their uncovered drinks and hoped for no bumps in the road. I was suitably disgusted by the whole thing. Who wants to be in such close proximity to pee in the car? This wasn’t baby pee. This was full-on kid pee, it smelled like mushrooms, and that was gross.
We finally made it across the bridge and eventually came to a reasonable spot to pull over, pour out the cup contents, offer another pit stop, just in case, and be on our way. We had made it through the trial. Key West wouldn’t be too far now and we could find a hotel, check in, and clean ourselves up. My mom and Michael were, of course, in the worst shape.
“Why are all the hotels along here saying no vacancy?” I asked, noticing the signs in an area that wasn’t usually as popular. “Is something going on?”
“Eh, who knows? Maybe some sort of fishing thing over here,” said Tom. We kept driving. The number of hotels became denser as we neared Key West, each one with its No Vacancy sign lit. The nice ones were full. The ones resembling the Bates Motel were full. We stopped at a few just to confirm and were turned away. Finally, at about the eighth hotel attempt, my dad asked about the cause. It just seemed so unlikely that every hotel in the Keys was booked up.
“Lobster Fest, sir. You didn’t make a reservation?” He chuckled like we must be kidding. Surely we weren’t that stupid? We didn’t respond with a chuckle in return. His look morphed and seemed to call us idiots with the expression. “If you don’t have a reservation, you don’t have a chance in hell of finding a place for the six of you. Don’t you know about Lobster Fest?” No, we did not, in fact, know about Lobster Fest. We had somehow missed the fact that the largest festival in the Lower Keys was happening.
Disgusted and disheartened, the adults decided to immediately turn around and drive the entire eight hours back home. Nobody was allowed to drink a single thing.
Hypochondriac Travel Tip #4
If a stranger offers to show you something (in a whisper), politely decline, then turn around and head in the opposite direction. Quickly.
4
An Innocent Abroad
Considering I had fantasized about going to Europe my entire life, it was no surprise that when asked what I wanted for high school graduation, I shouted heavenward, “EUROPE.” My parents suggested a car, and I looked at them and shouted again, “EUROPE.” I have always had, and will always continue to have a massive desire to travel around Europe.
I had this monster-sized, yet whimsical, Coke bottle coin bank and I started collecting coins in that thing when I was very young so that one day I would have enough for Europe. Growing up, I periodically dumped it all out on my floor and put them in neat little dollar stacks to count my stash, like an old scrooge. I had a mission, and that mission was the Old Continent. The Mother countries. The ancestral realms. By the time I convinced my parents that I should go to Europe upon graduation, I had somehow saved over seven hundred dollars in coins. To be fair, sometimes my hoarding included loose change from their pocket, purse, car ashtray, etc. They never noticed or didn’t think anything of it. Meanwhile, I miser-ishly rubbed my hands together. Maniacal laugh ensued.
As luck would have it, a European adventure was planned for high school students in my county school district. Any student from the included high schools could take part in the three week adventure, visiting six different countries. We would meet monthly during the year beforehand to learn about the places we would see. As an Epcot-World Encyclopedia-international flag-loving person, this was a dream come true. I eagerly awaited each meeting. The other students looked bored or adopted poses of cool detachment, whereas I was sitting straight up, listening with every fiber of my being. I was NOT cool about the situation. I’m the kind of person who walked into travel agencies as a kid, by myself, to just pick up brochures that I could take home and daydream about. This group of kids did not understand the likes of me.
In the midst of my excitement, I’m sure you could guess I also encountered a building anxiety. Since the time I went to summer camp, I hadn’t flown a single other time. My mother still refused to fly, so we never went anywhere requiring a plane trip. Flying internationally therefore seemed awfully scary and daunting. We would have to cross the huge ocean to get to England, our first stop. What if terrorists hijacked or bombed our plane? This was 1993, and I had heard much about hijacking. I knew I would definitely not enjoy it. Once in Europe, I worried about transportation, getting lost, language barriers, scary foreign people. I think I was as equally afraid as I was mesmerized by the unknown. Even though I would be with thirty other high school kids and chaperones, I was still without my parents and that gave me a little pause. It didn’t stop me; just gave me pause.
Europe, or at least England, France, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany and the Netherlands, was everything I hoped and more. It was old. It was pretty. The people looked slightly different and talked differently. This was before the Euro, so the money in each country was beautiful and unique and I admired it like I had found a treasure and not a few cents. I felt like the luckiest girl in the world. Then I got flashed.
We were in Heidelberg, Germany for the day, visiting the ancient, amazingly gorgeous town, learning about making wine in barrels. The surroundings looked exactly like a fairy tale. I expected some blonde, soft spoken princess to appear at any moment and make birds sing. I was in a fit of euphoria, pretty much my default state for those three weeks, and waiting in line for ice cream. A man was standing nearby in a brown trench coat, even though it was summer. He had mangy looking long hair, but to be fair, so did many other people there. Those crazy Europeans. He said something to me in what I assumed was German. I smiled, even though I didn’t understand. It’s what I do. I have trouble with even just accented English, much less an actual foreign language (with the partial exception of French), so I tend to just smile and nod. It keeps getting me into trouble.
At my nod, his grin grew wide and lascivious and he opened his coat, not shockingly fast, more casually, like we were continuing to have a normal, albeit one-sided conversation, to reveal a skinny, naked body with an impossibly long penis. I was equally repulsed and amazed. It was gross but also unbelievable, given his physique otherwise. I screamed. He looked at me like I had broken some contract between us; some code. His eyes showed hurt. “But you said you wanted to see it!,” they seemed to say. I guess that’s what he’d been muttering in German when I nodded and smiled.
I turned and ran back to my group, breathless and annoyed that I never got my ice cream. The image of the man’s bits and pieces was burned into my brain and making it difficult to enjoy the otherwise fantastic scenery. My friends laughed and said they wished they would have been standing there. No, you don’t- you can’t unsee that. I was worried that I had caught an STD from simple proximity or visual association. What if he was infested? His eye-contact made me feel like I needed a shower and a brain scrub. For a seventeen year old virgin this was a traumatic event. I survived, but EWW!
The adventures continued. We marveled and clapped for our coach driver who managed to squeeze into the tiniest winding streets in Paris and outpace other cars on the Autobahn. My group got a little lost in Paris while navigating the Metro and I had a mild panic attack from it. I never want to end up in the wrong part of town. Since I knew so little about the right vs. wrong parts of Paris, I worried. Given that we were on free time with no chaperones, I worried that extra little bit. We could be kidnapped, a long-standing fear due to repeated viewings of the six o’clock local news as a child. After stopping at a MacDonalds (seriously, someone needed to teach my travel companions some culture), eating fries with mayonnaise. and regrouping, we found our way to our desired location, Jim Morrison’s gravesite.
Jim Morrison’s grave is a tourist attraction unto itself. It sits in a lovely and famous cemetery full of raised sites and unparalleled statuary. When we arrived we were one group of many who had made the pilgrimage. People sat around singing, chatting with Jim (sure, that’s normal) and writing loving graffiti all over the site. It’s a whole thing and my group was eager to take part. Especially since there had recently been a bit of a Doors/Jim Morrison revival with the release of the biopic starring Val Kilmer. It was the highlight of the day as far as they were concerned. I like The Doors, sure, don’t get me wrong, and I wanted to see the site, too. But I didn’t want to stay there all day and take part in the