Preview
Here’s a sample chapter from my book. Just to give you a little taste before you buy…
BEGINNINGS
From Webster’s Unabridged-Encyclopedic Dictionary, Copyright 1957 Garrulous (gar’u lus) adj. Talkative, loqua- cious, travelling without Gary
Late in 2011, Lynn and I decided on a spring European holiday. The only constraint was to be home for my daughter Erin’s 30th birthday on May 15. Still working, Lynn could only spare two weeks, but since I’m not gainfully employed, other than scratch- ing out small observances whilst travelling, my being gone a month was easy done. Initial thoughts around destinations were Paris, Scotland, Wales, England and Germany. For a few seconds Holland was on the list, but the Netherlands didn’t hang around long. Readers acquainted with A Tramp in England appreciate that I am unsure if one can really trust the Dutch. I mean, Holland/ the Netherlands, just what is the reason they can’t provide a clear notion on where they live and what they wish to be called? What exactly are they hiding with this confusion?
After kicking things around for a month or two, we settled on seeing Paris and Scotland together and me on my own for two weeks in England. My venturing off first — and then meeting Lynn in Paris — made the most sense for some reason.
Immediately my plans were to visit places in England I had wanted to for years and to call on family in the city of my birth.
I’d taken enough trips over the years to appreciate the potential for aggravations when too fully finalizing arrangements at the outset. We initially decided to only book flights to Europe and back. Our idea was that, once the getting there and back had been nailed down, time could be more leisurely spent filling in the blanks of getting to and fro in Europe. Since I have always found Heathrow to be a cumbersome and annoying airport, we decided on Manchester as my jumping in spot — and our jumping off spot for going home. In the past, I had utilized that city’s airport a number of times but had yet to see Manchester other than the ride to or from the airport. Usually those rides were at night or in a driving rain, so this trip we thought we’d spend a day or two looking Manchester over prior to coming home. Once all that had been decided, we only had to make the bookings. Just after the New Year was rung in, we utilized hard-earned Aeroplan points to book Business Class seats. On an earlier trip to France, we had discovered that sitting in front of that curtain was so much nicer than sitting behind it.
On an early January morning, we settled at the kitchen table and braced ourselves for the challenging nightmare of utiliz- ing reward points. It is much easier to accumulate points than to redeem them. The Aeroplan person at the other end of the phone spent hours setting up everything that cold winter morn. During the marathon arrangement making, we discovered that the new Gold cards we had so easily switched to a few months previous hadn’t the benefits we’d assumed. You know what they say about assuming, it makes and ass of u and me. We had been tempted by the siren song lure of a concierge being available to more easily book flights, hotels, rental cars and the like. This looked great at first blush and appeared to be a huge and valuable benefit. But the new card’s benefits did not include Business Class upgrades. If you wanted such, you had to pay a fortune.
Unhappily, the only benefit that we really wanted was only offered through our previous card’s deal. Fortunately, and through dumb blind luck, we were both still members of the old package. To make it work, we needed to transfer points back and forth,
hither and yon between our own accounts, between each other’s and also a cash payment before the deal was done. During the process, our helpful and patient operator advised that Air Canada had the highest taxes of any airline on earth, so she booked us through Swiss Air. She was a wonderfully helpful woman who made a maddeningly laborious process less so.
As the morning’s process wore on, I’d been deathly afraid of our phone running out of charge. Whenever the telltale beep sounded in my ear, I would switch to another of our three phones. Thereupon, Lynn would place the discharged one on its stand to refresh it, in case it was needed again. Remember the days when you only had one phone in the house? It was usually in the kitchen by the dinner table with a cord connecting it to the wall and a spiral line connecting the handset to the base. Rudimentary perhaps, but you never lost the thing, nor did it ever beep in your ear to let you know that your conversation was about to be arbitrarily ter- minated. The other benefit was parental timekeepers who deter- mined when you had been on the phone long enough.
After being on the phone a modest three hours, we were booked to and from Europe. Once flight arrangements were settled, there was an immediate lessening of stress for a short period.
A few days after this, we learned that Thunder Bay, Ontario, friends Gary and Kim, who we have travelled with countless times, were also looking at spending time in Europe. There was a potential for us to meet up overseas. Gary had been my travelling companion on the adventures that became the fodder for A Tramp in England and A Tramp on the Line, but unhappily, meeting up just couldn’t be sorted out. It would mean travelling without Gary on this trip although, at one point, we would only be a few hundred kilometres from each other.
Shortly, and without a great deal of work, my plans for England were quickly and seamlessly put together. I had been to the Old Sod a number of times over the years, and while I had always wanted to, I had never visited Salisbury, Old Sarum and the standing stones of Stonehenge. Visiting these places was top of my list, as was a visit to Yorkshire. Outside of immediate family in Winnipeg, nearly all my relatives on both the paternal and distaff sides live in Hull. Whenever I am in the neighbourhood, I always stop at least a week and stay with my dad’s sister Sheila and my Uncle Alan. They are beautiful people, and when I am there, it is like being at home. Coincidently, in the midst of my planning, Sheila’s daughter Gillian wrote to say her parents’ 60th wedding anniversary would be happening when I would be in England. Immediately my plans revolved around making sure I was at the party. Gillian had also invited me to stay a few days with her in Gravesend before heading off to Paris, and I said yes in a heartbeat. An added bonus to stop- ping in Gravesend was that nonstop travel to Paris could be easily accommodated though just how would need to be settled.
I could fly over, sail over, or train under, and strangely the pricing for all options was remarkably similar. Each had issues, but whatever my ultimate choice, the heading to Paris from Gillian’s allowed easy access to airports, ferries and train stations.
Flying to Paris from England was not top of the list. It was the easy way, but being a very short flight, I would spend more time traversing from the front door of the airport to the front door of the airplane and then out again than actually flying. I have travelled by air so often that there really is little joy in doing so anymore. Arriving hours early to find the check-in gate isn’t open along with security controls that are so cumbersome and intrusive makes even a short hop quite trying. I have wondered that arriving naked might prove a quicker method of passing through all the hoops.
A ferry across the English Channel would be a novel method. I had been on ferries from Vancouver to Victoria a couple of times, and those few trips did prove I am a fair-weather sailor. My self control had been helped on those passages by the opposite shore being clearly in view at all times. That said, I can vividly recall specific moments on the bounding main when heartfelt vows were made of never doing it again. The English Channel was forty odd kilometres across, and I couldn’t block out thoughts of Phillip of Spain and the problems his Armada encountered when sent across
the water to teach Liz a lesson. The Channel could be a treacher- ous crossing, and I can’t swim, and I really hate cold water. What ultimately struck off the ferry came down to my not wanting to risk being seasick and then, with insides in turmoil, trying to find my way about Paris.
That left the Chunnel. Now I don’t like caves nor dark spaces, and lately have had discomfort at just the thought of being con- fined. But the train did travel under the English Channel, and how cool was that? There was also a recent wonderful trip travelling by rail through the USA. I was confident security measures to pass under to France would be less bothersome than flying or sailing over and was also sure accommodations would be more conducive to comfortable travel than flying. I did some research: you head underground at Folkestone on the Kentish coast and emerge at Calais. At its deepest, the tunnel goes down seventy-five meters, forty-five of that being the cold Dover Strait.
Ruminating on all this, I sat back in my chair one night, con- templating it all while sipping a large tumbler of Port. My risk was that the tunnel would spring a leak and water would impinge on my journey. However, the thirty-five kilometre ride beneath the sea was offset by travelling a hundred and sixty kilometres an hour. Rudimentary arithmetic suggested an underground — or was that undersea — journey of roughly twenty minutes. Quick tests determined I could hold my breath for nearly three minutes. Mathematics offered that, should the unexpected happen, I would only need six or seven deep breaths to carry me from England to France. The odds seemed acceptable, so the train it would be.
Once in France, plans were needed around where to go and what to see. Knowing full well what side my bread is buttered on, I allowed Lynn free hand in the arranging of our two week joint sojourn. This may seem overly magnanimous, but considering I would have already had the luxury of two weeks doing as I liked, it seemed only fair that she have the same opportunity.
Lynn would spend an enormous amount of time planning the joint part of the trip, and I think she enjoyed the planning portion
almost as much as the trip itself. She immediately decided on alternating accommodations between hotels and the apartments of people who offer their digs to starry-eyed travellers who desire to feel like locals when on holiday. We agreed, or at least I con- curred with her choices of where we would lay our heads in Paris, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Manchester.
When the smoke cleared, our finalized travel plans were easy peasy. I would depart Winnipeg on April 14 and change in Montréal to head on to Zurich, where I’d change again to arrive in Manchester on April 15. Almost immediately, I would jump on a series of trains to get me to Salisbury. I would board the train right in the Manchester Airport, change at Manchester New Street Station, Bristol Temple Meads Station and then get off on the Salisbury Station platform and head down to the ancient Westin Red Lion Hotel that I’d found online. On April 19, I would travel by coach (what European’s call an intercity bus) from Salisbury to London then change at Victoria Station for a northbound ride to Hull, where I’d stay at Sheila’s. April 26 would see me take the train from Hull to London’s King’s Cross Station, where I would meet Gillian, and we would cross the road to St Pancras Station and continue on by train to Gravesend.
Meanwhile, Lynn would leave on April 28 and, like me, change in Montréal to fly on to Zurich. There she’d change and fly to Charles de Gaulle Airport, arriving at 9am on April 29. On that morning, I would leave Gravesend’s Ebbsfleet International Station at 8:30am and arrive at Paris’s Gare du Nord at noon. We would each travel from our respective Parisian arrival points to our accommodation — Lynn by cab and I, with the best of intentions, on foot. We were booked at the Mon Doux Rêve, 3 Rue d’Alger, and upon mutual arrival, we’d punch the secret code into the intercom on the street- side wall to unlock the big double wooden doors. Then we’d walk through the courtyard to the building’s front door. We discovered later that the sixth floor garret would have been quite large and spacious for Henri deToulouse-Lautrec.
May 2 would see us leave Charles de Gaulle Airport at 7pm for Glasgow and the Holiday Inn Glasgow Centre at 161 West Nile Street. No relationship whatsoever to the virus. On May 6, we would travel by coach to Edinburgh, tickets pending, where Lynn had booked the first floor flat of a Georgian townhouse. Imaginatively known as Gayfield Square Apartment at 3 Gayfield Square, the place had a keypad secured lockbox on the gatepost holding the keys; obviously I won’t share the secret code. Finally on May 9, we would fly to Manchester at 8:30am and the McDonald Townhouse-City Centre Hotel at 101 Portland Street. Lynn would fly home on May 11 from Manchester at 11am via Munich, Montréal, Toronto and finally Winnipeg. I would leave the next day at 9:25am heading to Newark, New Jersey and from there on to Toronto and a change to Winnipeg.
I had also cleverly purchased a GPS (Global Positioning System) device for the trip. I had shopped around a fair bit, which was way out of character, and was confident I’d made an informed choice. It slipped quite easily into my pocket and came pre-loaded with Canadian, American and Mexican maps. I went on to download detailed maps of Paris, England and Scotland. I spent quite some time figuring out how to use the thing and input the addresses of our accommodations and the relatives that I hoped to visit. I was loaded for bear and fully expected to utilize the GPS for walking from the train stations in Salisbury and Paris to our rooms, as well as later wandering about. We even had a cunning plan out to stay in touch while I was away for the first two weeks; we would email ourselves as I expected to have internet access at the hotel in Salisbury and when later staying with relatives.
Simplicity itself. What could possibly go wrong with such well thought out plans?
As the big day approached, I was slightly tentative around being away for a month, but I knew that those feelings would quickly slip away when once under way.
