The 11:10 to Prague

   To a range of responses generally ranging from the bewildered to the bemused and on to the mildly annoyed, I manfully try to address the host countrymen in their native tongue. I greet them with a bonjour, guten tag or buon giorno. When it’s time for the check, I ask for the l’addition s’il vous plait, die rechnung bitte or ill conto grazie. But all my attempts to address my Czech hosts in their native tongue were met with complete incomprehension. I think it’s the Czech alphabet that’s my problem.

With a combination of broken German, English, sign language and baby talk, I was reassured by the Heidelberg ticket agent that our connection to Frankfurt would not split into two trains, and Carol and I could relax for the short, one-hour trip, and then on to our ultimate destination of Dresden.

   The problem with travel in Europe for me are the cities with “must see” sights that you haven’t seen yet. For a mindless wanderer, a must see creates an obligation, a commitment to accomplish, an achievement requiring plans, knowledge of opening times, tickets, lines, security checks, amidst a sea of selfies, tour group flags – and for reasons that completely escape me – cone-licking tourists in mock poses with a fondness for miniaturizing the particular must see into something that appears to be hand held.

Sometime early on this current trip, Carol and I began to think we might not be going to Hell after all. The combination of perfect timing, perfect opportunity and perfect luck that had befallen us in our previous travels had redemptively abandoned us so far. Where once we had been Roadrunner, we now seemed to be experiencing the aggregatable fates of Wile E. Coyote.

It is estimated there are 850,000 bicycles in Amsterdam. About 750,000 nearly ran me over during our stay there. By the time we left, the shrill little bell rings from cyclists warning me they were about to lay me out flat had begun to sound like a chronic medical condition. The Dutch are polite enough about not running you over, but to a man and woman, they claim their bike paths prohibitively as their own. The city claims they fish anywhere from 12 -15,000 bikes out of the canals every year, and several times I fought an urge to add to that total – while the bikes were parked or otherwise.

   Except my readers, who will hear about nuisance and delays because it’s an integral part of the meaning of travel for Carol and me. Carol handles nuisance and delay with the peace of a monk and the patience of a pointillist painter. My handling varies, but tends toward an Indiana Jones sense of imminent peril. Between the two of us, we have a travel approach that is a comforting blend of serenity and an urgent sense of gloom.

  I’d managed to book us into yet another disappointing accommodation for our last stop on our Wild West adventure. To top it off, I’d booked us in for two days. Two days in a place that when Carol looked up what there was  to do there as we were driving towards it, reported to me, “There’s no there there.”

  Once I’m going, I want to keep going. So when Carol suggested another stop at yet another scenic overlook, I wanted to vote against it. As is only occasionally the case with Carol’s suggestions, the decision was made before all the votes were counted.

   Nostalgia, when done right, is charming. When we rolled into Williams, AZ prior to our train trip to the Grand Canyon, I felt we had discovered a little town that had gotten nostalgia just right. Carol was still a bit unsettled from seeing our accommodations for the next two nights. Even after I had explained how the guy backing up next to us in his pickup with his personal belongings neatly tied off in hefty bags had made his reservation using Expedia.com, she remained skeptical, suspecting I’d once again booked us into a hotel occupied by characters in a Rob Zombie movie.

   I can sum up my initial view of the Grand Canyon this way: totally fake. There is no way a river is responsible for what you see here. The Mississippi River has been depositing Minnesota onto Louisiana for eons, but it still looks like Louisiana, which is to say, an unreclaimed swamp. That’s what rivers are supposed to do. They do not paint breathtaking landscapes like they were van Gogh or Monet. Even the little kid standing next to me told his mommy, “it looks fake.”