Thursday, May 26: After months of painstaking planning and anticipation, packing and agonizing over details, I set out from Portland with nothing more than the pack on my back and the knowledge that I was flying to Frankfurt, which was apparently somewhere in Germany. Actually, I hadn't planned at all, and that was intentional; my sister, Maggie, and I had corresponded only briefly on the phone about where we were going to meet up and what we would do, which we thought would be the fun way to travel. Happy-go-lucky, seat-of-your-pants, fly-by-night, and other-hyphenated-expressions would be our Modus Operandi. In other words, the night before I left, I tossed three shirts, some boxers and socks, a couple of cameras, and my brand new (and brick-like) copy of The Lonely Planet Guide to Europe on a Shoestring into my daypack. I was definitely going to be traveling light, I decided.
My housemate Dan generously gave me a ride to the airport when it was time to go. I think he was glad to get the house to himself for a month. The heat that day was out-of-control, and the little prop airplane I took to Vancouver was apparently not equipped with AC, so it was swelteringly hot. From Vancouver, where a nice old Canadian couple in line to check in to British Airways was convinced that I was going to return from this trip married, I flew to Heathrow, and thence on to Frankfurt.
At Frankfurt, Mags met me looking tanned, hale, and healthy, after a semester in the Spanish hinterland of Seville. It became immediately obvious that she was going to be my guide for some time on this safari, at least until I got my bearings. She's an experienced traveler and seemed completely at ease with people chattering about in strange languages (and, yes, German is a strange language).
Mags also seemed to have gone cross-eyed after so much traveling, and to have developed some sort of disability involving voluntary control of the tongue. Fortunately, this led strangers to hand her money on the street, and it went away after a few days.
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