Circles of Tail-Chasing -- Part One

Sure, yeah, you think you're a smart guy.  Yeah.

Everyone prefers to hear travel stories from exotic locales.  If hardship must be included in the tale, folks like to hear of things gone awry due to a lonely border crossing, a grimy bribe to obtain a visa, or being stranded by a rickety Cambodian bus.  Given enough time, events such as these become the highlights of a sojourn, the germ of the most requested story.  I have lots of these sorts of stories.  This is not going to be one of them.

Given the above parameters, Dear Reader, I'm going fail you.  Let's be honest:  This time, I'm going to leave you flat.  No delightful tale of the exotic, let's be kind and call this a litany of bad decisions. 

It was all so simple, just a rendezvous with several friends at a convenient Moto gathering in Germany.  Ha!  Deutschland!  Just the next little country over from Austria.  Yeah, yeah, okay, I follow the online link for the gathering, sign myself up, book a few train tickets at a fantastic advance rate.  Boom, Robert is your Mother's Brother.  I'm a busy man, things to do, books to pimp, agents to cozy up to, grievances to nurse.  Which leads us to the down and dirty, the trail of mistakes we must lay bare before there is any hope of redemption.  Sorry.

When I am sending out literary submissions, or sulking over the results, I am not operating at my highest level of awareness with regard to the outside world.  The foregoing is a bold use of understatement.  

It was a simple plan.  I had booked tickets on the ICE, the Deutsche Bahn high-speed train, direct from Vienna to Nuremberg.  Leaving Nuremberg, I would ride two local trains to the village of Ebermannstadt.  The connections were short and sweet, with the clockwork precision of Deutsch scheduling.  At the last tiny train station, I would doff my train clothes and don my hiking togs for an eight kilometer stroll to the hamlet of Veilbronn.  It was a good plan, a tidy plan, and it even included hiking the last leg.  How romantic and quaint I would be, arriving at a motorcycle gathering on foot.

Ahem.  Enter the Fool.  A scant two days before my departure date, I realized that with all of the train travel and romantic hiking, I would be arriving somewhat later in the evening.  I emailed the nice hotel folks to inform them of my later arrival and to assure them that I would be there.  "Please hold my reservation."  The reply was a very polite "What reservation?"  

Remember the preceding, the bit about the "busy man?"  When signing up for this shindig, I did not sign up for the mailing list.  All the information regarding the required deposit, et cetera, et cetera, was sent out via this email list.  The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.  I received no emails, no information, secure in a darkness of my own making.

A bit of panic now.  A few emails to the hotel.  No, due to a large gathering, there were no vacancies.  I was hoisted on my own petard.  An email exchange with the organizer revealed who the idiot was:  myself.  Mistake number one.  I did the natural thing, I cancelled the train tickets while I could.  Better to lose the eighteen euro fee than the entire hundred and twenty euro fare.  Mistake number two.  Then I began sulking.

The next morning, the penultimate morning for my now abandoned departure, I got a message from the very gentlemanly and patient event organizer.  There was a bed available if I was willing to share a room.  He had obviously gone to some trouble to arrange this, not to mention having to impose on another member of the group to share a room with an unknown idiot.  My own petard exploded once more, hoisting me a bit higher.  Only a complete cad could refuse.  

I manned up, gritted my teeth, and re-booked the train tickets.  I re-booked the train tickets at double the advance rate.  Then I spent some time applying my foot to my posterior.  The basic dilemma of kicking ones own ass is that there are not many options for escape.  Ass flees, foot follows ass, kicking continues.  My Love made a few amused attempts to intervene, but as I had no desire to be reasonable, she left me to my own ass-whooping, for all the good it did me.  

When the dust finally settled from my vigorous round of self-abuse, I was left with the very same trip, all neatly arranged despite the shambles I had tried to make of it.  After telling my friends I would not be making the trip, I sheepishly confessed my idiocy and assured them that I would, indeed, be there.  They know me.  I doubt they were surprised.  

The truth is that I needed to make this trip.  Veilbronn is located in Franconia, a region tucked within Bavaria.  Four decades ago I was a solider in Bavaria, one of the minions of the US Army.  Ostensibly defending the Free World from the Evil Communists, I spent almost three years there.  While I did not do much to defend anything, I did spend every free moment traveling about in Europe.  During that time, my heretofore tiny world blossomed into an immense universe, a vast expanse filled with other peoples and other languages.  At seventeen years of age, I discovered the wonders of independent travel.  Nothing would ever be the same.  Returning to Bavaria felt as if I was closing a loop, a vast loop that has encompassed four continents, the odd sub-continent, and decades of my life.

We, each of us, make myriad decisions over the course of our lives.  In making them, we never know which will be the choice that determines a major shift.  "Two roads diverged in a yellow wood" as the great poet wrote.  I had a strong desire to bring the shifting choices of my personal map back to a starting point, however mythical that point might be.  And so, I boarded the train.

I did arrive in Ebermannstadt.  I did doff my travel clothes and don hiking gear.  And, on a warm summer evening, I did hike through a picture perfect countryside of fields and small villages to my destination.  But that is the stuff of the nest installment.