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This is the Best Idea Ever

by Jes Simon

Read the true story of my trip to the UK and Europe. From flights to cities to funny pictures, it’s 50 pages of what a trip with just a backpack and no plans is really like.

You’ll never look at a travel show the same way again.

It’s amazing no one noticed.

I told him I’ve been telling people to imagine the worst neighborhood they can imagine in New York. “No. No,” he said. “That doesn’t even come close.”

We don’t have many pictures from Brussels. There are two images up on our PhotoBucket site. I have a couple others that don’t really show anything more.

Our hotel in Brussels

Why? It was the only place we went to where we were afraid to have our camera out. London, fine. Cologne, Frankfurt, Paris, pictures taken like crazy. Brussels? We would consider whether we’d need to take a photo, then decide if we felt safe having the camera out. Most of the time, we did not.

Yes, it was that bad.

Just woke up at Gatwick. There were several people sleeping in the area we were. The Asian girl is still here. The British man and the wife he watched over while she slept, are gone.

Jake is still sleeping.

I didn’t sleep well, but that was probably the longest time I’ve attempted to sleep in a while. I think we laid down around 8:pm last night and I sat up at 8:am, just now. Hopefully, we’ll both feel a little better today.

I would like to brush my teeth and have some coffee. I don’t know if I should wake Jacob.

I would love a shower.

—

It’s now a little after 3:pm. We had coffee earlier. I ate a sausage thing I found in a food store in the airport. It was only £1.

It is very boring, wasting days at the airport. Jake bought two papers and we each read one, then switched. There is little else to do.

This morning, I confirmed our reservations and the check-in area. We are scheduled to leave at 8:45am tomorrow. We have a short flight to Dublin, possibly a two hour connection, then on to Dulles. We should arrive in Washington around 3:pm. I’m not sure about the time though. I think the time they quote are local time.

We still have 16 hours before we leave. God help us.

I stopped writing that night. The next day we got up and had coffee, then checked-in for our flight.

The flight out was great and not just because I was headed home. The plane was really nice. We each had a screen on the back of the seat in front of us. They had movies and tv shows we could watch. I watched Sponge Bob, Fraiser, What Happens in Vegas and some Jack Black movie. It really helped make the length of the flight seem less.

I have more stray side-notes in my journal. I’m going to post them after this.

I liked Salisbury. I liked Cologne. Frankfurt was okay. Europe smells badly.

We made it back to London yesterday and tried to find a flight – any flight – back to the US. We had no luck. Last night we slept at Heathrow. We weren’t sure if we would get in trouble, then the guy working the bus information counter told us we should.

Newspapers are warm. Yes, this one is pink. No, I don't know why.

We slept on a bench with our backpacks locked together in-between us. I might have gotten 2 or 3 hours of sleep.

This morning at 6:am we started our quest again. We tried every airport with flights to Washington or New York and all the flights were full – except business class ($6,000 each!!)

Our tickets out are for Gatwick Airport. The bus shuttle was $40 each, but we found a metro way to get there for $23 each.

It’s like we’re leaking money and the only way to stop the leak is get home, but we can’t.

—

We’ve had no luck at Gatwick.

We’ve been sleeping a little on a bench in an area called Gatwick Village. For an extra $500 each, we could have flown home tomorrow. We decided to try our luck living in the airport, to not lose more money.

[beyond-the-journal notes]

Gatwick isn’t as friendly an airport as Heathrow. I don’t know what I mean by that, but that was the impression I got. It seemed much smaller. There were less ‘hiding’ places to sleep. Everyone slept in one or two large areas. By everyone, I mean everyone. As it got later, people would start claiming areas to sleep by spreading our their things. No one ever asked us why we were there, if we had a ticket out, or anything.

At Heathrow, we found a small alcove with a thing that looked like a public phone, but would send email or text messages for .20pence. It turned out that the text messages never got through, but the emails did.

Full-metal keyboard

The train station in Frankfurt was better than Gatwick Village – more shops, better variety of food sources. At the train station, we got a piece of cheesy bread for £1.80. It was big enough to share. There was only a Burger King, a Dunkin Donuts and some expensive restaurants at Gatwick.

We found it hard to waste time. There was nothing really to do once we’d explored the airport. Gatwick is very far from London proper, so it would have cost a lot to go off and come back again. We mostly wandered about.

We stayed at the Hotel de Milan last night. They gave us a bed that was, probably, a double. It was tiny. We had to walk up 3 1/2 flights of stairs (or more) . The stairs wrapped around the elevator shaft. The elevator that didn’t work. The stairs smelled. They were dirty, old and in places very tiny.

Our ‘foyer’ to our room, conveniently, contained a sink, toilet, and bidet. The door between the bath-entrance and the bedroom didn’t close all the way. There was no fan. We kept the window open, so were awakened throughout the night by noises from the street.

That door is the entrance to our room

This morning we got up and started our mission to leave Paris. We walked to a plane shuttle, paid 10€ and road to d’Orly airport. We wandered around for a while, then found out all the major airlines were at the Charles de Gaulle airport. We took a shuttle bus (18€) to de Gaulle and found the British Airways counter. It was 197€ each, but we’re on our way to London in a few more hours.

We hate Paris. I hate Paris. I thought my distaste was influencing Jake towards leaving, but he said he hates Paris more than Brussels.

We really aren’t sure what we’ll do once in London. Our first goal is to try to find cheap tickets to Washington. If not, see if we can change our expensive tickets’ departure date.

I don’t think I’ll be home tonight. Maybe, tomorrow. I hope and pray it’s soon.

—

We are on a plane to London after a security scare at the France airport. The matrix did not get us.

I made a side note about the security scare:

We believe it was an abandoned bag. The area we were supposed to go for check-in was cleared. Men in camouflage with machine guns chained to them arrived. After a while, we were allowed to check-in.

There were huge chains strapping the gun to the soldier

The reference to ‘the matrix’ is because we were discussing how advertising and marketing makes Europe look like a lovely, romantic place to visit – when that couldn’t be further from the truth. Paris smelled of urine and dog poop. I’m not kidding at all. We walked under a bridge along the River Seine and Jake almost puked. It was like sticking your nose into an ammonia bottle. I commented that we have ‘seen the matrix’. For the rest of the day, we remarked when it seemed those in control of the matrix did not want us to get the truth about Europe out.

I didn’t write much about Paris in my journal. I was very unhappy. We went to the Louvre. We walked all around the area and took many, many pictures, but almost all of the time we were doing it because we knew we should. People back home expected us to see certain things while in Paris. I didn’t want to turn tail and run when I realized where, and under what conditions, those things existed.

We saw the Eiffel Tower a few blocks off. Jake said, ‘That can’t be it. It’s tiny.’ He said it’s smaller than some famous tower in Japan he’d just seen. It’s simply a large metal structure. The bottom area was paved with people -stinky, stinky people.

Yeah, big metal thing

I’ve seen better, more interesting architecture in Richmond. It may not be as famous or as wide-spread, but it is nice and I don’t have to hold my breath to see it. The quaint Paris cafes all looked exactly like any cafe we saw in Germany or England or anywhere in The Fan.

Yeah, I really didn’t like Paris.

I made only a small journal entry this day:

Tips for Frankfurt. Hotel Nurnberg was darker, quieter and cheaper than Hotel Continental. Tchibo Coffee – in the main station door, down and left, by the platform – Has cheap, large, delicious coffee. Wish we had known this earlier. Foamy, delicious coffee.

Our last night in Frankfurt I heard some strange noise outside. I didn’t know what it was, a baby crying, a hurt dog? It turned out to be a very, very drunken man on the street across from the hotel. We were on the fourth floor (I believe) and I watched him for a little while through the window. He didn’t have a shirt on and was walking around shouting and muttering. At one point, he was laying on the ground and looked like he was doing the back-stroke. Eventually, he gathered up some things and moved on.

Drunk guy in Germany

When we were finally getting ready to go to sleep, people started shouting outside.  I guess they were leaving a bar.  The odd thing is, we went most of the day hearing very little English.  The people shouting outside?  English.

Early on in our trip, someone asked where we were from.  We told them Virginia and he said, ‘Oh, one of the oldest colonies.’  From then on, when we were in Brussels, Germany or Paris and heard someone speaking English, we would say ‘Queen’s’ or ‘Colony’ – depending on the accent.

At the hostel in Salisbury, the clerk told us he had checked in a couple with Canadian flags all over their luggage.  When he asked to see their passports – as they did in almost every place we stayed – they were Americans.  Shame on them.  Idiots.

We never hesitated to tell anyone who asked that we were American.  We never, never received a bad reaction.