The 9:20 to Ventimiglia The 11:03 to Milan     Our second the-train-is-the-destination experience would not alleviate my mounting fear that European rail travel had caught Covid. Worse, it had come out of it the way American rail travel had come out of its own golden years. Meaning, Europe was becoming Amtrak – or worse? (Spoiler alert: there’s nothing worse than […]

   A renovation architect once explained to me that the heavy aching in your legs when traipsing through a museum is a real physical ailment known as “museum fatigue.” “It’s a physical reaction to not knowing where the end of the museum is.”  I have a particularly acute case in that my legs will grow heavy […]

   As a general rule on the road, Carol and I don’t engage strangers in conversation. I studiously avoid it; Carol merely doesn’t seek it out. In this, it is more or less the position we maintain at home. In the going on five years we’ve lived in our mobile home community, I still don’t know […]

   Corresponding to what I like to do first when exploring a new location, Carol and I boarded the Ligne 1 tram just down from our hotel, and rode it to its terminus in each direction. The idea is to find something of interest along the way, and then ride back there to explore it in […]

The 10:34 to Marseilles The 14:57 to Nice    If this first rail trip is any indication, it might be that my previous experiences with Eurail already represent a bygone era.    The first clue was that the Marseille train lacked both a club car or even a beverage cart. Not that I had planned to pop […]

   A five euro tab for café creme, croissant and fresh squeezed orange juice beat the hotel’s 15 euro charge for a full breakfast that included a rubbery plain omelet and cold pancakes, and we are off to the Musée des Arts Forains (The Fairground Art Museum). According to the English language handout, actor and antique […]

   I woke up on our first full day in Paris with no wifi, and worse, could not figure out how the shower works. It’s embarrassing to have to explain this to the hotel clerk, who was working off the same wifi as I interrupted her, and then having to explain to this American how […]

   The first rule of flying by the seat of your pants is to have pants to fly from the seat of. Our original plan of sauntering from Paris to Barcelona and then onto parts south and east (chasing warmer temperatures) was immediately short-circuited by the total lack of available seats for Eurail pass holders. In […]

D220 to Paris  Say your ten years old and you’re going to Disneyland for the first time. You’re bugeyed with excitement as you enter the Magic Kingdom. There’s just so much you’ve been told there is to see and do. You can’t contain yourself, and you also don’t know where to begin. But you’re ten-year-old […]

   Carol is the only person I have ever known who can turn a fool’s errand into a certain done deal. For almost three years, we’ve been sitting on a pair of Eurail passes that had gone unused originally due to Covid. A series of extensions kept them valid through the period of travel restrictions, but […]