Traveling Light (Darkly)

I was fumbling through old pictures and found this one. It isn't too clear for two reasons: it was bigger (I cropped out my friend who was pointing at me and waving her camera) and it was probably scanned and manipulated poorly by me. In 1999

So almost eight years ago. It's June 1999.

I'm going on a trip with my friends that includes Normandy (the fifty-five anniversary of D-Day) and Paris and Berlin. A couple of my friends have been somewhere else (Switzerland, I think, or looking for chocolate factories in obscure parts of France). They are driving to Normandy and have kindly agreed to pick me up at Orly. Our great plan was that I would meet them at an airport hotel. Naturally my flight in was dead on time or early, I zoomed through customs and immigration and I was there hours before them. I got the shuttle to this hotel where I was not actually staying. I sat in the lobby and ordered strong espresso from one of those typical French waiters. I had to drag all my luggage with me (well, what you see is all of it) to use their public restrooms since I was alone. I waited and waited. I pondered the alternate plan. (That I would take a train to Paris and Bayeux and find them.) After what seemed like days (I'd been traveling a day by then) but was only a couple of hours, one of my friends stormed into the lobby with a big 35MM camera and started snapping pictures of me. Some people were staring like I was some celebrity they couldn't place. I was staring hard ahead at that point trying not to doze and look like a vagrant sleeping in this lobby. In the parking lot my other friend snapped a picture and later gave it to me. In the uncropped version, my friend is in a white T-Shirt and jeans and tennis shoes, waving that big camera.

Fuzzy or not, I like this picture because it shows me in traveling mode with everything I took on the trip either on my back or in my hands. Black jeans, gray waterproof hiking boots, a dark shirt, a black blazer. A small rolling suitcase and a day pack (which zipped onto the suitcase in a pinch allowing one to bust out straps on the bigger bag and put the whole mess on one's back). In the old days, I could have carried all this luggage on the plane. My trusty Swiss Army Knife would have been in the backpack in any case. It has a less than four-inch blade and was entirely acceptable for flying then.

Yep. I had everything I needed. Some dress shoes and dress pants. More servicable shirts. An anorak. A small camera. A few maps and books. The knife. Clean socks and underwear. A spare pair of eyeglasses and my prescription. Toothbrush and toiletries. I'm not sure how long I was on that trip. I'm thinking about ten days. I found a couple of notes about it in my online archive but nothing complete.

Notice though that I was traveling pretty light. One secret to that, obviously, is dark clothing that you can wear multiple times. My friends have so tired of my several black blazers. I still own the one in this picture. I occasionally actually wear it. I so need some new clothes. In dark colors.