Trip Opportunity

The offer arrived in the mail at the beginning of February - $300.00 (plus all applicable fees), roundtrip tickets to Frankfurt, Germany, from San Francisco. The only catch – all trips had to be made by April. It really didn’t take me that long to decide that I wanted to go – or maybe that I needed to go – it was truly a once-in-a-lifetime chance that I couldn’t afford to pass on. And besides, I really, REALLY wanted to see Maiol.

The previous summer (summer of 1992) my mother and younger sister had managed to take a month-long trip through Europe. I wasn’t able to accompany them because of some extenuating circumstances and had been feeling rather putout since they had returned with their tales and photographs and gifts. What had been hardest for me, though, was that they had had a chance to see Maiol and his family, and I hadn’t.

Maiol had been an exchange student who had stayed with my best friend’s family several years before. He and I had dated on and off during his nine months in the U.S., and had continued with a friendship, through absurdly lengthy letters and extraordinarily expensive phone calls, once he returned to Barcelona. He was (and still is, for that matter) one of my closest friends, and I wanted more than anything to see him – and I wanted to see him in his home space, if that makes sense. (Okay, so I also wanted to meet his girlfriend, Gemma, because I was wildly jealous of her, but I wasn’t willing to admit that at the time I decided to take the trip.)

Anyway, I fell into mad pursuit of getting everything ready for the trip, including applying for a passport, packing, arguing with my boyfriend about how it really didn’t matter that I was traveling half-way around the world to see a former lover, dropping out of my courses for the semester, and quitting my job. Everything was spur-of-the-moment and chaotic – I don’t think I was really conscious of what was going on, I was so caught-up in the excitement of it all.

In retrospect, I really can’t believe that I did everything that I did – after all, I don’t think that now I’d be willing to hop on a plane to fly to a foreign country, and from there to hop on a series of trains to travel through one country in order to get to another – and all the while speaking only English and American Sign Language. I hadn’t really thought through the potential problems that I might face, which was probably a good thing, else I might not have gone.

So…I went through all the chaos and boarded a plane from San Francisco to Boston, and once in Boston a boarded a Trans-Atlantic flight for Frankfurt. Once in Frankfurt I hopped on a train, and that is where the entries in A Traveler’s Diary begin.

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