Virtually Home

Last Christmas season, I had undertaken a fabulous holiday journey that started at my friend Tom's house in Poole, Dorset, England. After a horrendous number of setbacks that made me believe I would never make it to Tom's, he picked me up at the train station. We had some great times, in a house full of kittens and new friends. We drank a lot of cider, and walked to the grocery store in the freezing rain singing Tilly & the Wall at the top of our lungs. A year ago today, I left Tom's house to meet Rachel in Geneva, Switzerland, where everything was cold, beautiful, and expensive. We traveled to Lauterbrunnen and Zurich, too, and encountered such difficulties as coin-operated showers and respiratory illness. We met up with Hunter in Paris and spent several days in a shuffle of hostels and holiday crowds. We saw an anniversary light show at the Eiffel Tower and met an excellent Danish couple under the Arc de Triomphe at midnight. Hunter and I went on to Berlin and c...

These photos are all from Lauterbrunnen and on, I think. The one at the left is just after arrival on Lauterbrunnen on the 26th...Not the best photo ever, what with the light having been terrible, but I think it sort of portrays our feelings about the travelling and many aspects of Switzerland that turned out to be frustrating. But I'm getting ahead of myself. We slept in on Christmas day. I think we might have awakened and walked down for free breakfast at the hostel, and then returned to bed for another few hours. I think the afternoon was mostly uneventful. We walked around Geneva looking for cool things to do. I was still nursing a pretty terrible head cold and the beginnings of a frightful cough, so Rachel suggested we look for something spicy to eat for dinner. Spicy of course, is relative in Europe, though Switzerland turned out to offer more in the way of flavor than the UK, for sure. We found an Indian restaurant that we decided to return to later. Somewhere during th...

"Disaster" is about the only word that can describe the beginning of my trip. About midnight before my train was going to leave from Bordeaux, I got news from my mom that the Eurostar might not be running the next day. Confirmation came around 2:30, when I began scrambling to book a last minute plane ticket from Bordeaux to London Gatwick, where I figured I'd catch my previously-scheduled train from Waterloo to Poole. Little did I know that Gatwick had been closed the two previous days, or that British Airways was planning a 12 day holiday strike. Luckily for me, the plane did make it to Gatwick, though it was delayed an hour and a half. Customs in London turned out to be a hassle. I didn't think to write down Tom's address before leaving, since he was going to pick me up at the airport. This fact did not make the customs agents feel comfortable about my being in the country. They seemed to think I would just decide to disappear somewhere in England and just...

Today, France decided to let me catch a break. I was told Auchan might come sometime today. My phone rang at 10 a.m., and I, having been awake until five, struggled to be awake enough to understand French through the phone. For some reason it's a lot harder than in person. The guy on the other end said he'd be at my house somewhere between right that instant and 11, so I scrambled to get dressed and go get cash from the ATM to pay him with. When he arrived, he started tinkering with the washing machine and asked me if I still had the estimate. Awkward, because we never got the estimate and no, I didn't even have the bill that the first guy left me when he came to make the estimate. There was a sinking feeling in my stomach when I realized he might decide not to do the work, lacking that damned signature on the form. To my surprise, he kept working. He called the company to get the price of the part, installed it, and was in and out in fifteen minutes -- the total cost...