I’m sitting in seat 21K, a window on the three person starboard side of a British Airways Airbus A380 en route to Los Angeles. I don’t normally request windows on long hauls as I like to be able to get up and stretch my legs yet I double checked my Orbitz purchased ticket and sure enough I was always in this seat. I am trapped by a sleeping fellow on the aisle and a dozing woman between us. My legs are cramping up and killing me but there’s no easy way to extract me from this location. I am instead hoping against hoping, psychically willing my seatmates to need to get up so that maybe I can too. So far my powers of mind control are as weak as a disgraced sham televangelist. I say disgraced because if I were a televangelist faith healer at the height of my powers I’d long since have gotten these two to rise to their feet.
It’s been a long, strange trip, this European Tour. I’ve been to four countries, run four different weekends, and been to five different cities (wait – six! Hello, Paris proper and fairytale Bruges!). Hanging out with Mom in Disneyland Paris seems like a lifetime ago. But thankfully there’s plenty of photographic proof that that happened, and me in a fake moustache and flowing tash to boot.
Brussels and Bruges proved a medieval theme park unto their Belgium selves. I regret flying to Croatia instead of taking a bus – I suspect that indulgence cost an extra fifty euros and required a longer journey anyway due to airport security requirements and baggage services.
Zagreb wasn’t what I imagined but held fast to the awesome ability of humanity to work its way through the crucible of war and emerge a better, freer society.
As for Budapest… well, Budapest. I was tired by then, in so many ways. The miles both on the getting from Point A to Point B and at 42.195K per weekend on foot had taken a heavy toll. My broken English had faltered and failed and I don’t know if I was short-tempered because of the distances logged or because of the people I was encountering, but Hungary became a bridge too far. Several bridges on the marathon route, actually. I’m still smarting on the side from the cramped stitch in my side that developed running there.
And this long flight home, with seemingly never ending layovers and a delay on the tarmac at Heathrow, both in the terminal and sitting in this infernal seat 21K, have beaten me ever more into an achy, breaky body and soul.
I’m glad to have done this long haul through Continental Europe. I have traveled far, seen many things, made some good memories with Mom and me individually… and some not-so-good memories that perhaps as time passes will see their edges rounded off and made more humorous than aggravating.
Post college I used to write “incidentals,” summary stories of the misadventures of a 20-something buffoon questing for Hollywood fame and fortune and finding failure by a thousand paper cuts Somewhere along the way, as I found myself working in of all things international healthcare and child and adolescent psychiatry, I decided I would run a marathon. It was a stress relief and I thought I’d do one and be done with that forever. Almost fifteen years later, I’ve gone back through the London Heathrow airport I so often used to be rushing through on business, this time as a full-fledged tourist but still rushing. What am I running to or from? What am I searching for? It’s hard to say… despite still writing variations on “incidentals,” though now of the bumbling idiot abroad (or even a fool wandering his home country’s backyard), I don’t reflect too long or hard on me. I dare not gaze too long into my soul out of fear for what might look back. Maybe that’s why I keep running.
Whatever the case, as this European adventure draws ever so slow to a close, as I double fist my mini-bottles of wine because the flight attendants can’t be bothered doing drink services too often…
…there is one truth that is abundantly clear.
Tomorrow I will run again.
The road calls.
Both to my soul and to my shoe’s soles.
Run, Kevin. Run.
Long may I do so.