A Chance Meeting

October 11, 2006

It took about 20 hours to get to Amsterdam via some god-awful charter. (Do they have those any more?) I was lost even before we landed.

My mission was to make my way by train to meet Coleman in Lausanne where he knew some young Swiss guys. I had no date, no timetables, no reservations, and no address or telephone number where I could reach Coleman. The year was 1982. I was 21 years old and traveling in Europe for the first time.

The Dutch spoke perfect English. That got me on a shuttle bus from the airport to the train station. A giant billboard displayed departures. The information changed rapidly with little panels noisily flapping down to reveal letters and numbers – an amazing system before digital displays.

In a daze, I saw a train heading for Paris and other destinations. I ran to the platform and, uncertain whether the moving train was the right one for me, jumped on it.

Thus began my life as a summer snail with a Eurail pass. That’s a bit redundant, because summer snails at that point in their evolution nearly all had Eurail passes. The snail is a student off for the summer and must spend at least a month in Europe. The Australian subspecies does it once in a lifetime for an entire year after graduating. The snail carries his house on his back. Oddly, even when he checks into a youth hostel, he walks around big cities with his backpack on.

After less than 30 minutes on the train from Amsterdam, out the window like a dream appeared perfectly tidy fields of flowers and alternating fields of grass with one or two milk cows grazing and windmills. To my eyes, it was an astounding postcard. Nobody else in the train even looked. I was discovering a new world – the Old World.

Someone told me the train went all the way to Lausanne. Even now that seems surprising to me, odd that a train would go from Amsterdam to Lausanne without at least a couple of changes. When I got to Lausanne after another day and night of travel, I realized how perfectly idiotic our plan was. Okay, Lausanne is not a huge city, but it’s not a small one either. How would I find Coleman?  He did not know my train.

Worn out and a little desperate after more than 24 hours of travel, I discovered that the Lausanne train station had showers in the underground passages between platforms. I paid for and took one thereby nearly missing an unlikely and lucky meeting. Colman was waiting for me at the empty station. In my joy, I didn’t even ask him why or how. He said he hoped I would be on that train and was about to give up.

--Michael