THURSDAY, JUNE 26
I was taking the kids on their first trip to Europe, so it was a big deal, kind of a right of passage. I myself hadn’t been there for over twenty five years and I was afraid that perhaps my foreign travel skills had gotten irredeemably rusty. The day before was a flurry of final preparations. Make sure the house is secure and that the cats are oversupplied with food and water and that they will be visited regularly during our absence. To this end, Royse graciously volunteered to be the patron saint of pets.
Rebecca lost her car keys at 2:00 AM on her friend’s front yard near Coventry Road. She walked home, called AAA and had her Toyota Tacoma towed to my house on Yorkshire Road.
Thursday morning, the day of our departure, she took my Oldsmobile station wagon and delivered her dog Otis to a boarding kennel down in Richfield Township. On her way back, she stopped by Coventry and found her Toyota keys in the grass. We swung by Bellfield Road to pick up Royse and were off to the airport. Our scheduled 4:30 PM flight to Toronto was overbooked, so we rushed to gate B1, said goodbye to Royse, and caught a 2:45 PM flight. We flew Air Ontario in a small, twin turboprop De Havilland Dash-8, which is manufactured right in Ontario. Rebecca liked it because you walked across the tarmac to board and deplane.
Alex is carrying his beeper with him because it serves as a watch. James had won the prize for readiness by being the first to finish packing.
After landing in Toronto, we went through customs and everybody got their first stamps in their passports. For this trip, my role was that of over-protective control freak, so I carried everyone’s passports and tickets in a large fanny pack. Oddly enough, I looked like an over-protective parent taking his kids to Europe. As I write this, we’re at gate 106, lounging around on the seats, waiting for our 5:15 PM departure for London on an Air Canada 747. The kids are counting their Canadian change from purchases and wondering how they can get rid of their “loonies” and other coins.
FRIDAY, JUNE 27
So on this trip, we’ve had the smallest and the largest planes we’ve ever travelled in. The 747-400 we’re taking to London feels like a flying auditorium. At mealtime I had beef with a nice Bordeaux. Rebecca passed on dinner since I forgot to order vegetarian for her, which I will hopefully order on our return flight.
Right now it’s about 5:30 AM London time, 12:30 AM Cleveland time. We didn’t fly in darkness long since we were racing east across the Atlantic to meet the sun. They’re serving a continental breakfast which James has generously described as “disgusting”. Alex is quietly climbing the walls since he can’t smoke and he hates being cooped up in airplanes anyway.
So we landed right on time, zoomed through customs and pushed our bags on a cart through the airport to the underground station. None of our luggage had roller wheels and I was hauling an enormous duffle bag which would give me quite a workout in the days ahead. After picking up our three-day tube passes, we got on the Piccadilly line and took a long ride, bumping and swaying, to Earl’s Court where we made the wrong connection. Eventually, we took the Circle line to the Kensington High Street station, and from there we had what seemed like a five mile hike to our hostel lugging our concrete-heavy bags. After we checked into the Holland House youth hostel and bought locks to secure our stuff in the bedside lockers, we walked out to Kensington High Street just to look around. We were so exhausted, though, that we came back and slept from about noon to nearly 6:00 PM. After we got back up, we took the underground to Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square where, despite the rain, we hung around to enjoy the unique street life and listen to bands do covers of world music.
SATURDAY, JUNE 28
We still aren’t adjusted to the new time zone but we arose for a dubious English breakfast of baked beans and fried tomatoes at the hostel cafeteria. With that unusual fuel on board, it was off to see some sights. We took the Underground to the Tower of London. Nobody was really interested enough to pay to go inside, but we still got to see the Beefeaters in their ceremonial garb. Right next to it is the Tower Bridge over the Thames and James posed for a color-matched photo. After that we took the tube to the Houses of Parliament to see the Clock Tower which houses Big Ben, all of which was very big and very impressive. We then took a long walk over to Buckingham Palace for the changing of the guard. The crowds were huge and we really could only see the replacement guards led by bagpipers as they marched up to the gate. The Queen wasn’t there to chat with us but one could see that the Royal family really is a big tourist draw and undoubtedly has a huge economic value to the British economy.
After that we split up for a while. Alex and Rebecca took off with their underground passes and got culturally and botanically enriched at Kew Gardens. James and I took the tube to the Marble Arch and Hyde Park and, after lunch, planned to head for the nearby Alamo car rental office to confirm our reservation for the next day. While we were eating at a McDonald’s, I somehow lost the envelope containing our Alamo reservations, our Chunnel tickets and my international driver’s license. So much for my role as the responsible parent in charge. We hurried to Alamo to order a faxed confirmation sheet from Chicago. I then rushed to buy new Chunnel tickets for Monday’s trip to Paris. No further organizational catastrophes occurred that day, and we rejoined Rebecca and Alex, the cultural sophisticates, for dinner at the hostel. The evening’s entertainment was some great people-watching at Leicester Square.
SUNDAY, JUNE 29
This is our “stone mysteries” day for exploring Stonehenge and Avebury. A sense of dread weighed heavily on me because this outing would, of course, require me to drive on the left hand side – the wrong side! – of the road. I urged and cajoled the kids out of bed, into their clothes and onto the underground to pick up our car. When we got to Alamo, it transpired that they didn’t have the compact car with automatic transmission I had requested. I insisted on the automatic because driving a stick shift on the wrong side of the road would simply be too complicated. So we waited while they hunted for an automatic, and we didn’t get on the road until nearly midday. Luckily we had been upgraded to a luxury car and wound up driving a very nice and spacious Vauxhall station wagon. Believe it or not, I negotiated London traffic and finally got out on the open road to the Salisbury plain. It was a very impressive sight as we came over the crest of a hill and saw that great circle of stone standing silently in a field, in my mind at least, a mute witness from Atlantis. It had a heavy, dark presence. We quietly took in the scene, snapped some pictures and headed on to the stone circles at Avebury, which, unlike Stonehenge, aren’t fenced in. Sheep graze around them, tourists touch them and are free to wander the huge moat and bermed-earth collar around the town.
We were travelling through lovely Cotswold-style countryside with charming little towns and thatch-roofed inns along the way. Rebecca the Brave took the wheel of our Vauxhall and correctly drove on the wrong side of the road for a while. We made it back to London and I was very relieved to get that vehicle returned intact to its rightful owners at Alamo.
MONDAY, JUNE 30
Off to Paris! I wheedled and poked everyone out of bed early so we would have time at the Waterloo train station before our Eurostar bullet train departed. The station was a long walk from the hostel, so we took a taxi all the way to Waterloo for twelve pounds. I was glad to be early because the ticket counter idiot couldn’t find our tickets. He sent us to the SCNF (French Rail) who directed us back to Waterloo where they eventually found them. So we shot off to Paris in three hours on a train that was a shining piece of modernity. The bathrooms onboard were all state-of-the-art with touchless soap, touchless water and touchless hand-drying. A physician and I did a brief assessment of a woman who felt like fainting but decided that no intervention was indicated. After our arrival at the Gare du Nord, we struggled briefly with the language barrier, trying to read signs and find the underground. When we got to the Metro station, a hustler tried to sell us three-day subway passes for only 145,000 francs ($30,000). I thought that was a little expensive and declined. The Paris subway is in fact tres logique and we were able to figure out the way to the D’artagnan youth hostel on Rue Vitruve in the quartier Felix Terrier, quite close to Pere Lachaise cemetery. We got a family room on the second floor for two nights. This hostel operated with a certain Gallic flair and had a bar which stayed open until the wee hours of the morning. Their reservation operations weren’t online yet and I remember having to make an international phone call from Cleveland to secure a place for us.
We locked up our bags and had dinner in the hostel’s Southwestern-style restaurant El Paso. That was followed by a walk in the rain to the Port de Bagnolet Metro stop where we figured out the route to La Tour Eiffel. We could see it almost as soon as we got out of the subway. It was beautifully lighted and really magnificent. Naturally we did the touristy thing and paid the full freight to ride the elevator all the way to the top for an unforgettable view of the city at night.
TUESDAY, JULY 1
All of us slept late like dead people. I got up at noon and got yelled at by the cleaning staff for not vacating our rooms for the day. I just said, “nous sommes tres fatigues”. We were just exhausted from all the cumulative travel and really needed the rest. The kids slept until 2:00 PM. By this time Rebecca realized that she had left her diary and a paperback on the train from London. The diary was a priceless item, so she was pretty upset. In the afternoon, she and Alex took the Metro to the Gare du Nord to check at the lost and found, but with no luck and little help from the indifferent staff there, so they didn’t have a very productive afternoon. James and I had gone to see Notre Dame cathedral and the nice weather made it a pleasant outing. It was sunny and there were swarms of tourists in the plaza in front of the church. The two of us wandered the interior in a twilight of votive candles and stained glass. Back outside, we watched a group of inline skaters run obstacle courses, weaving through rows of cups forwards and backwards.
We reunited in the late afternoon and kind of scrambled for dinner – some baguettes, some McDonalds. I ate at the hostel restaurant and, out of curiosity, ordered a horse steak, which turned out to be a memorably bad culinary experience. While Rebecca was hanging out in the hostel bar with some guy from San Diego, I was trying to get the waiter’s attention to pay my bill. I tried repeatedly and waited and waited but with no luck. Finally, with a clear conscience, I just got up and left, having been fed for free. Rebecca was still being a bar fly when the boys and I crashed for the night.
WEDNESDAY, JULY 2
We struggled out of bed barely in time to avoid the maids. After an inadequate continental breakfast, we pointed our compass at the Louvre where we waited in the rain outdoors before being allowed inside through the fancy new I. M. Pei-designed glass pyramid in the central courtyard. The French kings would have been surprised to see that addition to their palace. After appreciating some Egyptian antiquities, we followed the crowds to the Italian art section and saw the Mona Lisa in its bullet-proof and flame-proof protective shield. The painting itself is rather dark and a little underwhelming. We also saw the Venus de Milo and the Winged Victory of Samothrace. That was easy. We knocked off the Louvre in an hour and took the Metro to Montmartre in hopes of a break in the rain but no such luck. However, I was able to reflect on my previous visit to that neighborhood when I was in college and had a brief career as a wino, sitting on the steps of the Sacre-Coeur basilica, drinking vin ordinaire out of a paper bag for breakfast, proving that, in the long run, not every period of dissolute behavior leads to chronic substance abuse.
Since we could find no place to eat lunch in Montmartre, we took the tube back to the hostel and ate there. When the rain finally let up, our late afternoon activity was a walk to Pere Lachaise cemetery. The ghosts of Edith Piaf, Frederic Chopin and Oscar Wilde begged us to stop by and pay our respects, but we were on a modern mission and proceeded straight to Jim Morrison’s grave, a modest site decorated with faded flowers and spray paint, and visited by a steady stream of young people, making it the fourth most visited grave in Paris. Like the Mona Lisa, not very exciting, but we could now say we’d been there.
THURSDAY, JULY 3
We’re finally, really, back on the road today. After checking out of the D’Artagnan hostel, we took the Metro to the Hertz rental office at Porte Maillot on the northwest edge of the city. Our car was a very nice stick-shift Renault Laguna and by midday we headed out, only to be ensnared by the maze of Paris’ one-way streets. Eventually, we found our way onto the Peripherique ring road and drove southeast to the exit for Fountainbleu and Lyon. Our hope was to get as close to Switzerland as possible that day. Using the hostel guidebook, we picked out the town of Pontarlier – less than ten miles from the border – as our destination. Our first few hours on a French superhighway were very enlightening [read: terrifying]. The French, like all other Europeans, drive as fast as lightning and it’s just dangerous to drive at slow, American speeds. We became accustomed to driving 80 to 100 MPH all day long. However, the roads themselves and the signage were excellent and we easily found our way to the very quiet hostel in Pontarlier. The price was right at about $10.00 per person. Rebecca crashed early, but the boys and I went out on the town and had dinner at The Great Wall, a nice little Chinese restaurant.
FRIDAY, JULY 4
We got up fairly early, but a large group of young men staying at the hostel had already produced bikes, helmets and packs to pedal off in the rain. After we ourselves got on the road about 10:30, we made a brief stop at an American-style Geant supermarket to buy a swimsuit for Alex, some superglue and three souvenir bottles of wine. We also stocked up on some rock-hard pain rustique, some smelly sheep’s cheese and some fruit. Then it was back on the road headed south from Pontarlier to the Swiss border, where they didn’t so much as look at our passports, which means the kids haven’t collected too many stamps so far. The countryside changed from French-speaking lowlands around Lausanne and Montreux to an alpine, German-speaking environment as we headed up the Rhone valley. Our destination for the day was Zermatt. We stopped in Visp and after a terrible time looking for the train station, we finally parked and took the 3:30 PM BVZ (Brig-Visp-Zermatt) rack-and-pinion railroad up a steep valley past waterfalls, flower-bedecked chalets and rockslides. After we passed the tiny hamlet of Tasch, we arrived at the chic, wealthy micropolis of Zermatt, set in a steep valley with – on a clear day – a spectacular view of the Matterhorn.
Though we had some brief moments of sunshine and blue sky which allowed us to see some of the surrounding snow-capped peaks, the Matterhorn remained hidden. We wandered the town to find lodging and after finding that the hostel was $120 per night, we picked the $180 Arca Solebad, a luxury ski hotel which had a heated indoor swimming pool. Our accommodations gave us a two room suite with a loft, a complete kitchen and more luxurious amenities than the kids were likely to see for the remainder of the trip.
SATURDAY, JULY 5
Our swim yesterday put us right for a good night’s sleep. Alex, James and I barely made it downstairs in time for an elegant buffet breakfast which was more than we could eat: croissants, numerous breads, cold meats, hot coffee and chocolate, yogurt, fresh and pureed fruits, cereals and juices. With our tanks full, the team assembled and wandered to the tourist office near the train station to get a hiking map of the valley. The weather was completely clouded over and raining so we decided against taking the relatively expensive Gornergrat train up to the Gornergletscher since there wouldn’t be any view. We opted instead for a hike to Zmutt, a tiny hamlet of 15-20 houses up the valley. Our chosen route was the longer, steeper approach to Zmutt and, though quite a tiring climb, took us through lovely country filled with racards, waterfalls and fields of wild flowers. We were pretty well soaked by the time we got to Zmutt and welcomed the chance to sit down in the Jagerstube restaurant and dry out a bit. This place was no shack but a beautifully decorated inn with very good food. There were Ibex skulls and horns mounted on the walls and a large collection of cowbells. Four hot chocolates started us off. James had a ham sandwich, Alex a bratwurst and I had a mushroom omelet. Rebecca went vegetarian. The return hike was easy. On our way back through Zermatt, we bought some groceries and Alex cooked up a great meal: pasta with spaghetti sauce, sautéed ground beef with onions and peppers, all topped off with a good Swiss beer. I made a call to my parents after dinner to give them an update on our doings. It’s remarkable what changes have taken place since the 1970s when Royse and I travelled through Europe. International phone calls are easy direct dial, ATMs are everywhere, and nearly everyone takes credit cards.
SUNDAY, JULY 6
This is a travelling day, although the kids were half-hoping they could stay in Zermatt longer for a chance to see the Matterhorn. Early in the morning we could see the Klein Matterhorn crystal clear to the south, but the skies quickly clouded over and we took the 11:15 local train down to Visp, found our car to be in good order and hit the road for Innsbruck. I had picked what I thought was a direct, time-efficient route but it turned out to involve a lot of twisting mountain roads and a hair-raising trip over the Furka Pass. On the way up, sections of road had been washed out by heavy rains. Near the pass, we stopped for a close-up look at the Furkagletscher, a frozen river of blue-green ice producing a stream of meltwater. Descending the pass on the other side was downright frightening as we plunged into thick fog, negotiating hairpin turns with enormous tour buses looming out of the pea soup on our left (uphill) side and a 5000 foot abyss on our right. Finally, after coming out of the fog into the valley, we chose the more indirect but much faster superhighway route to the Austrian border. With Rebecca at the wheel, we made a quick traverse of Lichtenstein and lead-footed it to Innsbruck and the large well-organized hostel there. I had wanted to show the kids the quaint old town but never could find it, so Innsbruck was just a quick pit stop. Also, it rained, then rained some more, and then kept on raining. We had gotten an ample dose of northern European weather.
MONDAY, JULY 7
We were eager for the sun and for warmth, so we hit the road headed south. There was a long wait to go through customs and tolls at the Brenner Pass but eventually we were on a long downhill run out of the mountains and away from the cold and the rain. It got warmer as we descended and by the time we turned east at fair Verona, where the Bard laid his scene, it must have been in the eighties. Rebecca was again at the wheel and we flew into Venice, parked at the twenty dollar per day garage and took the vaporetto [water taxi] to the Zitelle dock on Giudecca island. As we approached the dock, we could see the big Ostello Venezia from the boat. It wasn’t full as I had feared, and after we settled in and had a hostel dinner, we took the water taxi to the Piazza San Marco and walked around entranced by the narrow streets, the music and especially the Grand Canal by the Rialto Bridge. We headed back to the hostel with the plan to have dinner tomorrow on the Grand Canal after a gondola ride. I had forgotten how utterly charming and romantic Venice is. James remarked, unprompted, “This is where I want to go for my honeymoon!”.
TUESDAY, JULY 8
This is our full day in the queen of the Adriatic, La Serenissima. We grabbed a quick breakfast in the hostel dining room, where we met Jan Lytje-Hansen, a Danish accounting student headed for Greece. He had been through the States and spoke English like a surfer dude. We hopped the vaporetto to San Zaccaria and walked along the shore to the 1997 presentation of the Bienalle art exhibition. I had first seen the Bienalle with my parents in the 1960s. Rebecca quickly had her fill of art and headed off on her own. The boys and I strolled the permanent exhibits for a while but we soon each split off on individual tangents. I headed straight back to the hostel. Alex wandered onto a military base and got chased away. James got lost for several hours in the back streets of the main island. Rebecca, as it tuned out, took a boat to Murano, saw glass blowing and fell into a fountain. These various adventures and trips by water taxi were greatly facilitated by the fact that travelers on Venice’s vaporetti have a long-established tradition of never buying tickets, even though the city maintains toll booths at all the taxi stops. I’m quite sure there would be citizen riots if the city ever tried to make travelers actually pay for their free transportation. This is just another aspect of life in Venice that makes it unique.
For dinner, after a gondola ride with a real singing gondolier, we wandered to the Grand Canal and, with the Rialto bridge in view and more gondolas gliding by, had a lovely meal at the Ristorante Terrazza Sommariva. The bill came to about 190,000 pre-Euro lira, allowing me to imagine that by paying such an enormous sum for food we must be titled nobility. Afterwards we wandered through the Piazza San Marco, had espresso coffees, listened to the bands and looked at prints and watercolors on our last night in Venezia.
WEDNESDAY, JULY 9
This is our “headin’ ‘cross eye-talia” day. We checked out of our hostel, got on the free water taxi and retrieved our car undamaged from the garage. With Alex navigating, we hit the autostrada and flew along at 160 KPH past fair Verona and Brescia on our way towards Torino. The day’s biggest honor was being passed by a red Ferrari travelling at the speed of light. We also made great time and got into Nice, France in the late afternoon. We headed to the tourist office at the Gare Thiers. They found some beds for us at the Relais International de la Jeunesse on Avenue Scuderi in the hills on the north side of town. We fought snarled traffic and winding “sens unique” streets to get there but eventually got settled in for $15 per person. For some reason we fought the traffic back into town to eat dinner near the station. Our room at the Relais was large and pleasant with four beds, a private bath and a nice view of the hills surrounding Nice. On the Relais’ terrace, I chatted with a Frenchman who lived in the north but who was here in the south fixing up a house he had bought as an investment. He told a funny story about a trip he once took to the Atlas Mountains in Morocco. He was kidnapped and held for a very large ransom. However, he wasn’t rich or important and his family refused to pay anything at all for him. His kidnappers eventually let him go for about ten dollars.
THURSDAY, JULY 10
We’re spending one full day in Nice, so we slept in and had the maids hounding us to get out. Finally, we piled into the car and headed down to the center of town. While the kids hung out at the stony, not-so-“Nice” beach and got their first eyeful of a Mediterranean topless scene, I found a coin laundry and spent $30.00 and five hours doing everybody’s dirty things. I passed part of the time talking with Erin, a UNC architecture student. The kids found me and, since the laundry still wasn’t done, they opted for the tiring walk up the hill to the Relais rather than wait for Dad to finish the clothes. When I finally did get back, we went out for a nice cafeteria-style Chinese dinner.
FRIDAY, JULY 11
On the road again, this time to Barcelona. Being on those superhighways is like being strapped to a rocket. We flew along the French Riviera, shot past St. Tropez and Marseilles, and closed in on Perpignan, Canet-Plage and the Pyrenees. The winds along the coast by the French-Spanish border were incredibly strong, which explained the many wind turbines. There were even wind socks along the highway edge to warn motorists of wind direction and velocity. The real warning should have been directed to anyone trying to drive through the steep, twisting, Medieval streets of Barcelona. We got horribly lost in that tangled mess looking for the hostel. We would come to stop signs with the car pointed upwards at a forty-five degree angle and then have to grind the clutch to move forward when gravity wanted to pull you back down the hill. Rebecca tried that for a while then turned driving duties over to me. We did manage a brief stop at Gaudi’s basilica of the Sacred Family. We gave up on ever finding the Barcelona hostel and, orienting ourselves by the sun, we headed south out of Barcelona towards Tarragona. We stumbled on a delightful little seaside town called Coma-Ruga. It had a great beach and we stayed at the Gallo Negro hotel for a reasonable price. From the balcony of our second floor room, we listened to gypsies playing music in the streets and asking us to throw money.
SATURDAY, JULY 12
This was the kid’s first day at a real beach. Off they went with food, drink and sunblock they wouldn’t put on. Two bed sheets from Hillcrest hospital had mysteriously stowed away in my duffle bag and the kids used them as the center of their beach operations. My assignment was to head off to the supermercado Caprabo and stock up on detergent, food and other necessities. The kids came back from the beach at around 3:00 PM, heaped scorn on the mutton-smelling “ewe” cheese I had bought and loitered until Spanish dinner time, which is never earlier than 8:00 PM. We had three different kinds of paella at a nice sidewalk café near our hotel.
SUNDAY, JULY 13
On this travel day, we hoped to get more than halfway to Algeciras, Spain – our departure point for Morocco. We rolled out of Coma-Ruga at about 10:00 AM with the hope of getting past Cartagena by the end of the day. We picked out the coastal town of Aguilas and got in there late afternoon. It was a good-sized place and, as we found out from the tourist office volunteers, the hostel was actually in a little hamlet called Calarreona a few kilometers to the south. After several false starts and numerous questions, we finally found the hostel – an unmarked building in a kind of school complex. The person in charge spoke no English but said he had a room for $15 for all of us. After he had evicted some squatters who were hunkered down in our room, we finally settled into our minimalist quarters, a clean but unventilated concrete box. We celebrated by having a nice dinner back in Aguilas after an outstanding swim right outside the hostel. We swam from about 6:30 to 8:00 PM in beautiful, pounding surf. Rebecca wants to come back here with Molly someday and live for a while.
MONDAY, JULY 14
Our southern juggernaut continues. I didn’t look at the map carefully when we started out from Aguilas, so we wound up taking the coastal route which was part superhighway but also part local road. It was slow, frustrating going, even though the scenery was pretty. We finally pulled into Algeciras at 4:30 PM, found a garage to leave the car in, and bought tickets for the 5:30 PM ferry to Tangiers. When we got to the dock, however, they wouldn’t let us on for some unexplained reason. So we sat around in the rain and hung out with Jonas, another dude form Denmark. We finally caught the 7:00 PM ferry. From the ship we could see the coast of Africa and were escorted by a pod of playful dolphins. I noticed a man in a crisp uniform going from passenger to passenger. He would ask for their passports and tickets, examine them, mark them with a pen and ask for money as he returned the documents. He was very courteous and pleasant but something didn’t seem quite right. When he got to me and made his pitch, I asked him who he worked for and why he was charging money. He started to look nervous and immediately walked away. My opinion was that he was a scam artist. One thing that wasn’t a scam was the requirement to fill out a landing card and get my passport stamped, which I forgot to do, so that delayed us about forty minutes after we landed, waiting for the slow-motion officials to rectify my error. I was sure we had missed the overnight train to Marrakech until someone pointed out that Moroccan time is two hours behind Spanish time. So it was 9:00 PM in Tangiers instead of 11:00 PM. After a few hassles, I cashed some travellers checks, bought tickets and caught the 10:15 PM overnight express to Marrakech. The sleeper cars were sold out so we went first class sitting up, much to the kids’ disappointment. Our cabin mates were a woman and her small child. I fearlessly tried some of my fragmentary Arabic on her. She wasn’t impressed, but she was shocked and amused when Rebecca spread herself across the boys laps as they were trying to fall asleep. What a circus.
TUESDAY, JULY 15
We slept fitfully as the train rolled through the night. Dawn came and we got to see some of the Moroccan countryside – villages, sheep, goats, little kids and one camel. Our cabin mate lady proudly pointed out various scenic vistas. I think I responded by saying “Jameel jidan” [very beautiful]. After we arrived in Marrakech, we bought a map, hauled our bags to the tourist office and then, on somebody’s recommendation, walked to the Farouk Hotel, which turned out to be an unspeakably dirty flea bag. Rebecca and Alex hung around in the Farouk lobby while James and I went out to find another place to stay. During our search, we stopped for a very nice lunch of omelets at the Chawarma restaurant. Eventually we came up with the four-star Nassim Hotel. Despite reassuring comments from some French hippies and from the maids at the Farouk, who said they would certainly “changer les drapes” [change the sheets], I told the owner of the Farouk we were going elsewhere. He looked really hurt even though I actually paid him for one night. Within two hours we had checked in to the Nassim, which, for $30 a night less than the Paris or London hostels, gave us a two bedroom, two bath connecting suite with cable TV, a fridge, a pool and absolute cleanliness. So right away we started feeling good about Marrakech. We all showered and took long naps before we went out on the town. We took a horse-drawn carriage for sixty dirham to the Place Jamaa Al Fna. It was late afternoon and a cacophonous, surreal human circus was in full swing. The place was swarming with snake charmers, fire breathers, dancers, musicians, beggars, henna artists, food stalls and water vendors. They all competed for your attention and your business. After that, we made our first of many forays into the covered back street markets of the old city. This is what I wanted the kids to see and they were as transfixed by it as they were by the Jamaa Al Fna. Here were all sorts of shops, ateliers and cafes, all small and packed cheek-by-jowl with one another. Shafts of light pierced the gloom through gaps in the tin roofs and awnings. Music blared, merchants implored, shoppers haggled, and the aroma of strange food and the scent of spices filled the air. Eventually, we took a Mercedes taxi back to the hotel and had dinner at the Chawarma . The food was great and afterwards we bought fruit, bread and cheese for breakfast, watched NBC Europe cable TV back in our room, and reflected on a full and exciting day.
WEDNESDAY, JULY 16
We slept pretty late and weren’t up and moving until about midday. Yesterday I had checked into doing some things outside Marrakech but, even with the tourist office trying to help, it was an expensive and difficult process to get up into the Atlas mountains and Berber villages, so I had to scrub my plans for camel treks out of Zagora. Instead we caught a ride with the same buggy driver and headed back to the Jamaa Al Fna. Along the way, a guy pulled up on a motor scooter and, as our buggy rolled down the street, we hired him to guide us through the streets of the old city. So we plunged into previously unseen back alleys with Abdullah. He pointed out old walls, ancient arches and other antiquities. Near the spice market, Rebecca came upon a shop with chameleons, blocks of sandalwood, chunks of antimony, and a thousand other mysteries. After that we went to the Tuareg House, a well-known local landmark and climbed narrow stairs lined with carpets and wall hangings to get a nice view of the city. After the rooftop panoramas, the owner of both the building and the rug business it contained invited us into his showroom and served us sweet mint tea. Even though it became obvious very quickly that the owner’s friendliness and hospitality were part of a sales pitch, it was a great experience for the kids, and I found myself being skillfully guided into buying a nice kilim rug. The haggling and bargaining were great fun. Even paying by Visa was an adventure, at least for the seller. He hadn’t seen many credit cards and had to call his banker to be reassured that I wasn’t trying to hustle him. We finished the day by wandering more back streets and taking a taxi back to the hotel.
THURSDAY. JULY 17
Our last day in Marrakech. While the kids gradually got moving, I took a petite taxi over to the train station and got four sleeper car tickets for the overnight return to Tangier. The train was to leave at 8:30 PM, so that gave us the whole afternoon and part of the evening to fritter away. Predictably, we gravitated to the old city. Rebecca and Alex went off on their own. James and I wandered the covered back streets and found the spice shop with the chameleons. Later in the afternoon, we all rendezvoused there and Rebecca bought some henna and spices. She also saw a beautiful fish skin drum that she wanted really badly. I played the ogre and said no. Finally, we picked up our bags at the Nassim Hotel after a farewell-to-Marrakech dinner at the Chawarma restaurant. It took us fifteen minutes but we finally hailed a taxi and arrived at the station with a bunch of other Americans. By midnight we were tucked into our sleeper car beds, watching the twinkling carpet of yellow lights from Marrakech recede in the night as our train headed north.
FRIDAY, JULY 18
Our train got into Tangier by 7:00 AM. We caught a taxi to the dock and by 9:00 AM we were back on the ferry headed for Spain. Our car was in fine shape after three days in the garage. Since it had been surrounded by Porsches, BMWs and Mercedes, it probably hadn’t been an attractive target for thieves. So we hit the road and headed for the Algarve coast along the southernmost edge of Portugal. Two Americans we had met on the train said the islands off the coast of Olhao were nice. By the time we got there, the last ferry had already left for Armona island, our destination, so we stayed at the ultra modest City Lodge Pensione in Olhao. I remember meeting with the owner and making arrangements in German, a language neither of us spoke. We had a fairly expensive dinner served by a grumpy waiter in the heart of unglamorous Olhao.
SATURDAY, JULY 19
We decided that we would just visit Armona island as a day trip, so we left our car in Olhao and took the ferry to the island in the morning. It was a delightful place with white-washed vacation cottages, shops and a great open beach without too many people. I shopped at a little grocery store for lunch, took a quick swim, and hung out in the shade at a beachfront restaurant while the kids baked in the sun. We had dinner back in Olhao during which Rebecca ill-advisedly ate some mushrooms and some seafood when her stomach had already started to bother her. She started having painful cramps and diarrhea and spent the rest of the evening in bed while Alex, James and I finished a huge seafood dinner.
SUNDAY, JULY 20
We had vowed to get up early to head for the pays basque [Basque country] but we didn’t roll out of Olhao until 11:00 AM. Since both Rebecca and Alex were starting to feel sick, I tried to enforce a bland diet and did all the driving. I had a pretty heavy foot, the traffic was very light and most of the day’s driving was done at speeds just short of liftoff, as we literally traversed the entire north-south length of Spain. We flew by Cordoba and Madrid. Burgos shot by in a blur at sunset. A nice roadside hotel in Altube manifested itself as our accommodations. The two men behind the front desk looked Basque to my eye, but I resisted the temptation to engage in casual banter about their Atlantean ancestry or their violent campaign for an independent homeland. We were just thankful for the two nice rooms in which we gratefully crashed.
MONDAY, JULY 21
As it turned out, we were only a few miles from the ocean near Bilbao, so with a few hours of easy driving, we were across the border into France near Biarritz. We got off the freeway and headed down hill to the beach, which is absolutely spectacular – a broad, sandy expanse dotted with enormous, three-story boulders relentlessly pounded by the strong Atlantic surf. Needless to say, the kids spent the whole afternoon there swimming and sunbathing. James was the ruling surf beast and spent nearly all his time flirting with disaster and being ground into shark bait by the vicious waves. At about 4:00 PM, we got back on the road and drove north on route A63 across the flat, sparsely populated pinelands of the Gironde. We had picked a little town called Pilat Plage on the coast west of Bordeaux. To reach it, we had to drive through the horribly congested traffic of Arcachon, a nearby resort community. We never made it to Pilat Plage but instead stopped at a campground near Pyla-sur-mere and got a nice little rigid tent for $50 per night. The most remarkable feature of this area was the 100 foot high sand dunes which separate the campground from the ocean. You can see the dunes through the pine trees, like a strange wall. After settling into our tent, we made the exhausting climb to the top of a dune and walked over several ridges for a birds-eye view of the sea. Rebecca’s and Alex’s stomachs are feeling better so we had an overpriced pizza dinner at the campground restaurant. Before we all turned in for the night, Rebecca and James climbed the dune again for a memorable sunset over the Atlantic.
TUESDAY, JULY 22
We plan to spend the day here in Pyla-sur-mere. The only things on the schedule are wandering the dunes and hanging out. We all slept late and James and I barely made it to the traditionally small and measly French breakfast offered at the campground. I did two loads of laundry and hung them out to dry around the bungalow. Mid-afternoon we drove to the nearby Intermarche supermarket and got fixins for dinner. After more dune climbing and napping, Alex and I prepared some badly under-cooked rice to go with two very large and tasty trout filets served with lemon sauce. We were stuffed. While I did the dishes with the other parents, the kids took a final sunset dune hike and snapped some pictures.
WEDNESDAY, JULY 23
Today we are back on the road across France and headed for Paris. We left Pyla Camping at about 9:30 AM, headed along local roads to the superhighway near Bordeaux. Once on the racetrack, we sailed past Saintes, Poitiers, Tours and Orleans, then made a nice cut across pretty farming countryside to Chartres, which is our last stop on the road before returning the car tomorrow in Paris. Just off the autoroute in Chartres, we found a cluster of motels. We settled on the Villages Hotel with a family room for about 190 francs [$35.00], quite a good value, cheap and clean. After settling in, Alex was the only one who would join me to go see Chartres cathedral, which I had known about from my aesthetics class in high school. We admired its dissimilar spires, had a nice walk through the interior and took some pictures. In the square outside the church, we visited a medieval-themed gift shop which offered suits of armor and genuine broad swords suitable for any urgent decapitation needs you might have. Later I got the kids to help me wash and vacuum the car so that it finally looked quite clean and re-rentable. Since Rebecca is still having some stomach troubles, she passed on dinner while the guys ate at a nearby McDonalds. We’re actively stripping down our collective baggage since tomorrow we’ll be car-less and hand-toting everything.
THURSDAY, JULY 24
A short driving day between Chartres and Paris but it meant driving into heavy traffic and onto the Peripherique ring road and hunting for the Port Maillot exit. After I negotiated those moves, we got onto the Champs Elysee. I pulled over near the subway station and dropped the kids there with all our luggage. They waited while I made an uneventful return of the car to Hertz. Our next move was back onto the Metro for a ride to Port de Bagnolet and a hike down the street to the D’Artagnan hostel. We threw our bags in a locker and took the subway to Notre Dame so that Rebecca could finally see a cathedral. We headed back to the hostel for our 3:00 PM check-in, got dinner from a Chinese take-out, and then at 9:00 PM watched Humphrey Bogart in “Casablanca”. The kids had never seen it before but liked it very much. We stayed up till 11:30 PM.
FRIDAY, JULY 25
Today it’s off to London. Our Eurostar train leaves at 12:19 PM. We left the D’Artagnan hostel for the last time, trudged up Rue Vitruve and Rue Davout to the Port de Bagnolet metro stop and got to the Gare du Nord in time to allow Rebecca to check one more time at the lost and found for her diary and paperback. No luck, even though the man behind the counter really tried. Finally we boarded our Eurostar and had a glass-smooth 300 KPH ride across the French countryside, under the sleeve and into London. We had a sunny ride in a bright red cab to the Holland House hostel. After we settled in, we strolled out to the Kensington Safeway and got some groceries. Rebecca bought a book and Alex got a Reebok T-shirt. After nibbling our way through dinner, we headed out at 7:00 PM to the movies. Rebecca opted for “One Fine Day” and the three guys checked out “Con Air”. After that we paid a quick farewell visit to Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square. It was a warm summer evening filled with great crowds and street entertainment. We were back in the hostel and in bed by midnight. I couldn’t get a cab booked to the Kensington High Street underground station, so we’ll be hoofing it tomorrow.
SATURDAY, JULY 26
Home we go! It was a great trip, but we all want to be stateside. I was up by 7:00 AM. Rebecca got up pretty early and we all had our breakfasts of various sizes and descriptions. By 8:55 AM we were checked out of the hostel and walking through Holland Park. It was good we started early since the tube ride to Heathrow was pretty long, and the airport itself is immense and crowded. Eventually we boarded our silver bird with the red maple leaf on the tail and lifted off at 1:30 PM.