As pleasant and smooth as it was, the six-hour train trip into Barcelona gave me the urge to spend the first day in town with boots on the ground. It was a fifty-minute walk from my hotel to the Sagrada Familia basilica and that seemed doable. I need a lot of walking on this trip to make up for not taking my daily walk/jog along with me. I wasn’t in a picturesque part of the city, but as I approached the $300 per night Hotel Majestic, they’d set up a piano on the sidewalk as a way of drumming up some walk-in trade. It made for a nice rest break. I also observed that the clean sidewalk and streets are maintained by hand with straw brooms and oversized dustpans.

Even as the pain of her absence remains palpable after six years, Kent Hooper entertains no illusions about life and death. “Aileen is dead. I’m not going to see her again.” That hard fact does not impact his attitude about “getting back on the horse,” as it were. “I had the one great relationship in my life. There’s probably no number two out there. In many ways, I still feel like I’m married and I’m OK with that.”

  Normally, I sleep like a colicky baby. I get maybe four hours of sleep on an average night. Throw jet lag into the mix, and you have the makings of a treatable insomniac.
      For example, by the time I arrived in Barcelona late Friday afternoon, I had logged a total of two or three hours of sleep in the last fifty or so. When Carolyn and I traveled together, she worried I wasn’t getting enough sleep. “You’ll hit the wall by the aftenoon,” she would tell me, full of concern I wouldn’t be able to enjoy the day. Never happened. Now that I am traveling alone, the only person I can cause worry with is me, and I’m not bothered at all. I simply use the middle of the night as productively as I would the middle of the day. For instance, I’m writing this at 3:30 in the morning.

I didn’t get that shower after all. Sometime after 10:00 p.m. last night, I heard a key in the main
door, followed by the rustle of feet. Since the owner required us to remove our shoes, my new
roomies saw that someone was already in one of the rooms. When they also saw their room
had been slept in and not cleaned, it didn’t matter whether it had been Goldilocks or not. They
knocked politely on my door, and inquired whether I had the right room. I told them I had no
idea, but that it seemed to be first come, first served. A quiet ensued, and I decided it would be the friendly, youth hostel thing to do to go out and introduce myself to my bunkmates.

Beginning back at home, this trip unfolded more or less methodically and according to plan and expectations. Claude was packed and ready to go the night before. I even thought I’d noticed a yawn and a languorous stretch from him on the couch, surprised perhaps I was zipping him up with room to spare in his confines, as if he had not overeaten his dinner and there remained appetite for dessert. I figure I can stretch it maybe to ten days at best before I’ll either have to do a laundry or face potential recriminations from my fellow train passengers like, “since when are Gypsies riding in first class?”

These are examples of my travel goals:

So far I have two objectives for the Spain part of my trip. I’ve done a ton of background reading for this leg, including Michener’s exhaustive and exhausting Iberia, Zoellner’s chapter on the AVE high-speed train from Barcelona to Madrid in his wonderfully researched Train, Jack Hitt’s mostly enjoyable memoir of his pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostella, Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon and Cervantes’s Don Quixote. I’ve also digested a stomach churning account of the Spanish Inquisition, and browsed several other weighty tomes. After all this, here’s what I’ve come up to do in Spain: I want to find a good bowl of paella and an English edition of Jan Morris’s Spain. That’s it, you say? Bear with me, though. (I know that’s bearing a lot.)

My second train trip to Portland had a shakedown element to it as well. I’d purchased one of those eVests to carry all my valuables on my person while traveling. This would increase the security of those valuables, as well as making access to things like passport, money, tickets and tablet a matter of unzipping the right pocket on the vest, rather than packing and repacking Claude to get at those things. Smart travel move on my part.

Paul Theroux is my train travel mentor. Tom Zoellner is my train hero. Nevertheless, when I head to Spain, Italy and beyond, I have no intention of attempting to travel in either of their footsteps, or according to their goals. If you chose to vicariously ride along with me, you’re going to be riding First Class. If First Class is full, we’re sticking around town an extra day until there’s a seat. I’ll ride Second Class when that’s all that’s available on a short haul, but that’s as déclassé as I’m getting. If you want to share a low-rent travel experience with me, just wait a bit until I check into the hotel.

It’s been almost six months since riding the French rails for two weeks, and about a week until the adventure resumes, this time for a much longer and broader trek. When I leave again it will have been almost a year of living alone. During this time, I delivered much of Carolyn’s personal effects to her family and one of the Jeeps to her high school friend. Her closet is empty, and so is the garage, as the local PBS affiliate picked up the second Jeep, which Carolyn had owned for twenty years. I am now Wheeless in Seattle by choice. Yet, with all those material possessions gone, my experience so far is that our home is more filled with Carolyn’s spirit than before I left. France brought Carolyn so close to me again that I can practically feel the warmth of her breath on my shoulder. I can talk to her now as if she is standing right next to me, instead of pretending she’s channeling through that fish wind sock out on the deck. (I still talk to the fish, though.)

It happened late in the flight. The denouement of a story is the part where the main action ends. That should have occurred the evening Danielle and I had dinner together. That was a perfect denouement to this trip. But it didn’t turn out that way. There was more.

I was on a flight I shouldn’t have had to be on. Had the equipment not been changed to a smaller plane the day before, I would have been home already. Instead, I’m flying home a day late. But when I noticed that flight attendant, whom I hadn’t seen before until that last two hours of the flight, I knew in an instant why I was on this one.