Contagious Bus Tour

So much for a quiet hour of writing. Before 6 AM. Booter, Dad’s cat, is yelling her head off and Dad is shuffling around the kitchen, putting away the supper dishes stacked in the drainer. I’d go for a walk, but the damn mosquitoes are gathered on the other side of the screen door, the vultures anticipating a pre-dawn meal the minute I step onto the front porch.

My head is about to bust, a throbbing headache caused by a lack of a good night’s sleep and the remnants of a head cold caught on the tour bus. It’s my souvenir. That and a package of Ricola purchased at a Total gas station on the German Autobahn.

Foul weather hung over the European continent for all but two days of our seventeen day trip. I swear there is no sky in Europe. So when a deluge released on the Detroit airport and thunderstorms chased the ground crews inside leaving our plane stranded just beyond the gate 72, it seemed a fit end to the journey. The delay nearly an hour, another hour extra sleep we would have had if we got home at midnight instead of 1 AM.

1 AM – that would have been breakfast time back in Paris.

There is something about arriving back in your own country. It can’t be the signage in the airports that makes everything comfortably familiar. If one half isn’t in Spanish the other half is Japanese (if you are in Detroit), leaving one half for English. Maybe it is the sign with the little arrow that says US Citizens this way and knowing I have every God-given-right to be in that line. My passport says so anyway. It’s that secure feeling. This place is mine. I not only belong here and live here, but I have the rights to do so freely. I am no foreigner, no alien, no stranger.

Now I have to catch up on the trip. Once I came to terms that the internet wasn’t readily available I began taking notes on where I was and what I was doing. The hotels, the towns and the museums blurred into a confused collage of short term memories. Places were lost. Days misplaced. I didn’t have to remember the details as long as I had a brochure and a tour guide. There were no worries except to have my luggage sitting in the hallway by 7:30 in the morning and juggling bathroom time with Dad and my Uncle David.

With my new camera I learned just how many bad shots I can take of a back lighted statue—it’s seven—and that a grey sky will never make a remarkable photograph no matter what the subject. And taking shots through a wet bus window - well with pure luck can a decent one be had. There are a lot of unremarkable photos to cull through. (See posted example.)

So in June I’ll figure out where I was and let you know because there were some great times with Dad as he journeyed through his WWII experiences.