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A trip to Zermatt was next on my agenda, so the next day was nothing but train travel. When I finally reached Visp I hit a fork in the road and needed to make a decision on whether to fork out an extra nineteen dollars for a round trip train ticket or to thumb my way into Zermatt. The rail to Zermatt was a private railroad and not covered under my rail pass. I looked around and since there was not a single car heading in that direction my decision was made easily. …
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I woke up with a serious problem. I don’t know if it was the combination of the exercise the other day, the consumption of alcohol or both but my arms had stiffened to the point where I could not extend them beyond a forty five degree angle. I tried carried my bags first in one hand and then the other using the weight of the bags to help stretch out my muscles, very scary. …
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I was up early, grabbed a table and a few chairs and set them up on the sand. I sat and gazed out on the empty bay writing until the others woke. A pot of coffee soon followed and then breakfast. The girls were taking about exploring the city’s bizarre, a female shopping ritual. I on the other hand I was invited to go with the men. Bear hunting was on the agenda. We all loaded onto a friend’s boat and headed along the coast to a location that supposedly had a recent bear sighting. …
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I wandered through the station lingering on familiarities. It’s amazing how routines destroyed time and sped things up. There were so many unexpected avenues, detours, new faces and outright pleasures that it seemed as if it had been months since I left here, not days. I got talking up with a couple on the train that had been reading the same travel guide and discovered out we were going in the same directions. …
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We ended up in Oslo’s train station an hour and a half earlier than we had originally planned. We had eaten and kind of ran out of touring options and found ourselves debating on which train to depart on. One train left at eleven and the other at midnight. Jim was having another one of his bad days, randomly complaining about everything and anything that came into view. I wasn’t up for spending much time sitting in this vacant station with only Jim’s attitude to entertain me. When the first of the two trains arrived, Jim walked the length of the train while I watched the gear. “There’s no first class, so let’s wait for the next one” Jim demanded. …
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We had awakened almost in the same position we had fallen asleep. But now the birds below sang that the morning was new and filled with joy. It was as if natural geometry and rhythms had aligned and everything was clearer than the day before. We traveled hand in hand occasionally catching each other smiling as if it was just a bit hard to believe that we had found one another. …
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Jim joined the hostel attitude. He didn’t want to go anywhere, see anything, he just wanted to stick around the hostel and wash his clothes, so I sought out on my own. I checked out Albert Einstein’s home and then the modern art museum. “One man’s treasure is another man’s trash”. I love art but sometimes. I wandered the market and the local stops searching for Christmas gifts, but ended up buying chocolates to satisfy my taste buds instead. …
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One night at Mik’s place while passing around the pipe, he weaved stories of sprits possessing the trails between the white horse and the many rock circles heading north. I could almost visualize these images he was painting and hear the pounding of drums in the wind, as I focused in on the flames dancing with the beat. …
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Our train ended in Karajevo where we were left to wait for a bus. There was nowhere to hide from the cold so we all had to move around a lot and it seemed like the bus was ever going to show. We had scattered moments of sleep, moving here, moving there, trying to forget how cold it was. That was one bad night. The bus eventually showed up late and wasn’t scheduled to enter Dubrovnik until around breakfast. I just dazed out looking past my reflection at blackness that was the sea passing by in a blur. …
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I attached myself to the rear of a group touring Notre Dame. After I came down from the tower I found myself sitting among delinquents in the square just outside the church. After I finished a cigarette I proceeded down to the Louve. It took me all day to wander its halls, a maze of inconveniences. I planned on coming back in a day or two to catch up on what I missed. I always wanted to learn how to paint, so I enjoyed watching the students copy the masters. …
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It was raining a bit and we had a couple of open containers. The roads were narrow with no extra space to speak about. I knew if we got stuck behind another logging truck we could be here for weeks. Once we managed to pass a couple of these trucks we began to make up for some lost time. Jim began complaining that his bladder couldn’t take much more of this abuse but before I was willing to pull over, I wanted to put enough distance between ourselves and the logging trucks. …
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Eventually the crowds gathered and like sheep we were herded onto the boat. I managed to weasel my way through the gridlock to the sunny side of the ship, found myself a deck chair and began to relax under the sun. There was a young lady who had the same idea and took the liberty to pull her chair up next to mine and start up a conversation. Honestly I was more interested in her bathing suit than the conversation. From here the view was spectacular. Thousands of white sails littered the horizon and the many islands looked as if God scattered them from his own hand. …
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Like a bunch of cattle we were herded from the boat to the train station. It was in this company we met a group of young ladies from Costa Mesa California on their way to a concert in Paris. We were scheduled to see U2 in Dublin but that plan kinda got left behind with a bunch of stuffed animals. …
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I was intrigued with the works of Escher and understood there was an exhibit in the Hage, so I persuaded Jim to board a late train out of Luxembourg. We arrived in to Rotterdam even later. There didn’t seem to be anybody but the two of us, the streets were virtually empty. We wandered toward the lights advertising vacancies and pounded on doors until one finally opened. The price the gentlemen in pajamas requested was outrageous. …
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We had purchased a train pass for the British railway that provided a few consecutive days on a train and then the use of a car. Our plan was to more or less travel north by train until we reached Inverness Scotland, from there we would rent a car and travel the West Coast of Scotland southward until we reached Liverpool. …
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