A case can now be made that Carol is a slip-and-fall attorney’s dream. Back in Lyon during our first trip together (is that when I should have started thinking about travel insurance?) she had an epic heels-over-head tumble as she left our restaurant and started home in a drizzly French rain that turned those ancient tiled streets into a medieval super slide. She bounced back up laughing hysterically. (We’d had a share of wine that night.)

Lyon: a rainy night for slippery shoes.

  Then on that same trip, Carol caught a heel going up the escalator to our train platform. That had a cascading effect, which sent her tumbling backward onto me and then me tumbling backward onto anonymous French train travelers, who saw how bad Americans are at passenger rail travel.

  “Carol experienced no residual pain the rest of that day nor the next, so all’s well that ends well, though she does now feel like a bit of an expert at seeing parts of France literally from the ground up.”

  But this last one looked really bad from the get go. At the entrance of a Paris metro station, I had just put on my reading glasses to figure out the route map, when a lens popped out. It fell into a skinny gutter alongside the metro passageway. Carol offered to retrieve it. (Well, she is closer to the ground than me.) That’s when all hell broke loose. Her foot caught in that gutter. She lost her balance and fell back onto the passageway and (I thought at that moment) banged her head on the ground. I stooped toward her head, but she cried out, “my foot is caught!” I looked and saw that it was twisted in that gutter at an angle that suggested well, kids, that’s the end of this trip.

Paris metro: Not a place to be lying on your back.

  Luckily her foot safely popped out, but the shoe was really wedged in. Finally, she was helped up by myself and anonymous French metro travelers who saw how bad Americans are at using public transportation.

  Carol experienced no residual pain the rest of that day nor the next, so all’s well that ends well, though she does now feel like a bit of an expert at seeing parts of France literally from the ground up.

  This is not to say, I haven’t had my own brushes with public conveyance epic fails. There was the time coming out of the Cardiff train station while reading a city map and therefore ignoring the steps that had been competently designed to take one down to street level feet first rather than face first.

  Cardiff train station: an important reminder to always watch where you’re going.

In London, having been reminded to “mind the gap” at each and every station stop, I failed to mind it at Charing Cross and launched myself straight toward a suddenly startled English matron to whom I could only offer in defense, “I guess I didn’t mind the gap.” She no doubt joined French citizens in seeing how bad Americans are at subway travel.

  London Underground: Forget the news and mind the gap.

As I write this, we have arrived safe and sound at our final destination of Rota, Spain. Incidentally, “Rota” in Spanish means broken. And, no, neither Carol nor I are superstitious. But we are keenly aware of the slippery tiled sidewalks here and the stairs up and down to the beach. We’re committed to not having Rotarians joining the French and English in seeing how bad Americans are at walking along a beach.

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