When we were going along the Moselle river back in Germany, Nick and I spent a while talking back and forth in badly accented English of various flavors, complaining about how awful Americans are, and how badly Americans do everything. I played the Frenchman, saying stuff like, “Look at zese passenger trains. Zey are so much better than ze stupid American ones. Zey are on time, and zey don’t smell of piss and hotdogs.”
Nick came back with, “Yah, in Austria de trains have actual room, you know? You can put your feet up. But we don’t; ya? Because ve are not de tasteless savages like de Americans. In der flip-flops und baseball hats.”
Well, this morning we boarded our first French train, out of Luxembourg.
Crammed our piles of stuff onto the terribly designed French trains, and we’re on our way…
Crammed our piles of stuff onto the terribly designed French trains, and we’re on our way…
Nick managed to get about half an hour of napping, until a German man wandered into the train car talking loudly on his phone. The man paced the aisle and ranted, getting more and more upset, then disconnected the call and left through the sliding door with a murderous expression.
Nick was not pleased.
It’s so gauche to complain on vacation. But from a bike tourist perspective, I do have a few minor complaints to air about the French trains. For one, they sold me tickets with a six-minute transfer time, to get between two trains that arrived at opposite ends of a massive station, and our train pulled in late. Even without two loaded bicycles, we would have needed to move at a dead run, threading through crowds.
When we missed that connection, the ticket counter attendant said that missing the train was “our fault” and that the best they could do was put %15 of the ticket price towards later tickets. So I had to pay another $140 for failing to get across the platform at unsafe speed.
(The elevators were so small we had to stand the bikes vertically and go one at a time. The elevators were also very slow. This is a concern mostly for bicycle tourists like us, but also, woe betide you if you’re in a wheelchair and the person pushing it isn’t willing to sit on your lap for the ride to the platform.)
When I asked them which platform the next train would arrive on so I could be prepared, they said they did not know, and had no way of knowing until 20 minutes before the train was due to depart. Not when it arrived … when it departed.
When that time comes due, they start flashing the name and platform of the train on the big electronic signs, including the one in the lobby. At that moment, several hundred people suddenly stand up and begin shoving themselves and their luggage down the hall. The only reason I can think of for doing it this way is so people waiting for a train don’t wait “too close” to the designated platform and interfere with people catching trains before them. … But if they knew the time and platform in advance, with enough confidence that they could time their walk to the platform, most people wouldn’t do that. They’d sit in the waiting area where there are comfortable benches.
The train was ten minutes late, cutting ten minutes off the time it would linger before departure. Nick and I had to wait with our loaded bikes in the main hall, staring at the departure screen, waiting for it to update and show the platform, so we could dash for the correct elevators and ride them up.
When we got to the train we had to run the bikes to the far end of it, to a car with no external labeling indicating it conveyed bikes. The bike area inside was up two steps, around a sharp bend, behind a completely useless sliding door that kept closing on the bikes as we were moving them … and then up two more steps. And again, at the same time, if you’re in a wheelchair or not entirely able in some other way, the French train system says, screw you.
Traveling on the Belgian trains was alright; traveling on the German trains was a pleasure. The French train system is a dumpster fire. Not the trains; the train system. Even the lowly American train stations back home – and the subways, and the bus terminals – can tell you what platform each one will be arriving at, with near-realtime accuracy.
Aaaaanyway…
When Nick and I emerged from the train station with our bikes, we were in Paris, and it was instant chaos. We dropped into the nearest bike lane and zig-zagged through city streets, tumbling in the chaos of cars and people and bikes and scooters all fighting for gaps. It was pretty intense, after polite Luxembourg. Nick performed quite well in it, saying “my rides in Oakland prepared me for this.” We got lots of interested looks and comments from even the jaded Parisians about the bikes we were riding.
This is the face you make when you’ve survived your first ride through Paris bicycle lanes.
We had to pass through two security gates and open an apartment door that was built stronger than the door to any other apartment I’d ever stayed in. It was like entering a vault. We pulled the bags off both bikes to fit them through doorway.
I settled in with the computer, working mostly on photos, and Nick laid down for a few minutes. Then we got up and went searching for food.
We passed several restaurants and cafes, jam-packed with talking people, almost all of them smoking with one hand and drinking with the other. The noise of conversation even outdoors was jarring.
We arrived at a little cafe I’d picked randomly on the map, and the head waiter took our orders. He debated with his companion, who was from Argentina, what the definition of “Argentina spiciness” was, but couldn’t find an English translation. We rolled the dice.
First French meal, at a restaurant a few blocks away.
The meal was tasty but not quite filling. I suggested that we get right up and go looking for another, and Nick readily agreed.
He led the way, picking streets at random. I vetoed a couple of spots that looked too expensive or too boring. We eventually wandered into a restaurant facing an extremely busy traffic loop running around a square, and went inside because it was a little bit chilly in our cycling clothes. The big windows gave an easy view of all the passing cyclists, and I schemed about coming back some later day with the camera to make an anonymous gallery of them.
I ordered a bolognese and ate about half of it. It was very heavy. Nick ordered honey-glazed salmon which was cooked perfectly, and I stole some.
After that we went walking again, generally in the direction of the apartment.
Inside, Nick laid down for a while again, then got up and exploded his luggage and re-configured it into a smaller version, using one of my stripped-down bike bags as a carry-on for the plane flight he was going to be taking soon.
We were both up until about 2:00am, with him organizing luggage and me sorting photos. There were a lot of them to sort… About 1500.
The ferry would leave today, but not until 9:00pm. I had plenty of time to get there.
As I left the AirBnB I sent a message to the owner, thanking him again for the food run, and extending the San Francisco invitation again. I got a nice response a few minutes later as I was turning south on the highway, making for the Kollafjarðartunnilin and Tórshavn beyond.
Just around the bend I found a little grocery store and bought some nourishing snacks, then immediately ate half of them standing next to the bike. I noticed a “Fisk And Kips” wagon very similar to the one I’d seen three days ago. It hadn’t been there before. Was there a fleet of them, always on the move? Maybe so. I wasn’t hungry enough for Fisk And Kips.
I listened to an NPR podcast about voting patterns and political donations, and thought about social media platforms, and how they always seemed to be a net drain on my sense of well-being. That led to a focus on social media platforms as an influence on everyone’s well-being. I challenged myself to come up with the shortest possible phrase to describe their core business model, and arrived at:
“Your privacy for our ads: What a deal!”
I yelled it out loud into the wind a few times and laughed very hard.
Later on in the day I decided to record a “timestamp” for the NPR Politics Podcast, and I sent it in with an up-to-the-minute photo of myself. Who knows, maybe it will be used!
(Edit, several months later: They did in fact use it! That’s me introducing the October 7th 2021 episode of the NPR Politics podcast.)
This was the first day since Iceland that I was covering the same ground twice, and this time it wasn’t from two years earlier, but just a few days. I found myself less distracted by the scenery and more distracted by my own thoughts.
The relationship question was dragging me back into the recent past, and the sudden breakup that had defined the last winter season. It had been a very negative experience. It was reasonable that I had unresolved feelings about it, but I knew it was also possible my brain was walking back through this experience in order to express something going on in my body: I was still tired, and I’d eaten poorly, and I was fighting what felt like a mild cold, and knowing that there could be a physical basis for something as ephemeral as my thoughts was often helpful in accepting them. However sensibly one word may seem to follow another, our inner narrative is driven by something that isn’t thought; by definition. It’s our physiology, brewing inside us, and the thoughts that join together on top of it have more in common with the foam on top of a cauldron than with the neat words we see on a printed page. Physiology is not rational. We can usually only be rational when it’s not churning so much.
This can be a very hard thing for someone who insists they are always thinking rationally to accept. I know it took me decades… (Typical man, aye?)
I remembered lying awake on worknights months ago, composing elegant monologues that I would deliver to her face if we ran into each other at the Tuesday farmer’s market back home in Oakland. It actually happened – we did run into each other, twice – but each time I was with one or more nephews, and she immediately about-faced and walked the other way. For the sake of my nephews I didn’t call after her, even though I was vibrating with rage for hours afterwards just at the sight of her. … That physiology, boiling over in the cauldron…
In the present, I rolled to the top of the first hill outside of town and paused at a turnout, recognizing it as the one where I’d taken the cool panorama of rolling clouds a few days earlier. It felt like longer. Timespans always do on a bike tour; events from just a few days ago can feel like they happened last month. Metabolism perhaps? All that sensory input?
I stood there muttering to myself and realized that I was making myself suffer, in isolation, for my own reasons and sense of injustice at what had happened. It was my own personal bear trap, and I was sticking my leg in over and over, and whether I kept doing that – or didn’t – made no difference whatsoever to her life or state of mind or sense of guilt. She was not involved in this. The only thing I could do was stop sticking my leg in the bear trap as early as possible, and find ways to be kinder to myself and healthier instead.
Perhaps I could find a single thought to use as a brace, metaphorically speaking. To keep the trap from closing, so I could step away. After a few minutes of gazing at the rolling clouds, the thought I found was this: Regardless of whether this romantic partner acknowledged it, or even believed it, I had obviously been treated poorly by adult standards, and some amount of damage was expected. Feeling upset and wanting to find resolution was expected, and the stress of being denied that resolution was also expected. That’s the trap: Insisting on a resolution that will never arrive. … Now, why should I put my leg in there? No good reason. Step back out.
Be conscious of these cool rolling clouds and this fresh air instead. Perhaps with a few more days of good sleep and a few good meals I would stop wandering over to this awful thing again. I was honestly surprised to find it so close-at-hand today.
When I got to Tórshavn the press of buildings cut the worst of the wind, but it was still wet and cold. On a whim I stopped at the bike shop and asked if they had any GPS trackers. Nope! Next order of business: I knew the food on the boat was pricey and the water was terrible, so I got another platter of sushi at the same restaurant, then poured glasses of water into my water sack until it was full again. I was as prepared as I could be, but I still had a couple of hours to wait.
When I was packing to leave the restaurant I noticed my kickstand was extremely loose. The lower bolt had come out, probably just in the last few minutes. Thankfully the other bolt was secure, so the kickstand wasn’t lying in some random gutter a few streets away. All I needed was a spare from my tiny parts bag.
Standing at the curb in my rain gear, I detached all the bags and flipped the bike, removed the rear wheel, and corrected the problem. There was no way I could ride with a loose kickstand. The second bolt could come out, or the metal brace could swing around and tangle up in my disc brake, and cause a thousand bucks in damage or more in a few seconds. I was glad I knew how to do this quickly, and had so much time before the ferry.
Job done, I coasted down to the old coffee shop from before and ordered another swiss mocha, even though it was 4:30pm. I wanted a fancy drink after the last five days. I also had a work meeting to attend, and the mocha rented me a nice table for it.
When the hour came, I looped around the harbor to the ferry terminal and boarded without problems. I was surprised once again that all they needed was a glance at the ticket on my phone. No desire to check ID, or see a passport, or even ask for a COVID vaccination certificate. Danish security is funny. It’s like, “You coming from the Faroe Islands? You’re probably too cold and/or stoic to be any trouble.”
I lingered by a porthole to get cell signal, then holed up in the room and watched more braindead Marvel films: “Thor 2” and “Thor 3.” I did some writing, did some music editing, and generally relaxed. Then I began to feel feverish. This wasn’t some kind of sea-sickness; I wasn’t prone to that. It felt more like a mild flu, including some digestive problems. Had I finally caught a variant of COVID-19?
I walked around the deck a little to see if fresh air would help. No luck.
The journey to Denmark from the Faroe Islands includes one whole day at sea. For the next 30 hours or so, I slept, tossing around on the tiny bed in my tiny room, conscious only of the surging ocean beneath the boat in the darkness. Occasionally I drank water from the sack I’d filled before embarking. Just as I remembered, the water available on the ship was either foul tasting or tourist-grade expensive.
Eventually the fever broke and I felt much better, but all the sleep had wrecked my body’s sense of day and night. It didn’t help that the transition to European time had cut two hours from the clock. I grazed on some cafeteria snacks while listening to an audiobook, then spent the final night on the boat drifting around in a haze of semi-sleep that wouldn’t make a great start to my Denmark ride.