The line of the trip had to be in Bath. We’re on the open-top tour bus, where the tour guide was a sixty-ish woman with a dry wit and an impressive command of history. She described how people came to take the waters for all manner of infirmities – “infertility, gout, baldness, the lot.” Some time later, she asked if anyone had been to Bath before. My hand was up, and the following conversation ensues:
GUIDE: “And when were you in Bath, sir?”
YOURS TRULY: “Five years ago.”
G: “And did you take the waters?”
YT: “Of course.”
(pause)
G: “Well if you don’t mind my saying so, sir, you might try another glass…”
(entire top half of the bus explodes in laughter)
The thing about Bath, like London, is that you can walk around in things that were built six hundred, eight hundred, two thousand years ago. It really screws with your perspective to think that Columbus sailing the ocean blue was at the halfway point between the construction of Bath Abbey and the present day.
The other thing about Bath is that you get there on the train. Inter-city trains were the thing I really latched onto this trip – partly because we were going through five countries, I think. We certainly took a lot of trains last time – Eurostar to Paris and back, inter-city to Oxford and York – but it didn’t quite resonate with me as much as this time. I guess it’s because it seems like we were always on a train this trip – whether the Eurostar or the Deutsche Bahn inter-city sleeper from Paris to Munich or the Golden Pass narrow-gauge out toward Montreaux or the wee little one-car train from Mürren to the cable car station.
The trains are FAST, though. Never mind the Eurostar, we were routinely pushing 200kph on the way from Interlaken to Frankfurt. I would gladly kill several people to have that caliber of high-speed rail in the US – there’s no excuse for not being able to go 120 miles an hour flat-out from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Disneyland in three and a half hours.
I also signed up for a Clipper card when I got home. Clipper is the new name for Translink, the all-in-one card for the Bay Area’s alphabet soup of transit agencies. BART, MUNI, VTA, Caltrain – this is your one-stop shop for all of them. Mainly it’ll just be a way for me to avoid having to buy tickets on Cal gameday at Daly City or to make the train faster at Milbrae when going up to the city for dinner or whatnot. But the Oyster card in London only served to remind me of how much I missed having the SmarTrip card in DC – tag on, tag off.
I like European trains. There’s plenty enough legroom even in second class, most of them had a bar car readily available, they were all prompt and clean and navigable…I could use more of that.
Anyway, that was the UK experience, more or less. I did get my pub meal, thanks to the good offices of some of Da Wife’s clients in Marylebone (and they picked up the tab – cheers, lads) and I did get to hear some of Geoff Lloyd’s Hometime Show on Absolute live on FM (thanks to Da Wife’s new Euro-phone on Orange) and I got plenty of Pret and I got to ride around the scenic loop again on the Big Bus (which never, ever gets old for me). It’s just good to be there.
Paris I have less to say about. Wasn’t as good an experience as last time – the shellshock of dragging the old ones around a country they’re programmed not to like, when they don’t speak the language, is bad enough. Add in too much heat relative to the UK and an absolute shitshow trying to find the bus, not to mention constantly having to make saving throws versus aggressive vendors and gypsy beggars, and factor in the new revelation that I am more acrophobic than I thought (it’s not that I’m scared of heights, I’m scared of FALLING from heights. More to the point, I’m scared of LANDING when falling from heights)…well, the practical upshot is that the only good thing in Paris was laying in bed with the wicked-fast hotel WiFi letting me top up podcasts and RSS feeds for the next long train ride.
Ultimately that’s the big criticism of this trip: it’s not the trip we would have made if it were just us. Don’t get me wrong, I think everyone had a good time (well, everybody that could cope with towns bigger than 20K population) and I’m not sorry I went, but it’s a lock that things would have looked very different with just ‘er indoors and myself. I’m pretty sure Paris would have been a scratch and I honestly think we probably would have dropped the UK altogether unless we just had shopping needs that couldn’t be fulfilled outside Londinium…
You just about summarized the trip perfectly. It’s definitely not the trip it would have been if it were just us, but it was still better than nothing. We’ll go back to the Swiss Alps someday, I just don’t know when. And normally, here’s where I would say that we should go to many other countries and continents before going back to London, but let’s face it… we’re likely to go back again sometime sooner than that. For better or for worse.