On the Road - Europe

Before and after the closing of Paperback Traffic (see The Book Business), J4 and I took a couple trips to Britain and Europe, the only times I’ve been there. The first trip started in late April, 1981 and extended into May. We stayed at the home of a friend of her’s near Hampstead Heath in London and with my friend K___, then living with her French husband just below Pigalle in Paris. It was surprisingly cold at the time but I loved both London and Paris.

We rode a big hovercraft ferry...

... from Dover to Calais and then took the train to Paris. We crossed the Channel on a very stormy day so that, rather than smoothly skimming the waves as intended, the hovercraft crashed into wave after wave. I was a little disconcerted as I wasn’t sure how seaworthy these vessels were if they actually had to rest in the water rather than riding above on a layer of air. Anyway, we made it safely and on the way back we took a regular ferry from Dunkirk on a glorious night when the Channel was like a mirror.

Paris

The thing that most struck me in Paris was that when I tried to communicate to people at cafes that I was a vegetarian and didn’t want any meat in my meal, what they invariably heard was “Please add tiny pieces of ham, that are almost impossible to remove, to my order.” Until I discovered crepes, there was a chance I might starve by the end of our stay. But the street stand crepes made up for all the other problems.

Actually, the most memorable event of the Paris part of this trip was a lucky accident. The French presidential elections happened to occur while we were there. We spent much of election day hanging out around Luxembourg Garden before meeting some other friends of J4’s for dinner. Midway through dinner we began hearing honking and shouting out on the nearest boulevard and learned that François Mitterrand had won his first term in office. The celebration continued for hours. After dinner we walked through the festive streets all the way to K___’s apartment. She lived in a typical Paris building on a steep and narrow street and we were sleeping in a room facing the street. The honking and shouting continued well past Midnight and only really ended when a dramatic thunderstorm blasted through town. I had to throw open the windows and shutters to watch the lightning.

England

The second trip was in 1984 (I loved being in London in 1984 -- “War is Peace”) and we stayed within the UK this time, but we rented an Austin Mini and took day trips out of London to tour the south of England. We visited Cambridge (twice) and Essex, Kent, and various other charming places. We took a longer road trip to Oxford, going as far as the Cotswolds,  and stayed in Oxford for a couple nights with someone from my mother’s department back at ASU. This trip was mid Summer and the weather (in England) was glorious the entire time. We stayed with the same friends near Hampstead and arrived, tired and jetlagged, on a lovely, warm afternoon to find our host, D__, and some neighborhood friends hanging out, drinking and chatting in the rear garden of their brick terrace house. It was worth the cost and bother of the whole trip just to lounge out there in a somewhat befuddled state until dark.

The thing about Austin Minis, as opposed to today’s (BMW) Mini Coopers, is that they were really short and tiny. Merging into traffic on a motorway was like riding a go-cart onto a freeway -- exhilarating and exciting in an “Oh, god, we’re about to die!” way. I waited several days for the worst of my jet-lag to fade before I picked up the car, and there was only one occasion where I nearly killed us both -- I forgot to look to the left when turning right onto an A highway and nearly pulled directly in front of a lorry. Aside from that, the only problems I had were shifting with my left (and I’m ambidextrous) and navigating central London.

We took one final day trip with a friend of J4’s who had just hit town. On this trip we drove west on the M4 ending up in Avebury -- a somewhat lesser known stone circle not all that far from Stonehenge. Since I’ve never been to Stonehenge, I can’t fairly compare them but I can advise you to go to Avebury if you have the chance.

The stones at Avebury may not be as impressive but the circle is bigger and there is a charming village in the middle. Once you tire of hiking round the stones with the sheep, you can stop in at the local cafe or pub (I don’t know for sure there’s a pub, but how can there not be) and refresh yourself. We were there on a warm August day when the passing clouds were as fluffy and white as the ambling sheep. We considered pressing on to Stonehenge but decided we were really quite happy where we were.

Scotland

On this trip I also visited the ancestral homeland of about half my genes in Scotland. This trip I took by myself and first rode the train up to Edinburgh. Here it was raining, of course, but I had no complaints. I did all the usual things: Walked the Royal Mile from castle to palace, for example. Actually I walked all over. After spending the afternoon and evening here I boarded the train to Inverness (I had a sleeper to myself). I only spent a few hours the next morning walking around Inverness before climbing back on the train (coach this time) and riding down past Culloden (the Scots did the English a favor fighting there) and on to Sterling where I switched to an ancient commuter train heading cross country for Glasgow. Again, I spent a few hours walking around Glasgow (just long enough to see the Charles Rennie MacKintosh designed School of Art...

... and to snicker at the civic “Glasgow’s Miles Better” signs)

... before boarding another little train for Ardrossan and a connection to the little ferry to Arran.

The people we were staying with in London also had a vacation house (an old crofters cottage) on the west shore of Arran. While S__ headed back to London, I was joining N__ and the boys who were roughing it on Arran. We did most all the touristy things: Toured Brodick Castle (lovely grounds), caught the Highland Games (scores of bagpipes), and hiked the dramatic interior of the island where it looked like the glaciers had only retreated that spring. Sadly, what I remember most about this hiking is that the new shoes I bought for the trip turned out to be a little short and killed my toes -- especially when walking downhill. Other than that, I loved everything about Scotland. I especially liked how dogs were treated pretty much as people when it came to transport -- you would often see clever little terriers on trains and buses usually minding their own business. Everything in Scotland just made sense to me. And as a vegetarian I didn’t have to go near the haggis -- so that was a plus.

After A lovely time on Arran I returned to Glasgow. I spent a few hours waiting for the train to Edinburgh but that was fine because I adored the Glasgow train station. At that time, and I don’t want to know if it is no longer true, the station didn’t have the usual electronic, or even mechanical, sign for telling you when trains were leaving. Instead, there were large windows in which they hung these large, scroll like signs. I remember sitting on my backpack facing these second floor windows watching the person in charge hunt around the office for the proper sign before hanging it up for everyone to read. It was wonderfully charming.

God bless Google Images, here it is.

Eventually he posted the sign for the Edinburgh train and I was on my way. 

Back in Edinburgh I stayed at a B & B for a couple nights. One thing I remember from this time was that I was running out of laundry so I went to the local coin operated laundromat and found they only had washers, not dryers. How was that supposed to work? I guess they assumed you had a clothes line at home.

My two favorite places here were Waverly Station itself (the train station with hotel attached that sits between the old and new town), and the National Gallery of Scotland. Normally I avoid museums on trips because I’m more interested in seeing the city than in standing in lines to see art, but on this occasion I had some time to kill before boarding a train and it was raining again. John Singer Sargent is one of my favorite artists, certainly my favorite portrait artist, and there is a well known painting of his of Lady Agnew. But seeing it in a book doesn’t come anywhere near preparing you for walking around a corner and coming face to face with what turns out to be an almost life sized (or so it seemed to me at the time) portrait of a woman who (as is usually the case with Sargent) looked charming and seems to be alive on the canvas.

Eventually I caught the train back to London and soon we were flying high over Greenland on the way back to San Francisco.