct answer is d, all of the above. Watching the fans was a riot, and we were tempted to stay in town just to take it all in, but we needed a bed and the next train left in one hour. We chose the bed over the show.

On to Coblenz, Germany!

DAY 20: ALKEN

Some of the best days of our trip have sprouted from an unexpected change in plans – or, better yet, from having no plans at all.

Similar to yesterday, necessity won the “what do we do today” game of European roulette. Instead of spending a few days in Coblenz, using it as our home base to visit other towns along the Mosel River, we opted to stay in a town farther down the Mosel River, Alken, based upon a recommendation from someone in Coblenz.

Ding, ding, ding! We have a winner! Alken, it is!

At 9 a.m., we headed from the train station in Coblenz to the port where we could catch the ferry to Alken. The ferry ride on the Mosel River was beautiful, and we were able to see the spattering of towns nestled inside the gentle curves of the river and the vineyards that stretched out and up the terraced mountains. River travel is slow, slow, slow, but we weren’t in a hurry. It was Sunday, and we were headed to an itty-bitty town that was most likely closed. No hurries here.

The river’s locks maintained the snail’s pace (and kept us high on ferry and barge exhaust fumes). We passed a lot of barges (I think that’s what you call those long, skinny boats that you operate from the back), and the families on board waved at us. Some of the barges even had little fenced-in playgrounds for the children – I had no idea people actually used them as houses. Really neat.

Within three hours, we arrived in Alken, and as we guessed, everything was closed. I say everything, but it really only includes one grocery store and a few restaurants. We started hiking up one of the streets, looking for a place to stay, when we ran into a woman walking a dog – who, by the way, had a room available. She and her adorable four-legged friend, Lucky, took us to our room with our very own bathroom (tonight is the first night we will shower without flip-flops) and a terrace, to boot! The free breakfast sealed the deal.

As our ritual goes, we slept for the first three hours here, then we headed out for our first “home-cooked” meal since Barcelona’s paella. Since we’re in such a small town, nothing is printed in English. We tried to decipher the menu…”Hmmm…wurst probably means bratwurst…I think ananas means bananas (it means pineapple, by the way)…” Oh, and when people say they speak “very little” English here, they mean it – unlike the Italians, Germans, and Dutch, who say they speak very little, but speak in paragraphs.

Surprises are always good as long as they’re edible, warm, and tasty – and these meals were all of the above. We predicted something like bratwurst with cheese and potatoes…we got toast covered in ham, eggs, cheese, and pineapple. Yum!

And what do you do after a big, hearty German meal? Take a hike, of course! Well, we didn’t know it would be a hike at first, but a road led us to a path in the woods, which led us up, up, up…to a castle! What a view of the town you get from its castle up in the woods! The path to get there was as gut-wrenching as the cliffside roads in Positano…only without the guardrails. The path was perhaps 1-2 feet wide with a cliff going up to your right and a cliff diving down to your left.

We took the paved road back down to town and nosed around a bit more. Nosing has been our best enjoyment so far, and it kept its reputation this evening when we nosed into a garage adorned with wine bottles here and there. TJ triggered a motion sensor, and a stout German man in his seventies came out.

“Do you speak Enlgish?”

“Nine.” (I think this is German for no.)

We’re getting comfortable with the 100% language barrier – we’re even humored by it. People will continue to speak to you in their native language, knowing full-well you don’t understand them, and vice versa.

He grabbed two bottles of wine from his makeshift display shelf, grabbed two small glasses, and sat everything on a wooden barrel in the middle of the room. He poured one glass each of two different kinds of wine, and he handed them to us for a taste. He then went inside his kitchen (just off the garage) and returned with another bottle for yet another taste (still speaking German). TJ bought one bottle for three euros, and then he gave us the international “you wanna come see” gesture: forming glasses with his thumbs and index fingers, putting them over his eyes, and pointing to a cellar.

The language barrier at this point became a nuisance…there were so many questions I wanted to ask, but couldn’t! Inside this cellar, the basement to his ancient but immaculate home, were wooden wine barrels on their sides the size of small hot tubs. Wooden crates of bottles lined aisle ways, and he switched on cobwebbed light bulbs for us, grinning.

He held up a bottle of wine, and pointed to the year on its label, 2006. He then spoke some more German, and pointed to us. Somehow we figured out that he wanted to know what year we were born. I said 1980, and he shook his head, confused. He grabbed a piece of rectangular chalk from a shelf nearby, wrote the number 19 on a wooden crate, and handed me the chalk. I wrote 80, and he motioned for us to follow him into a colder part of the cellar in the back with bottles lining the walls from floor to ceiling. For a few minutes he searched for a 1979 or 1980 bottle, but finally gave up when he couldn’t find one.

As TJ and I left, we shook his hand, said something to the effect of gooden-tag, and headed on our way as he walked us to the end of the cobblestone street.

So, there you have it – the effect of giving yourself up completely to chance. It was a good, good day.

DAY 21: ALKEN

I think of things, usually as we’re hiking, that I probably should have mentioned on my posts – things that would clarify our intentions, reasons, etc.

Were you wondering why we wanted to visit the Mosel River in Germany? Well, our trusty tour guide, Rick Steves, said that his favorite castle in all of Germany was the Berg Eltz, located in a town called Moselkern, just along the Mosel River.

Thus, we are here, and today was our castle tour.

After an enormous breakfast on a table with every kind of china known to man (I even had a miniature ceramic shot glass for my coffee’s milk – and, yes, we stuffed our pockets with the extra rolls, jam, and butter), we headed to the next town on foot to catch the train to Moselkern. Why not stay right in Moselkern, you ask? Because that would be too easy.

The hike up to the castle took about an hour in all. The path was narrow and muddy in some spots, but so gradual that you didn’t realize you were at the top of a mountain until you looked over the edge of a cliff and couldn’t see the river at the bottom.

Burg Eltz sits atop a mountain, surrounded by other, bigger mountains. The castle’s size surprised me in two ways. First, the outside is so tall (8 stories total), that it hurts your neck to look all the way up at it. Second, the rooms inside are small – nothing like the cavernous rooms I’d expected.

We took our first guided tour (in German, of course) and read along from the English information sheets. The castle has been in the Eltz family for over 800 years, and it’s still privately owned today. That was one piece of information I learned, as TJ “secretly” took forbidden photos under the watchful eye of an English-speaking German tourist nerd who scolded us for breaking the rules. Supposedly, they discourage photography inside the castle, because you could sell the photos. I laughed at him, and TJ continued to take photos. Outside, I saw him tattling to the tour guide. Oh boo-hoo.

In all, we walked for seven straight hours today. So, if some of you are wondering why we’re so tired all of the time, that’s reason one. Reason two would be the lack of sleep you get on a train. Reason three would be a lack of big, hearty meals. Lots of output minus little input means fatigue.

Tomorrow, we’re heading back to a larger city to cure our internet withdraw (one negative to sticking to the small towns is that no one has internet access), then on to Gimmelwald, Switzerland (or, at least, that’s the plan for now). Thanks for your patience as we hop from cafe to cafe trying to find an internet connection. Stay tuned!

DAY 22: INTERLAKEN

Boring day today. We bounced along in a train for almost ten hours. The countryside was beautiful, but I really don’t have much to report, otherwise. So, instead of romanticizing the rivers or illustrating an exciting day, I’ll tell you about the not-so-adventurous things that happened:

We trimmed our nails while waiting for the inter-city train back to Coblenz.

We got money at an ATM.

We finally ate a bratwurst while waiting for our connecting train in Coblenz.

Also while in Coblenz, we hopped in and out of cafes in search of wireless internet. I finally updated this beast and my flickr page for the price of 1 euro 80.

My hair is growing into a strange-looking bowl cut.

TJ is wearing the blue t-shirt that changed colors in the French laundry what seems like months ago.

We ate our contraband rolls and jelly from breakfast on the train to Interlaken as supper (along with a cucumber, tomatoes, and chocolate).

We made it to Interlaken, Switzerland, where we will stay tonight and head out tomorrow morning (Wednesday) for Gimmelwald in the Alps.

DAY 23: GIMMELWALD

Today’s post is all about relativity. We interpret the world around us based upon how it compares to what we already know. The extremes we experience set the bars, high and low, for what we consider “extreme.” As we experience new extremes, those bars shift based upon our new understandings.

For example, think of your perception of that green, paper wonder: money. In college, an “expensive” meal might set you back ten dollars. Thus, you describe things as expensive based upon that amount. One day you buy a house – is there any other experience that raises that bar so quickly? Now, “expensive” is upwards of $1,000.

Until last night, my ideas of “bad service” and “downright nasty accommodations” were fairly low, but Balmer’s Hostel in Interlaken managed to lower them even more. Our room had no ventilation, a skylight over our bed gave the guests above us an interesting view, the bathrooms had no toilet paper, and the teenage staff didn’t seem to know which way was up. Hopefully, you’re not the next person who asks me for a recommendation on a good place to stay – my standards are extremely low right now. Running water and toilet paper nestles a hotel safely inside my “good” zone.

Similarly, my idea of “big” evolved today. As we took the train, then a bus, then a cable car to Gimmelwald high in the Alps, my standards of “big” quickly changed. In a previous post, I called walking through some German hills “hiking” in the “mountains,” and based upon my frame of reference to that point those words were correct.

Until today.

Those German “mountains” and the “hiking” we did now look like a quick game of putt-putt at Magic Mountain Fun Center.

To describe the mountains here – well, there just are no single words for the mountains or for the feeling it gives you to stand there while your brain grinds and clicks, trying to make sense of it all.

Confusing is the best description I can think of at the moment.

As you stand in Gimmelwald, your brain is reorganizing and re-categorizing everything it has experienced up to that point. What was once “big” is now small. What was once “breathtaking” is now decent. What you once knew of as “your place in the world” is now…well, my brain is still whirring and grinding, trying to figure that one out. The Alps put me in my place, so to speak; although my brain is trying to set the limits of what “that place” means. I keep asking myself, “Am I smaller, or is the world outside much, much bigger?

DAY 24: GIMMELWALD

Gimmelwald is a 1,000 year-old town, and at the top sits Walter Mittler’s Hotel Mittaghorn, built in 1909. The docile dairy cows in their stout-nosed suits of golden-brown outnumber the native inhabitants – 2:1 is a safe estimate. The town sits just below cloud-level, and from our loft window we can see waterfalls cutting down the face of the snow-capped mountains across the valley. The only sounds you hear are cowbells, distant waterfalls, random avalanches, and, sparingly, the neighbor’s roto-tiller, which he somehow fashioned into a tractor.

After breakfast, we stepped outside to check out the sky with the hotel manager, Tim, as a parade of cows walked past the front door, bookended by a farmer and his wife holding long, wooden poles.

Tim is a British paraglider who is the best example of someone who seems simply happy. He feels more like an instant friend than someone who we should ask for coffee in the morning, as he serves us toast in sweatpants, a tee-shirt, and Birkenstocks. He lives here during part of the year to help Walter run the hotel, and he is a walking textbook on good trails and hiking advice. Looking at the sky, he predicted rain and supplied us with giant trash bags – just in case.

We set out for a hike that zigzagged us 700 meters up into the mountains (a good four-hour hike one-way, when you account for picture-taking time). The first half hour was intense, but we eventually developed a rhythm and it became meditative…in an exhausting/thrilling way.

There’s an uninhibited freedom here. You’re free to set out in any direction you please in what seems like the most beautiful and dangerous place in the world. Some of the trails lead you through cow pastures (with cows), others lead you through snow drifts (walking through snow while sweating in a tank-top was a new feeling), and others yet lead you behind waterfalls or along cliff faces. There are no “park rangers” or “refreshment stations.” It’s just you, the mountain, and any other hikers you pass (in nine hours of hiking, we passed no more than ten people).

The views are dizzying…stop to take a look up, and an invisible hand pushes you backward. Stop to take a look down, and yet another invisible hand reaches down inside you, grabs your guts, and squeezes them.

On our way back to the hotel, as Tim predicted, the rain came hard and fast. Frantically, we poked head and arm holes in our garbage bag ponchos and kept keepin’ on…for about thirty minutes, all uphill.

Back at the hotel, we took our showers (1 franc for 5 minutes of hot water) before dinner.

Dinner is a big deal at Hotel Mittaghorn. In the morning, on the black chalkboard in the hallway, you mark a plus or minus beside your name to indicate to Walter if you want or don’t want dinner that evening. Dinner rotates every other night: spaghetti one night, chicken the next night.

I’ve neglected to tell you about the owner for which the hotel is named: Walter. Walter is a stout, bald man who waddles side-to-side when he walks. His age? 80, 90, or 100, possibly. He cooks the meals, cleans the tables, and runs the bar, which is open between breakfast and dinner. Walter is adorable – a guy you just want to hug.

Part of the first floor, of Walter’s hotel is a dining room. Wagon wheels fashioned into lights hang over a wooden-everything room. A tall grandfather clock leans to the right along the back wall, and everything is served on those old, round, tin beer trays.

Characteristically “TJ and Ash,” we took too long finding a primo place to sit as all fifteen other guests settled in and claimed their property at the table. This happens to us a lot – on trains, especially. We’re just not quick thinkers. Give us something to ponder for an hour, and we’re there, but snap your fingers and expect an answer now, and we’ll most likely just stare blankly…maybe we’ll blink.

In the dining room is a long, thin main table, which TJ and I dubbed as the “adult” table. To its side was a smaller table, inhabited by a young couple. We joined them, and what a nice experience it was! They were from Sarasota, Florida, also on a Rick Steves European vacation.

We feasted upon vegetable soup, green beans, vegetarian spaghetti, and ice cream covered in strawberry yogurt and fresh pears. The wine was flowing, too.

After dinner, two men, also guests at the hotel, pulled out their violin and trombone, and entertained us with some classical Italian pieces.

Heading up to the loft to turn in for the evening, I thanked Walter for dinner and, he said, “It’s good, but eating like this always could cause a complication!” I’m guessing the “complication” would be a heart attack, because the food was hearty and good…and plentiful!

DAY 25: GIMMELWALD

Two days of intense hiking earns you the right to hit the slow-motion button on the vacation flipper for an entire day. And we did just that.

After a filling breakfast, Tim shared with us the pictures he’s taken through the years of the Alps. He also shared some pretty crazy pictures of his paragliding adventures – this guy is a daredevil!

Then, we headed out and let our noses lead us through Gimmelwald on a treasure hunt for low-intensity entertainment.

After failed attempts at coaxing the snobby goats to the fence, we saw a sign leaning against a house advertising “Horse Shitballs.”

Curiosity piqued, we walked up the wooden staircase to the second-floor balcony where three horse shitballs sat in a clear plastic container. The shitball business is an “on your honor” system, in which you leave your 2.50 euros in the blue ceramic bowl beside the shitball display.

Outside, we nibbled on the shitball (a brownie shaped and baked to look like the decorations the animals leave along the roads here), which was very tasty.

Next, we stopped by a sign advertising cheese and beef jerky. I should clarify: the farmers here don’t just have signs – they have wooden display boards, perhaps three inches deep, covered in plexiglass, to advertise their wholesome goods. They decorate these display boards with flowers, fabric, ribbons, statues, etc. Really cute.

A lunch of shitballs followed by cheese and jerky had our mouths watering, so we walked up the path and rang the bell on the wooden board at the door. A second-story window opened over our heads, and a man poked his head out…”yes?”

“We’d like to buy some cheese and beef.”

“One minute.”

Creaking stairs produced a very old man with a cane – the family’s salesman, who became our entertainment for the day. This man, we discovered, is working with the family who makes the cheese and beef jerky, which he takes back to his home in Geneva and retails to the hotels there. On this coming Monday, he will also help the family move their herd of fifty cattle up the mountain to a new pasture.

He showed us the all-natural beef jerky, then he led us to the cheese chalet across the street. Inside this 10 x 10 wooden room were round, yellow wheels of cheese on shelves lining the walls. This guy had some great one-liners, but our favorite was this one:

TJ: Is it okay to eat the rind on the cheese?
Old man: “You won’t die – at least not today.”

He also told us that cheese sweats 20% of its weight in the first year of aging, alone – that’s why older is more expensive.

Then, we retreated to the patio of the hotel to nibble on our jerky and cheese, and we topped off the picnic with a beer (which, over the next few hours became a total of five) from Walter’s bar.

At one point, a farmer parked his truck/wagon/tractor in the road just wide enough for a golf cart, left it running, ran inside Walter’s bar, got a drink, came back out, and went on his way.

Tonight was dinner at Walter’s: cream of leek soup, chicken, rice, peas, and ice cream topped with vanilla yogurt and fruit.

DAY 26: GIMMELWALD

Not much to report for today.

We rented mountain bikes in Murren (the next town up), and then we spent the next two hours gripping our handlebars (and breaks) as we flew down the mountain. The guy at the bike shop told us that they replace the brakes on these bikes every 3 rides!

Along the way, we passed a little pig farm…I stopped and gave each of them a scratch on the snout. I’ve gotta get a farm, because piggies are my favorite farm friends!

On our way back, we passed a man moving a herd of cattle. Supposedly, and somebody correct me on this if I’m wrong, the farmers use these gigantic bells to deter the cows from leaping into a succulent field of grass while they move them.

After that, we came back to the hotel, I did yoga upstairs, and we feasted on our newest travel meal: ham, cream cheese, and pickles.

DAY 27: GIMMELWALD

There are instances when you’d like some time to prepare. Case in point: taking an eight-hour hike. We awoke this morning with a plan to take it easy before our train left for Austria tonight. But during breakfast, Tim enticed us into taking one last hike…this time, to the part of the mountain that the lady in the tourist information office told us not to visit at this time of year.

Sunshine, full bellies, and our last day in the Alps…well, taking a hike today wouldn’t be the worst possibility; however, my mind and body were doing a “Whaaaa? Todaaaaay?” song and dance. They wanted a little more time to prepare, but there wasn’t time…our train was scheduled to leave at 19:45, it was 9:15, and Tim said the hike would take 5-6 hours (which translates to 8 hours in TJ and Ash time).

The hike required us to first travel down the mountain to the valley, then hike back up the next mountain. Why bother, you ask? Well, we’ve been staring at this mountain sitting across from us for five days now…it was high time to get over there and see what it was like.

The best part of the hike was encountering a herd of cattle grazing in a field we were walking through. One of them was right on the trail (or we were on the cow path), and she wasn’t about to move. Tim warned us to give them a slap on the rear if we encountered this…I tapped the cow on the butt with my walking stick, but she just flicked her tail and looked back at us. When another cow came up behind us (making us the meat in a dairy cow sandwich), we decided to take the long way around.

Overall, the hike was exhausting – physically and mentally. That physical fatigue I experienced in the Florence train station , the fatigue that brought me to tears, came back today, big and ugly.

There’s something humbling about being at the mercy of nature…there’s also something ugly about it, too. Two hours into our hike, I lost my will to move higher and farther…but I didn’t have an option. We were on the face of a mountain, in the middle of nowhere. I couldn’t take a bus or subway back to the town…cars didn’t even come up this high – I had to stick it out for another six hours.

Then the rain came.

We sought shelter under a roof overhang on an empty home as better-prepared hikers passed us in their sporty North Face apparel.

(rage burning)

The worst thing about being exhausted and in pain and in a bad mood in the middle of nowhere with no choice but to keep on keepin’ on is that nobody cares. As much as I wanted to take my hiking stick and kebab an optimistic hiker, there wasn’t anything I could do.

Eventually, we made it back to Walter’s to grab our bags, which is where I’m sitting right now, documenting my miserable day. I wanted to post this before we left (even though our day isn’t over, and there’s a great possibility that something blog-worthy will happen on one of the five trains we take before arriving at 5:00 a.m. in Austria on Monday).

Pray for us – mostly for TJ, though, because I’m not easy to deal with when I’m “in this way.”

DAY 28: SALZBURG

As I mentioned in my rushed day 27 post, something memorable would – and did – happen on the overnight train ride to Salzburg. Well, what happened was not a specific, particular event; rather, it was a chain of inconveniences that, one after another, made it feel as if we angered the gods:

Our final leg of the train ride to Salzburg was a train with sleeper cars, and after the long day of hiking, we needed it. Unfortunately #1, it was too late to make train reservations, so we found an empty couchette, and waited for the conductor to come so we could buy our tickets on the train.

Unfortunately #2, the conductor was a twenty-something witch with a honky-horn voice and a bouffant. She jerked open the door, pulled back the curtain, and pointed for us to leave. We asked to buy tickets, but she said she couldn’t speak English, and yelled at us (what she said, we don’t know, but we are sure we weren’t welcome there).

Unfortunately #3, we were pushed to the part of the train without beds – just a train with seats, where we tried to sleep. Unfortunately #4, at the next stop, a swarm of young men in military uniforms boarded. Based upon their rudeness and childishness, we guessed that they are the human shield for the country’s real army.

Unfortunately #5, we arrived in Salzburg at 4:25. Nothing is open at 4:25, so we sat outside a hotel, waiting for it to open. Cold, hungry, and delirious by 7:45, we headed left (where we were going, we did not know, but the weight of our backpacks made the journey more serious than fun). By 8:00, we found a hotel for 82 euros per night (folks, that’s NOT cheap), but I was in tears, hallucinating from fatigue, and the hotel manager said we could have the room immediately.

By 1:00 p.m., our luck changed. We awoke, fresh and ready to see Salzburg, and we realized that the hotel we were in was very, very nice (white marble stairs and all).

Downtown Salzburg has an honest, simple charm, with palatial, stuccoed, plain-fronted buildings surrounded by small mountains.

We visited three bookstores (this is something I’ve neglected to mention in other posts, unfortunately, but I will now: independent bookstores are everywhere. In Baden-Baden, during the short half-day we spent there, we saw eight different bookstores.) I bought Thoreau’s Walden, and TJ bought Coehlo’s The Fifth Mountain.

Today was also an awakening: our trip will soon be over. We booked our return flights from Split, Croatia to Gatwick, UK (we fly from the UK to the US the next day). This means two things: first, we know we have to be in Split, Croatia on a very specific date…something new for this trip. Second, this means our trip is ending soon.

After a bit more nosing around, we found a small restaurant and perched at a patio table. Ready to reap the benefits of weathering the storm of misfortune (and take back the half-day that was stolen from us), we decided to go all-out: one hearty meal each AND dessert.

We’re not restaurant-dessert types. Dessert out is a luxury that we never partake in (unless my Dad gets one…then, we ask for extra spoons). But tonight…well, tonight we decided to splurge. After we pointed out our choice to the waiter, all we could think about was the chocolate cake and ice cream that would be our heaven. Honestly, I don’t even remember eating it – I remember it was amazing…but it was gone within seconds.

A good end to a bad beginning.

DAY 29: CESKY KRUMLOV

Honesty is a quality that most of us admire, although there are others who prefer flawless fiction since it’s an easier story to digest. However, I still like to think that some people out there respect the ability to be honest, and I’m speaking about honesty in two regards: honesty with yourself and honesty with others.

I hope you’ve appreciated my honesty on this blog. I was concerned about sharing my not-so-finest moments with all of you (Florence, Salzburg) for fear that, well, you’d see my weaknesses. But, my weaknesses are me, and as long as I’m honest about them and give them some fresh air and sunlight, give them a name, they are less likely to sneak up on me.

Casting aside the fear that you might call me uneducated or uncultured or “typically American” as one sicko peeping-Tom-at-the-beach did on my Flickr page, I’ll also lay this out on the line for you:

When Egan recommended Cesky Krumlov in the Czech Republic as a town to visit (a town that now reigns our “favorite spot” list), we expected a lot less than what greeted us after we jumped off the double-decker tractor-engine-sounding train at the edge of town. What we expected, I can’t really say – perhaps crumbling buildings, a lot of grey, and…well…that’s it.

Walking through the streets of Cesky Krumlov, TJ and I kept asking one another, “What is it that we love about it?” It doesn’t boast the breathtaking views of the Alps, its streets aren’t lined with perfectly-preserved buildings, green stuffing of plants bursting out the windowsills…just what is it that we like so much about it?

It’s simply honest.

It has all of the things we love about Europe, the cobblestones, the lazy river, the ancient stucco buildings, the windy streets, the culture, the castle…but everything is on a simpler scale. It’s more digestible and more real…like real people actually built the city.

Uneven, imperfect cobblestone streets make it impossible to walk and gawk into the miniature art galleries and cafes at the same time. The streets widen and narrow unexpectedly through the town, lined with a mix of stuccoed buildings painted every cool color paintable next door to those that are falling down.

Not everything is breathtaking. In other cities, you must travel out from the center a great distance before finding the forgotten, dilapidated buildings, some destroyed by a fire or others just slowly sinking back into the earth, or others still recovering from the flood in 2002. Here, these stories greet you just yards from the small town’s main center.

Somehow, those dilapidated buildings make the restored and cared-for ones even more remarkable. You get to see a real, living city instead of one that looks like a museum.

Thanks for the recommendation, Egan! We’re staying here for several days!

DAY 30: CESKY KRUMLOV

Today was a very special day. TJ turned 28.

How do you celebrate your birthday, Czech-style? Well, we asked, but no one really gave us a schooling in Czech birthday celebrations. Some recommended restaurants, while others recommended hikes.

We decided to do a mix of American (pizza and beer…okay, these are really Italian and German, maybe, but whatever…) and European (visiting a castle).

Our first stop was the town’s castle tower. We climbed to the top and enjoyed the view of Cesky Krumlov from the center of town. After an unsuccessful attempt at gathering tour information from the sour-faced woman at the castle’s ticket office, we gave up and decided to really start celebrating…with some pizza and Czech beer:Budvar (the original Budweiser).

From there, we roamed in and out of the small art galleries along the streets.

We stopped by another café for more beer (they serve beer in half-liter mugs, so they’re fairly large). Oh, and the price? Anywhere between $1 and $2 for a half-liter of good, good beer. We enjoyed some people-watching: I watched a woman gobble down a sandwich, using her large chest and belly as a crumb-catcher, then take the napkin and carefully dab the corners of her mouth.

After that, we visited the Egon Schiele museum, which also held a Keith Haring exhibition and exhibitions for various NYC artists.

Then, stop number three for another beer in a courtyard shared with a playground, surrounded by stucco buildings. After 1.5 liters of beer, we were slowing down, so stop number four for drinks were of the non-alcoholic, heavily-caffeinated kind.

Recharged, we then headed for dinner. The restaurant serves traditional Czech food (so we’re told…we wouldn’t know otherwise, really), which is prepared over an open fire and served on wooden boards. TJ ordered the “house recommendation,” which began with a shot of some kind of clear, STRONG, sweet alcohol. The food was great, and we washed it all down with beer number four of the day.

We were lucky to get tables outside, and even luckier to see a band (guitar, cello, and upright bass) play on the narrow patio.

Ice cream cones were our dessert on the way back to the hotel.

Happy, happy birthday, TJ!

DAY 31: CESKY KRUMLOV

Throughout our four point five weeks of backpacking, we developed an efficient laundry management plan. Dirty clothes (backpackers’ “dirty” means absolutely unwearable due to grease and odor buildup) go into white Glad trash bags, which are then placed securely on the outside of our backpacks, finally putting those external straps to good use. Yes, we look like we should be begging for change on the doorstep of a pawn shop, but this plan prevents our (basically) clean clothes from mingling with the likes of the rotting clothing corpses.

Therefore, my biggest fear is having to one day, out of desperation and necessity, reach into that graveyard and choose a corpse to schlock onto my body. Resurrecting the dead is never pretty. Wearing the dead is even worse.

Thus, we decided to do laundry today. When you are down to the last one percent of your underwear stash, it’s time to take some preventative measures. Laundry insurance. Affordable, but necessary.

The woman who runs the pension where we’re staying offered to do our laundry for $2. She doesn’t speak English, but TJ managed to pantomime a conversation with her. We headed out for town fully prepared to never see our laundry again.

When we finally returned to our room, our clothes weren’t outside our door, obediently waiting for us to return and finally grant them access to the safe interiors of our bags. I went to the office, and smiling, she gave me a “no” nod.

How do you pantomime “Where are our clothes and when should we expect to see them and oh, by the way, we need an early checkout tomorrow morning?”

Well, you just stand there with your mouth open, doing nothing.

She took me outside the hotel, around the back, to a gated clothesline area where our shirts hung upside-down by clothespins. She made a whooshing sound and waved her hands back and forth – the international sign for “your laundry is still drying on the clothesline.”

Well, you can’t do much about that. We went to bed, hoping the wind gods would bless us with dry clothes bright and early tomorrow morning.

DAY 32: BUDAPEST

Perhaps we angered the wind gods…and all of the other gods, for that matter.

When we awoke this morning, part of our perfectly air-dried laundry greeted us in a perfectly square folded heap…she even folded our underwear. I don’t even fold my own underwear. God bless this woman.

What about the other portion our clothes? Still wet on the clothesline, and we had three trains to catch to get to Budapest by this evening. Inside our bags the wet and the dry went. Hello, mildew.

Our final leg of the train ride (from Vienna to Budapest), a four-hour ride, was full. Perhaps overflowing is a better word. We started in first class, at the back of the train. Full. Then, we walked through the dining car. Full. Then, we walked through the couchette/smoking area with broken Heineken bottles on the floor. Full. Then we walked through two or three cars of second class. Full.

Tasting defeat instead of the tomatoes, meat, and bread we so responsibly prepared for this very part of the train ride, we stopped in the luggage area at the back of one train car. This luggage area, mind you, holds approximately four carry-on sized bags. Add two humans, two backpacks, and a grocery bag, and you’re pushing it.

The train eventually cleared approximately 30 minutes later, allowing us to sit and eat lunch. Ahhh.

When we arrived in Budapest, a fifty-something tan man with a salt and pepper crewcut (heavy on the salt and light on the pepper) greeted us and offered us a room. Through the train station, on a bus, and on the subway, he took us to the room on the fifth floor. It’s a nice, cheap room – although the flat has a deathtrap elevator and creepy, twelve-foot doors.

We crossed the river, and jumped on the tram, which would take us closer to some action and a Europe on a Shoestring restaurant recommendation.

Doing exactly NOT what the salt and pepper man told us, we jumped on the tram without a ticket. The trams are an on-your-honor system, similar to the shitballs system in Gimmelwald…except mean women sometimes walk through the trains to make sure you are, in fact, on your honor.

Bad us. And right after I go on and on about honesty. I tried to ignore her, pecking in my ear in Hungarian or something. She didn’t go away. My armpits became sweat spigots as she kept yelling “pay on spot!” Fearing avoiding the tram police is akin to assaulting an officer, we paid her instead of jumping off at the next stop. Goodbye, $30.

That easily sours an evening. We had dinner, walked back to our flat, chanced death in the elevator, and floated to dreamland on bus exhaust fumes and a crotchrocket lullaby.

DAY 33: BUDAPEST

Think about a ticket. What is its function? That rectangular piece of paper grants you special access past the turnstiles and revolving doors that separate society – one day, it might be a concert, the next a movie. You pay money for the ticket, and that ticket represents the cash with which you parted. However, without an event to attend, that ticket is meaningless. Whereas if you purchase, let’s say, a coffee table, the table represents money but it’s also a functional piece of furniture. The ticket? Nothing.

Today we partook in one of Budapest’s well-known indulgences: a bathhouse. Our ticket granted us two hours in the baths and one 30-minute massage. Our bodies ready to be pickled, we parted ways to lock up our things in the locker rooms: women downstairs, men upstairs. The women’s locker room was a surprise…the “lockers” were white painted wooden gates – a community of miniature suburban backyard fences, just big enough to turn around in, with an eye-level wire “window” to look out (or in).

The locker room attendant, a fifty-something woman with a wrinkly, hairy upper lip and dyed maroonish hair took me to my backyard fence, pointed to its number, 20, and said, “Memory.”

She then took my massage ticket, placed it in her breast pocket, and said, “Come in half hour for massage.” She slipped a red wristband on my wrist with a metal tag. I still do not know the purpose of the wristband, because the tag said nothing about a massage, time, or number of my backyard fence.

TJ and I met up for our two hours of buoyant relaxation. In our glasses and bathing suits, we dipped in and out of four pools (three indoor, one outdoor), one freezing bath, and the sauna.

We parted again for our massages, women downstairs, men upstairs, and the confusion began – all over my precious, sacred ticket.

The wrinkly-lipped attendant asked for my massage ticket – the one I gave to her earlier. In broken English, she denied taking my ticket. I pointed to her breast pocket, where I saw her put it, and she innocently pulled out everything except my ticket: cigarettes, lighter, a pen…

Fearing my $15 massage was being held hostage in the depths of wrinkly lip’s pockets, I went upstairs to the men’s attendant, and I explained the confusion to him. He went to the stairs, bellowed for wrinkly lip, sighed when she did not respond, and bounced down the stairs as she walked around the corner.

At the bottom the three of us stood. They yelled to one another, gesturing full-arm gestures. An oblivious spectator, I stood there, barefoot, in my black bikini and red glasses when, instantly, she grabbed me by my wrist and started to drag me down the hallway, the way a mother leads her three-year-old son out of the grocery after knocking over the glass pickle jar display.

After a few steps, I stopped and jerked my wrist from her beastly grip. Looking back to my only salvation, the bald attendant from upstairs, I asked him what the hell was going on. He said something to her, and she motioned for me to follow her, this time in a more humane, civilized manner.

Through a maze of hallways, curtained-off areas, and showers, we made it to the massage area. One young woman sat in a principal’s office row of hard plastic seats along the wall, looking terrified. Wrinkly lip began a conversation with the massage attendant (by the way, for as many “attendants” as they employ, this process should run much more smoothly, no?), gestured to me, they rolled their eyes, and I finally got my precious, wonderful, paper ticket.

The massage was breathtaking – not in an amazing way, but in an “I held my breath” kind of way.

First, the masseuse grunted for me to take off my suit and get on the table. Naked, I laid on my back, my arms glued to my sides and my legs glued to each other. She walked to the end of the table, grabbed my ankles, ripped my legs apart, and folded the sheet underneath me up between my legs, diaper-like.

She had a tattoo on the skin between her thumb and forefinger (that’s all I saw – the rest of the time my eyelids were trying to block out the pain she was inflicting on my already-tired body). I never knew a woman could be so strong. Perhaps she had a herd of 2,000 cattle at home – milker’s hands, maybe. At times, the pressure of her body plus 500 pounds forced me to exhale the breath I was so dearly holding in. I managed to laugh to myself – if they flipped the bed upside down, I would have still clung to it from underneath with my clawed hand-and-foot grip.

When the torture was over, I pulled my meat-mallated body from the table, squeaked back into my cold, wet bikini, and ran back upstairs to warm up in another pool. TJ met me there, and we shared stories. Ironically, his masseuse, a man, was much, much, much more friendly, offering him a place to stay in the city if he wanted to come back next week.

DAY 34: ZAGREB

Today we arrived in Zagreb with a plan to venture on to Plitvice Lakes for two days.

But Zagreb had a different plan.

As we walked out the doors of the train station, a green carpet stretched from its doors, through the streets, and into town. We’re suckers for parks, especially parks with fountains, lined with gravel walkways and wooden benches. Antique cable cars ran down the street on either side of the park, along rows of four- and five-story stone buildings.

Zagreb was putting forth a convincing argument to stay and nose around for a day.

So, that’s what we decided to do. We secured a hostel room and nosed, nosed, nosed.

In the main center of town was a small festival. Groups of children and adults were dancing beside a café. A cobblestone street lined with cafes led us to an old church. We stopped at a café, planning on buying $50 flights to Dubrovnik for tomorrow. After discovering that flights were, in fact, $150, another Europe on a Shoestring error, we decided to travel via train (a difference of 8 hours travel time, but much cheaper).

We ordered a pizza to go and took it to the park with us to enjoy a free concert there. People lounged about in the grass and on benches, enjoying the music until 10. The only way to top off a pizza picnic and concert is to get gelato, so we headed back into town – the direction from which ice cream cones were coming, carried by hands next to happy faces.

Unfortunately, I didn’t experience gelato in Italy…but I can say that Croatia’s version of gelato is heaven. The names of the gelato varieties, about 25 in all, were in Croatian…so I chose on looks alone, and I made a good decision. TJ enjoyed his, too.

We walked back through the park to our hostel and fell asleep with very full bellies.

DAY 35: DUBROVNIK

Today we left Zagreb and headed for Dubrovnik, a ten-hour trip (5.5 by train, 4.5 by bus). And, what we thought was a rough train ride was just the appetizer in our main course motion sickness.

The train portion of the trip took us through much uninhabited countryside with a few villages of four or five homes along the way. The train stations’ newer buildings sat beside the old ones lying in lumps of rubble. Other stone buildings scattered about, missing roofs or walls, next to new roads being built. Growing up, hearing about the war here in the 90s, it was surreal to actually see it.

The bus portion of the trip along the Adriatic coast was the epitome of motion sickness. Inside the bus, near the second folding doors, were two barf buckets, and there’s no doubt in my mind that they are used regularly. Stopping offered no relief, either, as the bus rocked back and forth like a baby’s cradle.

Although, now I can say that both TJ and I are victims of racial profiling. The bus traveled through a small tip of Bosnia, which meant border patrol. A uniformed Bosnian man woke me up, saying “passport,” and when I tried to show it to him, he waved me off and exited the bus. Then back at Croatia’s border, an officer boarded, singled out TJ, asked for his passport, and killed the time waiting by rolling his eyes while TJ, holding his sesame goldfish in one greasy hand, fished around in his money belt with his free hand.

After the profiling, the bus stopped at a roadside diner, the driver announced something, and everyone got out. We found out that this was the dinner break.

When we finally made it to Dubrovnik, the work was not finished. First, we had to make it past the crowd of gypsy-looking women (and one man) who encircled the bus as we pulled up, trying to sell rooms. I climbed down the stairs first, as heads of dyed hair and natural gray roots poked in to greet us. Each held little picture books detailing the finer qualities of their accommodations. The herd followed us around the bus and surrounded us while we prepared our bags, snapping at other saleswomen trying to nudge their way forward. Remember that saying your mother always asked…”If so-and-so jumped off a bridge, would you do it to?” There’s no question, these women were the kids who said, “Yes!”

We decided upon a woman who wasn’t as pushy as the others, and who was listed with the tourist office. She drove us to her home near the Old Town, a 150-year-old house that sits beside a new supermarket – the modern placeholder for the factory that was destroyed during the war. We had drinks, talked about the war, and she mentioned Clinton’s help in Bombing what is now Bosnia. “We love America,” she said.

Tonight we walked around Old Town, the walled part of the city with marble floors. Inside is Europe’s oldest pharmacy, dating back to the 14th century. TJ said, “This place has a storybook quality, but kinda creepy.” He was right. The way the roads glow in the moonlight, the stone buildings still being patched from the war, the black ocean meeting the black sky somewhere in the horizon, the old and the new, the orange trees randomly dropping citrus bombs beside you…it is a unique mix – one well-worth the motion sickness and racial profiling.

DAY 36: DUBROVNIK

While we’re in a tropical paradise, it only seems appropriate for us to get something “tropical.”

A tan.

We set out for the beach, the rebels we are, wearing SPF 8, in the 40-degree Celsius heat. I was skeptical about lounging on a pebble beach. Lying on rocks? It turns out that lying on them is the easy part…walking in them poses the greater difficulty.

We found a spot next to the water, and I bent over to lay out our towels when the unexpected happened – my bikini, my ever-loving, butt-hugging bikini broke. It seems that my Target original wasn’t made so well, because the S-hook holding the top together in the back snapped. Who in their right mind makes these things out of plastic?! The top wasn’t even that tight!

So, after TJ tied my bikini top in a knot behind my back, making my small top now an extra-extra small, we hopped in the water. I’ve never swum in water that was so clear, but I decided that I love it – I can see when fish are approaching. And the rocks on the sea floor feel pretty neat on my feet.

Once we crawled back to shore, we set in for a good tan. And the rocks were actually very comfortable…no icky sand to deal with makes them even better.

It turns out that we’re not made out to be sun worshippers. I think their prayer goes something like, “I vow to lie motionless for hours on end.” We perhaps made it five minutes before the fidgets got the best of us. Hopefully sunrays can still catch you while your flipping and flopping around on your towel.

We also found a place to unload what we thought were our worthless euro coins, 11 in all – a gelato stand! One scoop for one euro…that’s 11 scoops for us. Hopefully the bottom half of my bikini doesn’t burst open, too.

We ate dinner on the patio at our hotel, accompanied by a very friendly dinner guest, Bellina. Besides terrorizing the fifteen-or-so cats here, she likes to play and beg. She even managed to get her front half up in my lap to give me a kiss. When we tried to get back into the house, she ran up the steps and sat there, blocking the door, giving us that sneaky doggie smile. We couldn’t get in without letting her in, too. Smart dog! Maize would love her.

DAY 37: DUBROVNIK

Unwilling to accept defeat so easily, we charged the beach again today, determined to get the Mediterranean tans our translucent bodies deserve. We lasted a little longer today, two hours in all, and victory was ours in the little-league trophy for which we yearned: tan lines without a burn.

I now understand the pride some sun worshippers take in their bronzed bodies. This kind of deadly beauty takes patience, the right angle to the sun, and the ability to sculpt the rocks underneath you in all of the right places. Hats off to those of you who remain victorious in this endeavor.

Our tanning time, bookended by two-hour chunks of beach preparation and beach cleanup, left us little time otherwise to nose around the Old Town a little more, but we did our best. We wandered along through narrow marble passages in the town as cafes appeared at corners, surrounded by an amphitheater of tables and chairs.

A five-person band playing at a corner café caught our attention. As we chose a table, one of many sprawling out into two different streets and two different directions, the band started playing Elton John’s Your Song – rearranging, mumbling, and omitting words throughout.

Unfortunately, our mutual enjoyment of the band’s mistakes ended there. Poor TJ was cursed with a wife as tone-deaf and musically retarded as the singer/piano player beating the well-known tune with an ugly stick. Apparently, in addition to the butchering of words, they were butchering the chords, too.

All TJ could say was, “Are you hearing this? You…you…you know, please, tell me you know they’re butchering this song. Right?!”

DAY 38: KORCULA

No name on Earth incites the excitement and glee of a child like the name Chuck E. Cheese. Pizza, an animatronic band, games, and at the end of the day, the opportunity to cash in those hard-earned orange game tickets for a prize behind that glass counter of wonders. At a young age, children learn an important lesson in economics as they are forced to part with their orange currency for overpriced magnetic slap bracelets, stuffed Gizmo dolls, and generic Barbies. With 2,000 tickets, you can get one great prize or fifteen ring pops. Your choice. It can be a hard one.

There’s no doubt that TJ was one of those children who collected his orange game tickets, figured out how the ticket machine worked to reap more than he sowed, and mathematically calculated the benefits and costs for every kind of purchase possible. And me, well I grew up as a banker’s kid…save, save, save.

Today, TJ and I finally arrived at the glass counter of adulthood, a real travel booking office, fully prepared to trade in the money we responsibly saved by scrimping on cheap hotels, hostels, pensions, and train couchettes throughout our five-week European tour. What was the prize we would choose?

A luxurious, comfortable room with a view of the sea on the island of Korcula, Croatia.

And that’s exactly what we got. For $60 per night, a private studio apartment overlooking the sea with a patio and stairs leading to a private beach is all ours. The owners who live in the house above us on the hill are very sweet, and they told us to ask them for whatever we need. The wife brought us a bottle of wine to celebrate the birth of her baby granddaughter who is “not more than two days old,” she said, smiling.

Besides the clear sea, balcony, private apartment, and all of the luxurious relaxing we intend to do – completely naked, because we finally can – we are very excited about another possibility: cooking.

Our apartment is furnished with a kitchen, fridge, and table and chairs. No more eating finger food on makeshift plates of shopping bags for us. After round number three of tanning, and a quick lesson from a local on sea urchins (the seaside counterpart to a Midwesterner’s burrs), we hit the grocery and stocked up on food and tequila. Our dinner feast included stuffed pasta with chicken and tomato sauce.

Sipping tequila on our patio, we watched the sun turn a robin’s egg sky to a fierce orange before burning out behind the tip of the peninsula across the bay. In the black night, a string of lights brightened unevenly along the peninsula’s shoreline, marking the line between civilization and desolate, desert-like hills silhouetting the night sky.

It seems that saving paid off very, very well.

DAY 39: KORCULA

With only four days left of Mediterranean seaside sunshine, the race to the tan is becoming more serious. Unfortunately, half of Team Sochor came regretfully ill-equipped for the race. While I sprint effortlessly forward, thanks to the few drops of Indian blood bestowed upon me by my paternal Grandfather, TJ lags behind, wheezing, disgruntled with the distribution of tanliness between team members. For once, genetics is on my side. TJ might have a naturally lean body and artistic talent, but I have the ability to tan.

Yes, this was the biggest event today – tanning, which only lasted two hours (hey, it’s a race, but we’re not being stupid). And what did we do with the rest of the day? Besides lounging, reading, and relaxing in our private balcony overlooking the water, TJ snorkled and I practiced yoga.

DAY 40: KORCULA

Today Team Sochor officially dropped out of the race to the tan.

TJ resigned himself to the fact that he will not return to Ohio sporting a bronzed bod – instead, he lowered his bar of expectations and contentedly leapt over what he considered to be a successful de-transing (v; the process of becoming less translucent in appearance). Unfortunately, the latent effects of sun poisoning, a gnawing headache and sour belly, reared their ugly heads on TJ this evening. It seems his resignation came a bit too late.

My skin is browning quite nicely; although, seeing TJ’s discomfort has turned my race into little more than a leisurely autumn stroll down a tree-lined street.

Since lounging presents little else to talk about, and posting such a short account for today just seems wrong, I’ll charter a speed boat back in time to approximately seven days ago.

There’s a saying that goes something along the lines of…”a humorous event is just a dangerous event that happened long enough ago that it no longer poses a threat.” So what happened seven days ago that I neglected to share with you, hoping to spare you from gut-wrenching, nagging worry?

Sitting across from one another on the train to Zagreb, I noticed bright red bumps along TJ’s forearms. Clueless as to their origins, we brushed it off as just a little skin irritation. However, as the days passed, these bumps multiplied exponentially, spreading from the tips of TJ’s fingers and the tips of his toes inward, each line stopping at his torso. It seemed that these fierce zit-looking bumps were only infesting his limbs.

As these bumps multiplied, we debated seeing a doctor. The bumps looked like mosquito bites, but there were so, so, so many of them.

We first thought that TJ was possibly allergic to the laundry detergent the woman used to wash our clothes in Cesky Krumlov. But that didn’t explain why his torso was unaffected – where his clothes touched his body the most.

Then we hypothesized that we picked up some kind of bed bugs – the Dateline black-light undercover special kind – and they were feasting upon TJ’s body. I especially didn’t talk about this earlier on, because I knew if Mom read this – who is already deathly fearful of hotel bed bugs – she wouldn’t let us inside her house when we get home. We eventually kicked the bedbug theory to the curb as well, since I didn’t have any bites.

A quick search on WebMD.com ruled out the possibility of hives, shingles, chicken pox, pulling out eyebrows, and ________.

We finally decided that they are, in fact, mosquito bites – of the European persuasion. Much smaller and less itchy, these bumps look more like zits. Even more puzzling is their linear arrangement…like the damn things were too lazy to get up and fly to a different part of the body for more drink – they just walked two steps, bit, walked two steps, bit…all night long.

The fact that I showed no outward signs of the bites until days later, and in a much smaller quantity, is still a mystery, since I tend to be an all-you-can-eat-buffet for mosquitoes.

The mosquito threat added a new expense to our trip: bug repellent. And, in the quantity in which we use it, it goes fast. A cool evening shower just isn’t as refreshing when you follow it up with a mist of insect-repelling chemicals.

DAY 41: KORCULA

Poor TJ tossed and turned all night, victim to a mild case of sun poisoning. He spent much of today asleep – the only thing to do in this heat.

During our waking hours, we perched in the shade on our patio, watching boats and bugs – the bugs proved to be more entertaining.

Ants are really cool insects. Round heads and butts (I have a feeling someone out there will correct my anatomical insect ignorance) are connected by no more than a string. Like miniature walking barbells. They are constantly working, frantically moving things from here to there, up stone walls, down into tiny crevices – what a life of toil these poor little guys have.

To keep them busy, and, thus, entertaining, we fed them. While they seem to take anything you put in front of them, we like to think that they especially enjoyed the small crumbs of cheese we cast their way.

We even felt sorry for the ones who, victorious, made it to the top of the stone wall with their loot, only to drop it before climbing backwards over the ledge.

…is this what isolation does to people?

DAY 42: SPLIT

Today was bitter-sweaty.

The end to an amazing journey became very real as we sat along Split’s harbor at sunset. Although we spent the entire day using the Old Town’s skinny alleys and cozy cafes to dodge the scorching sun, as it disappeared under the water far, far away, we found ourselves longing for just a few more hours…to reflect, think, and appreciate it all. Because tomorrow we begin our journey home.

Experiencing a trip like this with a person who is your husband and your best friend – well, I can’t begin to tell you how that feels. You’ve taken the journey with us, and the physical (and some emotional) details have been yours to nibble upon. Some details I haven’t shared, because…well, they’re not the kinds of details that are easy to put into words. Those details are the ones only we will know and understand. Some will most likely take a while to surface, in intelligible shapes at unexpected moments.

Looking at the end, we thought back to the dilemma we faced months ago, before the beginning: Should we take the trip or not?

Well, that seems like a silly question now.

I can’t imagine having ever missed out on this experience – knowing that we would have, could have, should have taken the chance but instead turned away from it, biting our fingernails, nervous about the ugly what-ifs.

Yes, we will return home with pictures and stories, but there’s more to it – a re-categorization, similar to the one that happened on our first day in the Alps. There’s a theory in education that true learning occurs when the brain makes new connections – when the brain finally finds the shortcut from point A to point B, and the previous avenues are no more than detours.

You can’t put a price on those clicks. Finding the appropriate words for them is even more difficult.

DAY 43: GATWICK

As our pushy cabbie drove us from the UK’s Gatwick Airport to our hotel in Crawley, the first signs of familiar life popped up in the form of a BP arm-in-arm with a Wild Bean Café.

The weather in Crawley? Not exactly sure on specifics, but as we re-clothed in nearly everything we brought with us – an activity quite similar to day 1 of this trip – we laughed at how this has all come full circle.

Tomorrow we will be back in the US. Back to the life on which we clicked “pause” six weeks ago. Back to our home, our cars, our COFFEE MAKER, our beds, constant wireless internet…

Although we will embrace these luxuries in a bear hug, it is with trepidation that we leave behind the tiny cups of overpriced coffee, lumpy mattresses, trains, scale-less maps, time spent attempting to decode an artist’s rendition of what might be inside the plastic tub of refrigerated “salad” at the grocery, and dividing by five (or multiplying by two or dividing by one point five) to get the US dollar price of something.

This trip allowed us to see and experience Europe: its food, its people, and its architecture. Most importantly, it allowed me to see myself in a different light. For the first time since, oh, let’s say adolescence, I found myself saying, “Who am I?”

Before leaving I was the Ashleigh who lived in Hilliard, the Ashleigh who made two cups of coffee mixed with vanilla caramel creamer every morning, the Ashleigh who obsessively made sure the laundry was always no more than one load away from being perfectly finished, the Ashleigh who only practiced yoga in the evenings after coming home from work, the Ashleigh who did the grocery shopping at giant supermarkets on Sundays…

As you can imagine, these things dissolved the morning we left for Europe. I became the Ashleigh who shopped for food at produce stands as needed, the Ashleigh who practiced yoga whenever time allowed (even stiff and sore in the mornings), the Ashleigh who had no control over the laundry situation, and the Ashleigh who never knew in what form or when coffee would come.

We define ourselves by what constitutes our lives. Our labels of stay-at-home-mom, cook, editor, farmer, sister-in-law, doctor, …strung together, we use them to outline ourselves, like outlines of bodies in chalk –we can step back and look at, admire, and understand. But when you erase a portion of that chalk outline – you’re no longer the p.m. yogini or the a.m. coffee drinker – the outline of your body, who you are, is undone, imperfectly finished.

At first, I didn’t like the feeling or the look of me after some of those portions of my outline were erased. I felt imbalanced, confused, unsure, and doubtful. Standing back, head cocked to the side, these new parts of me looked funny.

“What is that there, in place of the laundry fanatic? Where did the Sunday Sam’s Club grocery shopper go?”

Although these changes in my outline were initially discomforting to look at, especially to me who thrives on routine and predictability, I am now glad my outline changed. I know more about myself, and I can define myself by more than my job and hobbies. These new parts of my outline are fun. I suppose change always produces some kind of discomfort, and looking at yourself in a different light can make you want to squint your eyes or even close them, but keep looking.

I hope I can continue to produce change in my life. I want to keep that chalk outline from turning into a permanently painted one. I want to keep erasing and re-drawing lines as it is necessary. Most importantly, I want to enjoy those first few moments of surprise, discomfort, and confusion as I stand back, head cocked to the side, looking at the new parts of me.