It’s
been a long long time since I traveled alone in a foreign country, but that’s
where the plan took me today. As you recall, this little vacation was triggered
by Ally’s business trip to Cologne, which commenced today, Tuesday. She left St. Goar at
around 6.30 am, which would allow plenty of time to be at her 9 am meeting (the
main foreseeable problem would be to make the mental shift). I went to the
station with her, saw her off, then went for an hour-long walk, to Das Boot, which I
described before (and which looked even more eccentrically desolate at this
time of day), and back. I went to breakfast by myself. “Are you alone?” asked
the guy with apparent astonishment, as he lit my lonely candle.
I was
scheduled to leave St. Goar at 9.21 – astonishingly, the train was late! As I
had only five minutes to make a connection at Oberwesel, I then needed to
decide whether to get off there regardless of having presumably missed that
connection, or whether to stay on the train I was on and work it out later. I
got off, and it turned out the connecting train was late as well – all immaculately
coordinated I’m sure. The whole check-in/security process took no more than
half an hour. The highlight of that was seeing an Ozu-like dog, apparently
about to be placed in a crate to embark on a flight, and looking too happy to
be aware of what was coming (I don’t anticipate we’d ever put Ozu on a plane –
it would only be out of utterly unavoidable necessity).
Then
I had three hours or so to wait around at the airport. I don’t mind such
waiting around too much, as long as I can use it to read or do things I would have
done anyway at other times (i.e. so that the time needn’t in any sense be
considered “wasted”) and I had more than enough of a to-do list to meet that
criterion for today’s waiting time, for the flight home, and for a big security
margin on top of that. I made pretty good progress on this list, largely
because of sleeping only minimally. I had an aisle seat, but when I arrived at it
I was asked by a couple who’d been separated whether I’d switch and take her
middle seat in another row. She was much larger than I was so I made a snap
decision that I would contribute to the common good by agreeing to this
(usually of course, my own well-being would have been greater by staying on the aisle, but
even that might not have held here, sitting next to a possibly disgruntled husband
for eight hours). Anyway, no doubt I did the right thing.
The
flight was on time, and Canadian immigration took no time at all, but then the bag took an
hour to show up (as they always seem to at Toronto Pearson unfortunately) and of course
traffic into the city was slow. But I picked up Ozu exactly at 7 as planned. We
ran home, and celebrated in our usual buoyant manner, and for me that’s always the official end of the vacation. Meanwhile,
Ally did a full day’s work, and when I called her from the airport, she’d had
dinner long ago, and had been in her Cologne hotel room for a couple of hours,
just winding down the day. We don’t have too many days when our trajectories
deviate so dramatically…
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