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.)

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.

Today ends the le flaneur or wandering part of the trip. My destinations today and tomorrow are all proscribed by the objective of getting back home. Toulouse was one of two cities that would get me to Gare Montparnasse and my bus to Charles De Gaulle airport. I could have chosen Bordeaux, but I knew my way around Toulouse better. Plus, Danielle had said she’d be returning from Paris early that evening, and perhaps we could get together one last time.

 With last night’s “steak” still creating gridlock in my digestive system, I realized I’d have to make an effort to work up an appetite for my poulet grande by lunchtime. I might be in the home of the French popes, but Saturday is Saturday, and that’s my wash day. I also hoped doing a load in the common laundromat would provide some measure of exertion toward creating that much desired appetite for lunch. 

Another piece of new train knowledge I gained today was not to take a seat in a four-seat configuration. The rider sitting across from you means you cannot stretch your legs. Never mind that the rider in this case is a stunning brunette who could have stepped out of a Cosmo ad (a copy of which she was flipping through). At my age I need to stretch my legs or I may require the Jaws of Life to get me out of my seat by the time the trip is over, rather than have a pretty face to look at for an hour.