Return of the young rain gods
Last Wednesday, at about nine in the evening, our young travelers returned to Linz by way of Prague. As the train pulled into the station where we were waiting for them, Peter pointed out that it was coming from the direction opposite to the one they had left in, so they really had come full circle. As they got off the train and announced that they were starving, they brought with them the rain that seems to have followed them all the way around this circle.
The day they arrived tired but without further complications in London at Francis’ house was the same day that Skype went out all over the world. I found that quite frustrating, since I had been looking forward to a long talk with the boys without feeling pressured by the cost. Nevertheless, they obviously enjoyed being with Francis again. Paddy caught up on sleep, and Christopher took an extra little side trip to East Anglia to pick up with small rucksack with some extra clothes that friends had kindly taken with them when flying from Linz to London a few days earlier.
After their refreshing visit with Francis they went on to Kemble, where they enjoyed a visit with their cousins. Sara took a picture of all the cousins together, which she put online on Facebook, and it was lovely to see how happy they all looked together.
Since the boys had made plans to rejoin the rest of the group in Amsterdam a few days later, I booked a flight from London to Holland for them, but it left from London-Stansted at about six in the morning. Unfortunately, since Francis had already gone to Northumberland and the boys had somehow not managed to communicate other than telepathically (and quite ineffectively) with Nizam, they found themselves then without a place to spend the last night in London. The problem was quickly solved when I sent out a request for help to about five or six different people. Three people kindly offered to take them in, and they ended up staying with my friend Paula. They even managed to get themselves to the airport at dawn without waking her up and made it to Amsterdam without further mishap.
In Amsterdam they caught up with Sascha and George, but Alex had unfortunately had to go home from Paris after he injured his foot and it got infected. George returned to Austria shortly after that to go on holiday with his family, Christopher set off from Amsterdam to the Czech Republic by himself to go to the hip hop camp there, and Paddy and Sascha went to Switzerland. The three of them met up again in Prague last weekend, where Alex was able to rejoin them, and apparently had a wonderful time making music together in Sascha’s uncle’s flat in Prague. Their longest journey was the train ride home from Prague in the end, when they ended up on a little train that stopped at about every other little house between Budweis and Linz.
In the meantime, at home in Linz Peter was not coping very well with the information about things going wrong and the impossibility of taking over and sorting things out. We finally reached a point where I began to seriously doubt that he would be able to live to see the boys return: Either he would wind himself up worrying until he gave himself a heart attack, or I would murder him if he asked me one more time whether I had heard from the boys, about where they were, what they were doing, what he thought they should be doing ... So I made reservations for us to spend the weekend, Friday through Sunday, at a spa hotel in the country.
It was a very restful and quiet weekend at this hotel, where we enjoyed going in and out of the sauna and the hot tubs and lying comfortably naked in the sauna garden reading crime mystery novels. That definitely helped – except for a slightly hair-raising moment, when Peter asked me whether he had understood correctly that the last time I had heard from Christopher, he was walking all my himself down a long country road in the Czech Republic with no money on his way to the hip hop camp. An anxious text message to Christopher, however, soon brought assurance that he had arrived at the camp, met up with a large group from Linz, and everything was fine.
From the lovely messages I have received from various people, it seems that the boys left a trail of good impressions along their way around Europe. It is nice to hear that from other people, but I am very glad to have them home again.
They won’t be home for long, unfortunately. They have this week left of summer holidays, then they have one week at school, and then they will be leaving for a week of language school in France with their respective classes. When I expressed my dismay at the realization that they will both be gone the same week, Christopher in the north of France, Paddy in the south, Paddy sternly reminded me that they had left us alone for three weeks already, and he would have expected us to have matured a bit in that time. I doubt it. I think we are just going to miss them terribly again.
Paddy is just working on a map of their travels that he wants to link to his wonderful photos, so that should be online soon too.
The day they arrived tired but without further complications in London at Francis’ house was the same day that Skype went out all over the world. I found that quite frustrating, since I had been looking forward to a long talk with the boys without feeling pressured by the cost. Nevertheless, they obviously enjoyed being with Francis again. Paddy caught up on sleep, and Christopher took an extra little side trip to East Anglia to pick up with small rucksack with some extra clothes that friends had kindly taken with them when flying from Linz to London a few days earlier.
After their refreshing visit with Francis they went on to Kemble, where they enjoyed a visit with their cousins. Sara took a picture of all the cousins together, which she put online on Facebook, and it was lovely to see how happy they all looked together.
Since the boys had made plans to rejoin the rest of the group in Amsterdam a few days later, I booked a flight from London to Holland for them, but it left from London-Stansted at about six in the morning. Unfortunately, since Francis had already gone to Northumberland and the boys had somehow not managed to communicate other than telepathically (and quite ineffectively) with Nizam, they found themselves then without a place to spend the last night in London. The problem was quickly solved when I sent out a request for help to about five or six different people. Three people kindly offered to take them in, and they ended up staying with my friend Paula. They even managed to get themselves to the airport at dawn without waking her up and made it to Amsterdam without further mishap.
In Amsterdam they caught up with Sascha and George, but Alex had unfortunately had to go home from Paris after he injured his foot and it got infected. George returned to Austria shortly after that to go on holiday with his family, Christopher set off from Amsterdam to the Czech Republic by himself to go to the hip hop camp there, and Paddy and Sascha went to Switzerland. The three of them met up again in Prague last weekend, where Alex was able to rejoin them, and apparently had a wonderful time making music together in Sascha’s uncle’s flat in Prague. Their longest journey was the train ride home from Prague in the end, when they ended up on a little train that stopped at about every other little house between Budweis and Linz.
In the meantime, at home in Linz Peter was not coping very well with the information about things going wrong and the impossibility of taking over and sorting things out. We finally reached a point where I began to seriously doubt that he would be able to live to see the boys return: Either he would wind himself up worrying until he gave himself a heart attack, or I would murder him if he asked me one more time whether I had heard from the boys, about where they were, what they were doing, what he thought they should be doing ... So I made reservations for us to spend the weekend, Friday through Sunday, at a spa hotel in the country.
It was a very restful and quiet weekend at this hotel, where we enjoyed going in and out of the sauna and the hot tubs and lying comfortably naked in the sauna garden reading crime mystery novels. That definitely helped – except for a slightly hair-raising moment, when Peter asked me whether he had understood correctly that the last time I had heard from Christopher, he was walking all my himself down a long country road in the Czech Republic with no money on his way to the hip hop camp. An anxious text message to Christopher, however, soon brought assurance that he had arrived at the camp, met up with a large group from Linz, and everything was fine.
From the lovely messages I have received from various people, it seems that the boys left a trail of good impressions along their way around Europe. It is nice to hear that from other people, but I am very glad to have them home again.
They won’t be home for long, unfortunately. They have this week left of summer holidays, then they have one week at school, and then they will be leaving for a week of language school in France with their respective classes. When I expressed my dismay at the realization that they will both be gone the same week, Christopher in the north of France, Paddy in the south, Paddy sternly reminded me that they had left us alone for three weeks already, and he would have expected us to have matured a bit in that time. I doubt it. I think we are just going to miss them terribly again.
Paddy is just working on a map of their travels that he wants to link to his wonderful photos, so that should be online soon too.
posted by Aileen at Monday, September 03, 2007
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