We have officially entered Europe for Month 2 of our grand travels. It took us one-and-a-half days to get to Slovenia from England – days filled with constant train travel. We left York on Thursday morning for what was supposed to be a relatively easy trip to Stratford-Upon-Avon for an afternoon spent wandering the streets of The Bard and an evening spent at the newly renovated and recently re-opened Royal Shakespeare Theatre. The train out of York was delayed for nearly an hour, causing us to miss our connection in Birmingham and catch a later train, which finally got us into Stratford around 5:15 PM – and our tickets to see “MacBeth” were for 7:15. So much for a relaxed stroll around the town. We got to our B&B, found out that we were (of course) in the room at the top of the building, humped the 500 pound backpacks up the three flights of stairs, threw on a change of clothes, and were at the theater by 6:15 for a quick bite at the café. While noshing at a little table by the Avon River, my plastic cup caught a breeze and sailed off, swirling lazily for a moment in the spring air, until falling – kerplunk – into the river, the river on which lovely swans were making their graceful way, on which people were rowing, in which fish and other aquatic animals were living. Splash went my plastic cup and there I was, Ms. Environmentalist, a person who has spent the past 26 years of her professional life working to protect water bodies from pollution, particularly pernicious plastic pollution, splash went my never-to-biodegrade cup, landing right by a regal swan, the emblem of Stratford, as boaters, theatergoers and God Himself looked on askance. I have sinned, I moaned, I have just emptied my karma bank with one bigass bad karma withdrawal. All that was needed was for the swan to swallow the cup and then go into a paroxysm of choking and gagging and expire, right there. But it didn’t, and I managed to slink into the theater without being pelted with other plastic cups from enraged onlookers.
However, the play was fantastic, and as we returned to our B&B we bumped into a group of 4 senior British women, also fresh from the play. How did you like it? we asked. Two liked it, one demurred and the other “wasn’t sure about having a colored man play a Scotsman.” Banqo was played by a tall, absolutely beautiful, British man of African descent; in other words, if the words were being uttered in 1950, a “colored man.” Max stared literally open-mouthed at the woman. The moment we got into our room he said, “I’ve never heard someone use that word, I’ve only read it, like in To Kill A Mockingbird.” There we all were, nominally sharing the same year of 2011, with one end of the generational span using a word that the other end of the generational span had never heard uttered and would never consider saying. It was the span of progress achieved over decades, compacted into a living room in a B&B in a town in England in the course of a polite exchange about a play.
We arose the next morning and made our way to the Stratford rail station. We were off to the continent! The train pulled out of Stratford at 9:30 in the morning, and thus began our day-and-a-half of nonstop choo-chooing. We pulled into London around noon, did a few errands, got the tube to the gigantic St. Pancras Rail Station, went through security which consisted of a bored customs agent glancing at our passports and stamping them, and then onto our fast train through the Chunnel. It was unnerving to think that we were below the full weight of the English Channel, all that water above us, as we zipped along in the dark. So much for making sure we had window seats: we got to see a whole lotta dark!
Then we arrived in Paris, and there’s nothing that screams “SEXY!” louder than wearing a fifteen thousand pound backpack, a plastic carrier bag dangling from your hand, as you make your way through the streets of romance and love. Yes, men stared at me with raw animal desire as I clumped by, my backpack-Quasimodo look accessorized by my lovely bright white new tennis shoes, which I had to wear in order to keep my ankle bones from shattering from the weight of the pack. I was the Brigitte Bardot of Backpackers, an angel in adidas.
And then it was onto our overnight train for our trip from Paris to Ljubljana. I had booked us a sleeper car with visions of Rosemary Clooney and that other woman from “White Christmas” dancing through my head, how cute they looked in their crisp little pressed jammies, peeking out from their snug bunks as they chatted with Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye. There we’d be, too, cute as buttons, rolling along the rails. We found the sleeper car and opened the door to our compartment, filled with excited anticipation, only to see approximately 14 inches of space inside. For the three of us, our three elephantine-sized backpacks, various carrier bags, and daypacks. It was like trying to squeeze a traveling circus into a matchbox. We tried to enter all at once and got jammed in the doorway, which necessitated complex maneuvering (“OK, on the count of three I’ll turn sideways, Max will lie on the floor, Jeff you grab the top railing and pull yourself up, and everyone do a 45 degree turn to the left, now GO.”) We took off our backpacks and stacked them against the wall inside the tiny compartment. It was like a show-down from an old Western movie: us eyeing our backpacks and drawling in a menacing twang: “There ain’t room enough in this here compartment for all of us, pardner.” If I’d had a gun, I’d have shot either the backpacks or myself.
But then we took a closer look. The compartment was essentially one half of a regular six-seater train compartment. Instead of having two bench seats facing each other, each capable of seating 3 people, it had one of those bench seats. Then above it was another bench seat, and above that was the third. The porter had already made up the seats with clean white sheets and pillows, and had laid clean white duvets across each of them, along with a big, old-fashioned wooden hanger (for hanging your fur coat on, no doubt) and a complimentary bottle of water. Peering beneath the lowest bunk we saw a large storage area, into which we promptly shoved two of the packs. Then opposite the top bunk was another storage space, and we hoisted the third pack into that. Hanging from a railing from two strong hooks was a ladder, which Max promptly climbed to claim the top bunk, with its own reading light and a shelf. Jeff and I settled onto the bottom bunk after folding the middle bunk up against the wall, and wa la – space galore! The only other thing in the compartment was a cupboard with twin doors that upon opening, revealed a teeny sink with a faucet. On the inside of one door were three little towel racks from which hung three little face towels, and on the inside of the other door were three hoops into which three glasses had been set, filled with drinking water and covered with paper tops – for brushing our teeth, I learned from the German porter (“Vas ist das?” I asked, my high school German once again coming in handy. His answer was something along the lines of, “Das ist der thingy fur da brushing of das teethers.” “Yah,” I answered sagely, smug in my bilingual splendor.)
By the time we’d organized the compartment into a useable space, our next door neighbors, a middle aged German couple, had already eaten the food they’d brought on board, made their way to the toilet, changed into sleeping gear and shut the door of their compartment for the night. The French couple on the other side of us had brought with them what appeared to be a mobile toaster oven, and they were busy working their way through a bottle of wine while toasting pancetta bread and cheese. We were the obvious slackards, failing to be either snoozing or eating within five minutes of entering the sleeper car.
But we soon got into the spirit of things, breaking out the sandwiches and wine we’d brought with us, passing food up to Max ensconced in his eyrie, chatting as we rocketed along the rails. I was a little disappointed that our neighbors had sequestered themselves away so quickly, as I’d been hoping for some train drama to help wile away the miles. Our trip from Bath to York had been greatly enhanced by the Blind Man Missing His Stop floor show, an exceptional bit of train drama. We’d watched the blind man enter the carriage, gripping an old suitcase in one hand and the leash to his very reluctant guide dog in the other. The man seated himself at a table and attempted to squish the dog under it. The dog refused. The dog had evidently been squished under enough railway tables in his life to know it was no damn picnic, and since he was a German Shepherd, there was a significant amount of him to be squeezed under the little table. The man shoved the dog, the dog shoved back, each of them getting progressively more irritated with the other. Finally the dog allowed his hindquarters to be consigned to the space under the table, but kept his front paws and nose out in the aisle. The man thought the dog was completely tucked away, but the dog figured what the man couldn’t see wouldn’t hurt him (ba-dum-dum.)
Within seconds of getting the reluctant canine settled part-way under the table, an elderly couple slowly made their way down the center aisle: a very old man – as in ancient old, as in can-you-believe-this-guy-is-still-alive old -- and his wife, who you would think was very old until you saw her husband, which made her appear not-all-that-old-in-comparison. The woman was clutching her train tickets and peering at them with the kind of serious attention usually reserved for X-Rays or pregnancy test results. The duo made their way down the row until they came to the blind man and the guide dog. Then they stopped. The woman peered at her ticket for what you instinctively knew was the four hundredth time, then peered at the seat number, then peered back at her ticket and everyone in the carriage reached the same conclusion at the exact same moment: shit, we all thought, the blind guy is sitting in Methusalah and his wife’s seat. And so he was. Mrs. M’s face tightened into a peevish grimace. Oh no, we all thought, she’s actually going to make a scene about it. Because the irony was that there were a bazillion empty seats around where the blind guy and dog were sitting. It wasn’t like they’d occupied the last place in the carriage; there were loads of seats to choose from. Still Mrs. M had booked Seats 48 and 49 and BY GOD, she and Mr. Older Than The Hills were going to sit there and it didn’t matter if Luis Braille himself, along with Helen Keller, Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder, were there. She cleared her throat, preparatory to launching into a peevish whine, and a scrappy British woman threw herself onto the etiquette grenade and took one for the blind guy. “There’s room here,” she said, pointing at the empty seats across from her, “Why don’t you sit here?” The old woman paused. Then she acquiesced, pointing at The Oldest Man On Earth to sit his ancient tushie down. “What’s happening?” he shouted, cupping an ear that already bore a hearing aid the size of a tennis ball. “Sit here!” she shouted, and he did.
We all relaxed, glad the tense moment had passed. The train soon came to a town and stopped, people leaving or getting on. As the train started up again, just picking up speed, the blind man asked, “Was that Little Wooten-In-The-Wold?” The scrappy British woman said, a little too loudly, “yes, yes it was.” “Oh no,” said the blind guy, “I’m meant to get out there. You have to stop the train. Stop the train!” Everyone froze, newspapers and magazines clutched in mid-air. Stop the train? An excited young woman jumped to her feet and said, “I will!” and sped down the aisle. Within moments a British Rail official came blustering up. The blind guy proceeded to tell him off, pissed as hell – or bloody irritated, more correctly – that he was supposed to be met by an escort, he was always met by an escort, and the escort always came and got him off the train, and now he’d missed his stop, so now what? I watched this exchange, thinking that if this were Amtrak:
· The blind guy and dog would have been prevented from getting on the train because of some obscure Amtrak rule and they’d basically be conscribed to a life of immobility; or,
· The blind guy and dog would have made it onto Amtrak, but if they missed their stop, tough shit, they’d go to Connecticut before Amtrak would stop and let them out, and the notion of someone meeting them and helping them off the train would make the Amtrak official laugh so hard he’d herniate something.
But this was England, not ‘Murika, so the British Rail official not only apologized for the fact that the escort failed to locate the blind man and lead him off the train, but he then radio’d ahead to set up another escort at the next station, who would put the guy on a train back to his original destination, and British Rail would refund him the entire cost of his ticket as an apology for their error.
Needless to say, I had to fight the urge to stand and applaud.
So as Jeff and Max and I turned in for the night on our bunk beds, rumbling and shaking our way down the tracks, the train whistle blaring periodically, I was a little sad that we hadn’t witnessed another episode of Excellent Train Drama. I can only hope that our European journeys will present another edition featuring an entirely new cast of characters.
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