Gorman Stories

When we got home, we realized we were essentially one day behind in our sleep: From the time we woke up in Antwerp, Belgium on Saturday morning (Belgian time) to the time we went to bed back in Las Vegas Saturday night (Pacific Daylight time), we had been up 24 hours without sleeping except for some lousy cat naps during 13 hours in the air. 

We got through Sunday OK but the sleep deficit hit us Monday.  I got home from work Monday about 7 p.m. and found Jeanne napping in bed. Without taking my shoes or tie off, I laid down beside her and promptly fell asleep. I woke up 90 minutes later. Guess I was tired.  We didn’t have dinner until around 9.

A high school friend of mine – we’ve reconnected 40 years later on Facebook – remarked that it takes a day to recover for each time zone we traveled.   Vegas to Antwerp: Nine time zones.  So, nine days.

There is so much I want and need to do, not the least of which is to edit the thousands of photos, create an accurate map of our route, start writing the travel story I promised a favorite newspaper of mine, and figure out the costs of the trip.  And Son tells me that I need to keep the GormanStories.com blog active.

But all that I really want to do is sleep for a few more days.

I think companies should let you slip back to work more slowly. You know, just work a couple of hours the first day, maybe a half-day the next, that kind of thing. Maybe I just need a vacation.

We returned home about 10:30 p.m. Saturday from Belgium, 24 hours after we woke up in Antwerp, and following two flights totaling 13 hours in the air.

The goodbyes were as difficult as I anticipated. They always are. 

On our way to the gate I bought some duty-free alcohol, which was allowed as a carry-on onto the airplane.  And it was a good thing that we had an unused suitcase (we had consolidated our stuff and so we nested two suitcases into one).  Even though the bottles were allowed, in their sealed packages, as liquid carry-on for the first flight across the Atlantic, we had to pack them in a suitcase at Dulles in  order to get past security for our second leg home. That nested suitcase came in mighty handy at the last moment.  (I don’t know what happens to travelers who don’t allow space for liquid  purchases if they have to change planes after Customs.)

At home, our loquacious Bichon, Willy, spent 30 minutes telling us about how two big strangers and a real tiny one, and their two dogs, had coincidentally invaded our home hours after we left for our RV trip through Europe, and that they had fled the house just hours before our return because they were headed off to their own vacation. Willy wasn’t complaining, I don’t think, but just confused as hell.

Home looked good. The house sitters went through a lot of Diet Cokes with lime, red wine and diet Snapple, based on the contents of our overflowing recycling bins.  There was also a gallon-size jar of mostly consumed Vlasic pickles still in the fridge. Dill.

The sitters probably don’t fully realize how much we appreciate their taking care of the place and the two dogs.

Sleeping in our own bed was a bit weird last night. I woke up once and was disoriented, thinking I was still in the Mobi. I headed for the toilet and collided with my night stand.

I woke up early and my mind started spinning with images. I was at the computer by 7:30, poring over pictures and wondering how I will edit them down to a manageable few thousand.

And after Jeanne woke up, we were on Skype, talking to Daughter and Fiance about the grand time we had.  Would we do it again? Yes.

We’ve still got more stories to tell, about the people we met, the sights we saw and our impressions of Europe. They are mostly very good but why don’t they like ice in their drinks?

Tomorrow, back to work at the newspaper.  Which reminds me to tell you later about the salt mines in Poland…

We washed and cleaned out the inside of the Mobi this morning and returned it to the dealership that sells and rents them, about an hour away from Antwerp. It poured rain, a hard, drenching rain, most of the way back. This is typical of Belgium, said Daughter’s Fiancé.

The young man who checked us out on the Mobi back on July 6 also was assigned to make sure the Mobi was intact when we returned it. It was. His boss was a bit upset that we didn’t return it until 1:30 p.m. because we had promised to return it by 10 a.m., and Mobi was going to head out later in the day with another party. I should talk to them about the propane tank’s sticky valve, and the hot-water problem. The broken door lock got the mechanics’ immediate attention.

Remember how I complained that the water-intake cap was frozen shut? It was a locking cap, the young man showed me, and if I had unlocked it, a quarter-turn would have released it.  Oh. I hadn’t noticed the key slot in the cap. That was embarrassing. I am why Americans have a bad reputation in Europe.

The young man also said that the waste-water draining problem was a common complaint, that the valves stuck open or closed, so I shouldn’t feel bad about that. And he and two mechanics discussed how it was possible that someone was able to cleanly break into the Mobi and steal Fiancé’s laptop computer when we had it parked at Bratislava, Slovakia. The crooks might have been nearby (and there was a motor home right next to where we parked), using a device that would have recorded the frequency code of our locking fob, and used it to gain entry through the front door with no problem. Hmm.  Or maybe I failed to lock one of the doors. This will forever haunt me.

Back at the front counter, the young man went through the paperwork and gave me a copy of our invoice. Some security deposit refunds were due us, and would come later in a bank transfer. He said we drove 4,800 kilometers.  I did the math: 2,982 miles.  Over 17 days, it averaged to 175 miles a day. And just one traffic ticket, thanks to those young German police officers who accepted payment with American Express (which, by the way, is not very widely accepted in Europe).

Back at Daughter’s and Fiancé’s apartment, I hit the “properties” tab on “My Photos.” Between the four of us, we took 8,766 photos.  Thank God digits are free and storage space is dirt cheap. Eight-thousand, seven hundred and sixty-six photographs, all crammed inside my little Acer netbook (and backed up every other day onto a separate hard drive).

All those miles, all those photographs, and one wonders: what was our favorite place? We loved each of them for different reasons. The frolicking beer gardens of Munich, the overwhelming history of Prague, the public spaces and monuments of Vienna, the grace of Lucerne, the dramatic setting of Luxembourg, the majestic Alps.

I decided today that my favorite place is Antwerp. We leave tomorrow at noon, and it will be so very hard because we are leaving our Daughter and her Fiancé, and won’t see them again until Christmas. Conversations on Skype are nice but you can’t hug on Skype.

We had so much fun over these three weeks but without a doubt, the most fun, the most treasured moments, the highlights of our time in Europe, are those spent with them. There was laughter, of course, and silliness (we’ve been humming the chicken dance song ever since the proposal occurred in Vienna), and there has been tears, How I wish that they, and our Son and his wonderful wife back in Las Vegas, and Jeanne and I could all live near one another. It’s every parent’s dream, I suppose, but parents also want their children to pursue their own dreams and sometimes they come true on the other side of an ocean.

I took a few photos today of Antwerp as we walked around this afternoon — a bit of window-shopping by Daughter and Fiancé for an engagement ring. (No, they did not order the one from Tiffany’s in Vienna.) The photos aren’t necessarily of the most attractive or oldest or most historically important parts of Antwerp. We’ve visited those neighborhoods on previous visits. But these photos represent the neighborhood where Daughter and Fiancé live — near the train station, not far from the diamond district and not a far walk, down from where the Moroccans claim their neighborhood, to a wonderful Chinese buffet. (We have concluded, by the way, that there are four truly international foods: Hungarian goulash, pizza, kebobs and anything served at an Irish pub.)

So it’s over, this crazy vacation of ours. Nearly three thousand miles down narrow, old-city streets, meandering country lanes and along steep mountain sides shared with bicyclists. But the hardest miles are yet to come, the drive on Saturday to the airport for our flight home.

We arrived back in Antwerp Thursday evening, around 8 o’clock, our RV trip through Europe now completed. We are intact, healthy (physically at least) and now braced to having to clean up Mobi so we can return it today (Friday, in Belgium).

Mobi failed us one last time, and thankfully it happened on the last day of our travel: Somehow, the side-door lock is now permanently locked, and the door cannot be opened, either from the outside or from the inside.

This means that after parking Mobi in front of Daughter and Fiancé’s apartment in downtown Antwerp, we had to unload all of our stuff through  the front passenger door.  That sucked in a big way. We have added this to our list of other complaints for the dealership — how the wastewater tank valve doesn’t work, that the water-intake cap is frozen and we had to fill the water tank by dragging a hose inside the vehicle and accessing the tank below the dinette table seat, that we could never figure out how to turn on the radio speakers in the back part of the vehicle so passengers could listen to music, that the hot water boiler didn’t perform for more than a week…

But we are safe, and in awe of all that we saw and did, and wishing that we could spend more time here. Looking back, the trip seems to have gone way too quickly. On the other hand, in some respects, it seems we have been here for months. We lost track of what day of the week it was, which is a good thing when you are on vacation.

We will go through our notes and write a lot more about what we saw, what we learned, what we felt and what our advice will be to others. This will have to wait a few days, after we are refreshed and back home in Las Vegas.

But we are proud to say that we never used two of the more decadent features of our Mobi. We never used the shower.  We used the campgrounds’ showers. And except for the first night of our vacation when we turned it on to see if it would work, we never watched satellite TV in our Mobi.

When it comes to roughing it, the Gormans know how to camp. Watch TV? Hah! Yeah, right. Not us. That’s not camping.

But we do wish Mobi had a microwave and an icemaker. 

I’ve figured it out, why it is that Europeans do so well in downhill skiing events.

First of all, when you are outside of the city, Europe has two speeds. Very slow (tractors lazily pulling trailers of hay down country roads) or very fast (especially on the autobahns if you’re in a sedan, or down twisting mountain roads if you’re in Spandex or cloaked in leather atop a performance motorcycle).

Secondly, the traffic signals in most European countries have this neat feature: When the signal is red, it goes to yellow before going to green. This is warn you that it’s now time to engage the clutch so when the signal turns green, you are ready to go and not sitting there fumbling with the gear shift.  But developing the skill of getting out of the gate the very  moment the light turns green pays off on the competitive slopes as well. (And unlike in Las Vegas where you are more likely to be killed by someone running a red light, in Europe you are more likely to be T-boned by someone anticipating the green, so people really really really do slow down when the light goes from green to yellow.)

And here is the third reason why Europeans do so well in downhill skiing. This is not obvious but now I am convinced it is the most effective training tool: the traffic roundabout.  When you enter the roundabout, you lean to the right, and  then as you continue the turn you lean to the left, and as you take your exit you lean again to the right. The faster you drive through a roundabout, and learn the cadence of leaning right, left and right, the better you will do in the downhill slalom.

By the way, Europeans do very poorly in downhill skiing if they approach the slalom gate from the left and their first move is to lean left to go into the gate, versus to the right. They are fighting every instinct in their body when their first lean is to the left. This is a symptom of spending too much of their lives in roundabouts.

Having left Geneva Wednesday for our sprint home to Antwerp, Belgium, we found ourselves searching for our final campsite of our madcap RV trip through Europe. We wanted it to be special.

But I was dragging. Driving through downtown Geneva had taken a lot out of me, in part because in the search for diesel, Miss GPS sent us down some harrowingly narrow streets. Everyone inside Mobi was assigned a window to look out of and declare how much clearance I had on one side and the other. We were measuring in terms of inches at one point, and the notion of knocking down a group of tightly parked motorcycles sounded more frightening than fun. Who knows why our computerized, satellite-driven tour guide chose to send us down such narrow streets — and, in the search for fuel, to deliver us not to a gas station but, instead, to a downtown farmer’s market.  GPS’s: You can’t live with ‘em, you can’t live without ‘em.

And so by Wednesday afternoon, with me growing weary driving down the two-lane highway, Daughter and Fiancé poured through the campground books, including one in only French, to see what was within striking distance. They selected a campground in a village we knew little  about, off a small, two-lane winding road far off the beaten path. We picked it because it was only an hour away and relatively cheap — 25 Euros, or about $37, compared to another campsite that was twice that expensive.

We found ourselves in the wonderful little town of Plombieres-les Bains, and at a quiet campsite up the hill where no one spoke English. (Fiancé speaks Flemish, French and German, so he comes in mighty handy.)

This was going to be a grand finale to our trip: discovering a little French town and a campsite among tall trees, alongside a cheerfully gurgling creek.  Daughter was preparing our last dinner — steak and salad — when she offered a plaintiff plea for help: Dad, there’s no gas! There’s no flame! What’s up with that?

We had run out of propane. Great.  The Mobi had two propane bottles and the dealership assured us that we had more than enough.  I checked. The second bottle was filled.  I had thought the two were somehow piped together like a daisy chain, and was doing a slow burn that it was malfunctioning. That’s when smarty-pants Fiancé pointed out that only one bottle was connected at a time. Duh. All I’d have to do is take the hose off of the empty propane bottle and attach it to the other.

But the second, full bottle had a frozen-closed valve handle, similar to our water-intake pipe cap. I couldn’t turn it for my life. Fiancé came to the rescue. He had a Leatherman, that same Super Tool that I had bought for the trip, and he turned his into a sort of pliers. That did the trick, and in a few minutes Daughter was cooking away.

The evening dissolved into a second bottle of wine and the logistics of Fiancé’s and Daughter’s wedding day (He had proposed to her just a few days earlier, in Vienna). Then to sleep, and being awakened in the morning by rolling thunder.

Before we left town, we walked around town — separating in four different directions and agreeing to meet at the  church an hour later. Somehow our cameras got switched among us — Daughter was using Fiancé’s camera, he was using mine and I was using Daughter’s. I’ve got some great photos on my camera — and I didn’t take them.

We were drawn to many of the same photo scenes, and I’ll post more later when I have time. But take a look and enjoy.

Next stop: Thursday night, back in Antwerp, in time to clean up Mobi and return it to the dealership by Friday’s deadline.

There’s a lot more to say, a lot to reflect on. Suffice for now to say that this has been a most amazing trip, with the theft of Fiancé’s laptop computer as the only casualty. By day’s end Thursday, we will have visited 10 countries in 17 days, and will have spent two days at the same campsite only two times — in Munich and in Vienna.

With Mobi due back at the dealership Friday afternoon, we are starting to run out of gas.

Later on Tuesday, as we climbed up the highway toward our quest to photograph Mont-Blanc, one of the largest mountains in Europe and just a few miles from the real Matterhorn, we stopped to photograph Martigny from above. Martigny is the city where the Tour de France began Tuesday.

For our view, we pulled out at an apricot stand, in part because it offered a huge parking lot which translates to easy-in easy-out. We were thousands of feet above the city.

It’s there we met our new friends from Cincinnati — Barb, who does PR and marketing for an insurance company, her husband, Jeff, who does I.T. work but wants to follow his heart and go into teaching, and their daughter, Julie, 15, who was wearing her Tour de France T-shirt, still freshly creased.

Bubbly Barb, being the P.R. person, did the talking. Yes, they were in Martigny earlier in the day to watch the Tour de France. “We saw Lance,” she said. “Well, we haven’t seen Lance yet but when we blow up the picture on the computer, we’re pretty sure we’ll see him in the crowd.”

Today, two major road events converged at Martigny (pronounced "martini" with a little action thrown in for a soft g), a Swiss town at the intersection of France, Italy and Switzerland and a gateway to the western entrance to the Alps.

The major roads entering the city were closed to accommodate today’s run of Le Tour de France, that superhuman exposition of lungs and legs.

Le Tour de Gorman — that superhuman exposition of human relationship and RV daring-do as the Gormans careen through Europe in a  Mobi, accompanied by Daughter and her now-Fiancé — entered Martigny later on Tuesday, as biking enthusiasts were walking back to their cars and streaming out of town.

We were unimpressed. In fact, I have come to detest bicyclists and their fancy Spandex pants and colorful helmets and weird shoes as they share my Alpine roads.

Narrow winding roads were not meant to be shared.  Either close off the damned highway, as they do for Lance & Co., or ban bicyclists from the roads.  Based on my experience, they cannot be shared.

At best, on a flat, straight portion of the road, you can see them as you approach from behind, time your braking and/or acceleration, and pass them quickly at the first chance. But roads in the Alps are generally not flat and straight.

If the road is curving, you have to constantly wait for an opportunity to pass them. And if your Mobi is as wide as ours, almost filling the pavement from the shoulder line to the center line, to give them even two feet forces you into oncoming traffic.  We did this and I drank a lot of Scotch last night to recover.

If you are going uphill when you encounter your bicycling buddies, you normally have to downshift, and even though I’ve  been driving the stick-shift Mobi for more than two weeks, there is nothing easy about downshifting and re-engaging your gears when you are driving a 50-ton vehicle uphill. Fifty ton, give or take but I know it’s gotten heavier because Jeanne has been buying a lot of refrigerator magnets.

You might think driving downhill is the better scenario for coming up on bicyclists. But these pedaling pals of mine love going downhill. They live to fly downhill. In fact, when we are going downhill, they pass me and probably curse as they do it.

The worse scenario is to come upon a bunch of Bozo bicyclists on a 170-degree hairpin turn and, at the very moment you encounter them, a propane truck suddenly enters the hairpin from the other direction. Ohmygod, grip the wheel and close your eyes – wait, don’t close your eyes – and scream – wait, don’t scream, you’ll scare your passengers. You downshift, you brake, you measure the space from your front right bumper to the bicyclists, you anticipate your turning radius, and that of the propane truck’s, and you briefly become very spiritual and give serious thought to whether Heaven is in the clouds or just a state of mind and if it is in a cloud whether Peter at the gate is wearing Spandex.

There comes a point where I find myself at a loss for words. The beauty of the Swiss Alps is stunning. This is, I think, the most beautiful place I have visited, partly because of its overwhelming scale.

The forests go on forever and, with the meadows, offer every conceivable shade of green. The mountains are majestic and even in the summer, covered with snow at the higher elevations. The lakes are a strange hue of blue-green, perhaps reflecting their icy origins.

Even the towns and villages are postcard perfect — the swans, the covered bridges, the pastel-colored buildings, the stone churches.

So, at least for now, I will leave this post, and invite you to click onto the photo galleries to enjoy the enlargements. I guess I’m speechless.

Because we love the Olympic Winter Games, it was a thrill for us to wake up Sunday morning in Innsbruck, Austria, where  our first destination was the ski-jumping stadium that was used for both the 1964 and 1976 games. “I can hear Jim McKay’s voice,” Jeanne said. “I can see him, I can hear him.”

The stadium was surprisingly close, and low, to the city, and maybe its location a bit unsettling for jumpers. If they look up during their jump, instead of focusing on the tips of their skis and their landing target, they’ll see a cemetery filled with tombstones just beyond the stadium. Lovely.

The stadium is used year-round and in the summer, jumpers fly down onto a kind of a plastic, grassy material. If you click onto the photo below to the left in order to see the enlargement, you’ll spot the cemetery in front of him.

At the top of the ski-jump tower is an observation terrace and restaurant. It’s a tad pricey but we rationalized we won’t be back for a few weeks so we’d live it up. You can imagine the view.

We left Innsbruck for Zurich in the early afternoon, knowing we were behind schedule in getting to our planned camping site in Lucerne, Switzerland. But hey, no worry, we would not let ourselves be rushed! The scenery was remarkable and now I know why ice-skating and gymnastics judges are reluctant to give 6.0′s or 10.0′s to the first competitors to perform: there is nothing better to give if better performances are turned in by later competitors.  So true with scenery, too: we were baffled by the forests, the mountains, the lakes, the Alpine villages and as we drove, we exhausted our adjectives. We didn’t grow numb, mind you, but we just had nothing more to say.

Zurich was our dinner stop. Daughter had visited it before and wanted us to have dinner at a restaurant she discovered.  The tables are shared among parties and next to us was an elderly couple from Japan. The most I could figure out from talking to them was that they were on a 19-day tour of Europe and had just spent 4 days in France. I liked them, though, because as I told a few jokes, they laughed loudly. I guess the understood English better than I had realized.

After dinner we drove for Lucerne, targeting a camp site that had good reviews.  We pulled up at 10:20. It was closed.  And it was, we think, the only campsite in town. The agony of defeat. So we did what the camping books advise: “free camp” — find a place to park where nobody will object, close the curtains and call it a night.

We found a public parking lot just down the street, where a tour bus was parked. We pulled in  behind him, hoping he would provide cover for us if police drove by.  But we wouldn’t be secret for long. By the time we were asleep, no less than nine other campers had pulled in alongside of us, all having found themselves with no where else to park.

Lucerne’s lake was just 200 yards away, with members of the Lucerne Yacht Club having access to their private docks. Us, we parked next to a weedy lot where little dinghies are stored.  Maybe I can do some Photoshopping.