WAYSTATION

by DAVID C. AKE
 This story is for Jose Perez and Jason Bell. I hope it takes you
back to this time in our lives. Gentlemen, those were the days.
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of
our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable
views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner
of the earth all one’s lifetime.” -Mark Twain

I’D BEEN IN THE ARMY FOR TWO YEARS when the girl I thought I was
going to marry broke my heart. She called me crying and said she didn’t
love me anymore. It was over. Our forever was no more.
Save your pity because it’s not as sad as it sounds. It was my first love, but
it wasn’t true love. It was one of those high school infatuations with love
that lasts far too long – three years too long. Like a million young fools, I
asked her to be my girlfriend when I left for training. We wrote letters that
naively mapped out our lives after the Army. But after basic training I was
stationed in Germany and she stayed in the states, and the bond between
our hearts broke from the separation of thousands of miles. She did what I
was too stupid to do when she called to ask if we could still be friends. I was
heartbroken, and when my unit was allowed to go on leave and no one was
waiting for me back home, I was lonely.
Summer was coming to an end in 2003. Fighting units were rotating into
Afghanistan and President George W. Bush was on TV celebrating the de-
mocracy America had just brought to a freshly “liberated” Iraq. For soldiers
at the time, uncertainty hung in the air like a fog. We didn’t know when the
orders would come down, but we were sure we’d be in a combat zone soon.
My unit missed the invasion and subsequent toppling of Saddam Hussein’s
regime, but we knew it was only a matter of time before it was our turn. The
commander told us he’d try to get us a mission so we could stop watching
the war on TV, but for now, he said, we should be with our families.
Usually when we were allowed to go on leave, I caught the first plane
home to be with my girlfriend. I should have flown home to Indiana to
visit my family, but I didn’t want to be anywhere near my hometown. It’s a
small place; I didn’t want to risk the chance of seeing her. I was too young to
forgive so quickly.
I signed out on leave and spent the first night in my room, soothing my
aching heart with beer and cigarettes. Jose Perez, a fellow tanker, stayed in
Germany to chase a few girls he liked but didn’t love. He joined my wallow in
self-pity shortly after signing out. His sage advice cut through the loud music
coming from my stereo and the sound of my fist slamming on the table as we
talked about the way she’d ripped my guts out. Every so often he’d lower his
gaze, shake his head, and say, “You know man, there’s a million more like her
out there.” But I didn’t listen no matter how many times he repeated it. I knew
she was “the one,” and now she was gone.
Jose was like an older brother to the younger guys in the platoon. Off duty I
called him Joey. He was a short, second-generation Mexican immigrant from
Central California quickly approaching his 30s. He’d been in the Army for a
few years but was busted and demoted for a stupid decision he’d made. He was
working his way back up through the ranks and trying to keep his nose clean.
Joey was a bit of a ladies man, always ready with advice for young soldiers
experiencing their first brush with the misery that love often is for soldiers.
Like me, he’d enlisted with a girlfriend that he thought was “the one.” He’d been
in long enough to know that my situation was the norm and not the tragedy I
made it out to be.
In the life of a fighting man, women come and go. It’s our curse. That’s why
our weapons usually carry a girl’s name. If we treat them well, they will be the
most faithful girls in our lives. But rather than tell me I was stupid for believing
my relationship was stronger than the hundreds he’d seen devoured by Army
life, Joey pounded the table and cursed his ex while I cursed mine.
We drank until the room got boring and then wandered the halls of the
barracks. It was mostly empty. The soldiers had gone home to their families,
fiancés, and girlfriends. The Orwellian halls were dark and silent. The brick
walls were cold. There were just a few of us haunting the building, which added
to what I’d been feeling all night. For the first time in my life, I was a lost soul.

I woke up the next morning to a pounding in my head. No. It was at the door. I
barely opened my eyes and the morning sunlight poured in. I quickly realized
the pounding was in my head and at the door. I shook off any belief that I’d be
going back to sleep and got up to see who was knocking. I peered through the
peephole and realized I was still too drunk to see straight.
“Hello mang?” a voice came from behind the door. “I see you mang. You
cannot hide from Carlos. Carlos sees you mang, and Carlos wants to make
looooove to you.”
It was Bell, another tanker in my platoon. Carlos was his alter ego, and he
often came out to entertain. Late at night, after many hours of rolling on tanks
in all kinds of nasty weather, Bell would transform from a tall, goofy Texas
panhandle kid into Carlos, beautiful singer and lover of women. We’d stand
around the tanks, smoking cigarettes and drinking turpentine coffee, and Bell
would make us forget where we were for a moment. He loved making people
laugh, but at the moment Carlos was not appreciated.
I opened the door and groggily said, “Dude, I thought you were finally going
home on this block of leave.”
Bell made the absolute best out of being young and living in Europe on the
government’s tab. His attitude toward being stationed in Germany was the
polar opposite of mine. He almost never went home on leave. He’d gladly trade
his hometown for the Swiss Alps or the Roman Colosseum. Up until now, I
couldn’t wait to get back home, but as soon as he got to Germany, Bell never
wanted to leave.
“Geez, you look rough. So, you going?” he asked.
“What’re you talking about?” I replied.
“He’s going. I’m not going to let him wither away and die in his room, man,”
Joey’s voice boomed from down the hall.
Bell looked from Joey back to me. “Straight from the man’s lips. Looks like
you’re goin’,” he said.
Joey slithered his body around Bell, who was still standing in the doorway,
and sat down on my empty bed. I stood there, reeling from the booze, trying to
understand the plot that had been hatched without me.
“Where the hell are we going?” I demanded.
Bell’s tall, thin frame moved from the doorway to the open pack of cigarettes
on my desk, to my lighter, and finally beside Joey, where he lit a stolen Kool
and exhaled thick smoke. The wisps turned blue in the rays of sunshine pierc-
ing the room. Bell chewed a half-pound of Copenhagen at a time, but every
now and then he’d find one of my smokes and make it his own. I didn’t mind.
He’d gotten to the platoon about a month before me, and when I arrived, he
taught me the important things a soldier stationed in Germany should know,
like how to open a beer bottle with a lighter and how to properly order “Ein
hefeweizen bitte.”
Bell took another drag and exhaled, “I heard about your girl-, well, ex-girl-
friend. I hope it burns when she pees.”
Bell’s weird sense of humor is the reason we instantly became friends. His next
words were always a mystery.
He continued, “I canceled my plane tickets home and decided to stay. When
I ran into Jose this morning, he said you guys were staying in the barracks too.
So dudes, why don’t we go to Italy?”
“We could rent a car. We’ve got a whole week, and Italy sounds better than
sitting here in the barracks thinking about your ex, right?” Joey said.
I have to admit I liked their idea, but I was a little nervous about driving
across Europe. The only road trip I’d ever taken was in high school for spring
break. We drove from Indiana to Gulf Shores, Alabama, but these guys were
asking me to drive across Europe. What if we got into trouble? A million scary
situations ran through my head. I thought about saying no and sitting by my-
self in the barracks all week, eking out my time in the Army so I could go back
home to my dirt road in Indiana.
Maybe it was thinking about that dirt road, or maybe it’s what Joey said, but
either way it would be better than sitting here with a broken heart. I swallowed
my fear of the unknown.
“I’ve always wanted to see Normandy. Why don’t we go there after Italy?” I
asked. “We can do all that it in a week, right?”
“I like where your head is at,” Bell said. “Pack your bags, dude. Let’s get a car
and see the world.”

“We were supposed to fill out a mileage pass before we left, right?” I asked.
Soldiers in my unit were required to fill out a mileage pass if they went more
than 150 miles away from the base. It’s a procedure in place so the chain of
command knows where its soldiers are in case they need to be recalled for
something like World War III.
“Oops,” Bell said sarcastically from the front passenger seat. “We didn’t have
enough time.”
It wasn’t a big deal, but if we got arrested in, say, France, there would be more
than one pissed off person waiting for us when we got back.
We were headed south, out of Germany and into Austria. The plan was to
stay at an American paratrooper base in Vicenza, Italy, that night, wake up
early the next day, and drive to Rome. I was way out of my comfort zone but
didn’t care as I watched the rolling Bavarian hills fly by in our black Mercedes
wagon as it barreled down the autobahn.
We hit the border of Austria and Germany and pulled off the autobahn to
make a bathroom stop. Joey slowed the car and followed a slight curve to the
right before stopping completely. As we rounded the corner and passed a row
of tall evergreen trees, I saw the first mountain I’d ever seen in my life. I mean,
I’d seen mountains from a plane window and in pictures, but never like this,
standing right there. It was part of the Alps we’d spend the next few hours driv-
ing through. It stood alone, towering magnificently over the world with the rest
of its range in the background. The three of us were speechless. The mountain’s
grayish-blue form turned white with snow before disappearing into thick gray
clouds. I felt small – really small – like a speck of dust in the greater scheme of
the universe. I’d live and die, and it wouldn’t affect this awesome thing before
me one bit.
Bell broke the silence. “Man, that’s awesome. We don’t have anything like
that in the panhandle,” he said.
“I’ve never seen a mountain before. Only hills in Indiana, and that’s not a
hill,” I said.
“Nope, that is not a hill,” Joey said.
We took pictures, handled our business, and got back on the road to Vicenza.
We spent a few hours weaving through the Alps in Austria and crossed the
border into Italy. The road signs changed from German to Italian. Joey spoke
fluent Spanish, so his grasp on the Latin-based language proved beneficial in
deciphering simple Italian words. The fancy, in-dash GPS our Mercedes was
equipped with guided us to Vicenza but couldn’t locate the U.S. Army base
where we wanted to stay the night.
It was almost 2 in the morning. We were tired and lost in Italy. Behind the
wheel, Joey searched for street signs and finally found one that said something
about the military. We followed its direction and drove through the front gate
of a military base, only to find more signs in Italian.
Something about the late night visit seemed off. As we approached the guard
shack at the entrance, we were surprised to find Italian soldiers guarding it. We
pulled up and the young soldier spoke Italian too quickly for Joey to pick out
words that sounded like Spanish.
“Uhh, what’s he saying?” I asked from the backseat.
Before Joey could respond, a bright flashlight shined in my face through the
window. Another Italian soldier came out of the guard shack to investigate the
German-plated Mercedes with the Spanish-speaking driver. About 10 more
soldiers poured out of a building behind the guard shack. They carried Beretta
assault rifles and each one had a magazine, indicating that the guns were prob-
ably locked and loaded. We were completely surrounded by armed soldiers that
seemed as confused as we were.
Bell and I didn’t say a word. Joey kept trying to communicate with the first
guard we had encountered. They spoke quickly until, suddenly, the young
Italian soldier let out a laugh that put the other gun-toting guards at ease. He
yelled something to them and they filed back into the building. The soldier be-
side my window turned off his flashlight and the tension seemed to fade from
the situation.
The Italian guard shook Joey’s hand, said a few phrases in broken Spanish,
and made a gesture toward what I hoped was the U.S. base we had intended to
find. Joey put the car in reverse and quickly headed back out the gate.
“Well, that was scary,” he said. “The good news is that we’re close to where we
want to be.”
We found the American base, paid for a cheap hotel room, and talked about
our crazy experience until we found sleep.

We awoke the next morning and hit the road toward the ancient city of Rome.
Rome was Bell’s idea. Neither Joey nor I protested. We thought Rome would be
a fitting place to stop on the Great Eurotrip of ’03.
I took over driving and sped the car south on the autostrade, the Italian
equivalent of the autobahn, at almost 200 kilometers per hour, flying past trees
I’d never seen, across mountain ranges whose names I didn’t know. At one
point I looked in my rearview to see a convoy of Lamborghinis and Ferraris
catching our car that was going more than 125 miles per hour. They passed us
like we were sitting still. I guessed they were motorists from some kind of high-
end car club out strutting their stuff. The six-hour drive at dangerous speeds
was exhilarating and took us through cities with names like Prato, Firenze, and
Montevarchi.
We got to the rough outskirts of Rome a few hours before the sun went
down. Rough is the only way to describe it. The streets were crowded. Graf-
fiti covered the walls of the bottom floors of buildings that were built right on
top of each other. Some of it was beautiful, but most of it was obscene. Plastic
wrappers and empty water bottles were picked up by the breeze and placed in
small piles on the sidewalk. It’s what Midwestern kids would call the ghetto. I
switched places with Joey because he had the most experience driving in big
cities. I didn’t realize that nothing could have prepared us for the insanity of
driving in Rome.
We made our way through the area where ordinary Romans live to the
ancient city where tourists go to take pictures. At one intersection, we sat a few
cars back. There were five cars across three lanes. The car all the way to the left
had its right-turn signal on and the car all the way to the right had its left-turn
signal on. When the light turned green, everyone sort of went their own way
while scooters zoomed between the cars. It was like nothing I’d ever seen. Pure
pandemonium all over the roadway, but no one crashed. After witnessing that,
we decided to find a parking place and not drive any more in Rome.
We wandered the ancient city until long after the sun went down. We took
pictures of the Colosseum, Trevi Fountain, and the Pantheon. When the night
turned black, we stuck to the back alleys away from the tourist-filled streets un-
til we passed a fellow traveler who’d gotten lost in his journey. He was sleeping
on the stone steps of a centuries-old building. The three of us sat down on the
steps close to him to catch our breath, but he didn’t stir. I put a few cigarettes by
his head, hoping he’d find them when he woke up.
“I wonder what it’s like to be a bum in Rome,” Bell wondered.
Understanding that his comment was rhetorical, Joey and I remained silent.
After a brief rest, we continued through the Roman alleyways, passing street
vendors who were busy closing their operations. Many took a second to say
“Ciao” or “Buon giorno,” and some gave us leftovers from their carts. We were
handed pieces of coconut and fresh peaches that hadn’t been sold to the tour-
ists on the main drag. Our limited grasp of the Italian language prevented us
from saying anything other than “Grazie.”
Our wandering took us to St. Peter’s Basilica, where we planned the next
leg of our road trip while we sat in the moonlit shadows of the columns that
circled the plaza outside the church. All around us were travelers, pilgrims,
and tourists, who all had their own reasons to be there. I took out my pack of
cigarettes and offered them to my friends. We sucked down the menthol smoke
and rested our tired legs on the cool marble. It was a beautiful night to be in
Rome.
“So where do we go from here?” I said. “Lots of land between us and Nor-
mandy.”
“We’ll have to drive through Spain. Wanna stop in Barcelona?” Joey said.
Bell asked, “What’s in Barcelona?”
“Beaches mostly, and I speak Spanish, dude,” Joey replied. “Other than that, I
don’t know. I’ve never been there.”
Our desire for adventure was strong and growing with every stop along our
journey, but we wouldn’t make it there tonight and we had no place to sleep.
We came to this realization, and Bell threw out a perfect solution.
“We’re practically on the coast. Let’s drive ’til we find a beach and just sleep
there. We’ll get to Spain tomorrow afternoon,” he said.
 We made our way from the Basilica back across Rome to our car, dead set on
finding a beach. Bell’s idea sounded good but overlooked two details: none of
us could read Italian road signs to know if we were even close to a beach, and
it’s damn hard to see the ocean from the road at night.
Looking for the ocean, we drove until we couldn’t drive any more. Exhaus-
tion won, and I pulled the Mercedes off the highway and into a parking lot. We
accepted our loss and fell asleep in the car for a few hours until the sun came
up.
Joey was the first one up and stepped out of the car to shake off the cramps.
Bell and I awoke to him jumping up and down, laughing like a crazy man. He
tapped on the window and pointed down the street.
“I don’t believe it! Dammit, so close!” he said.
Less than a quarter mile down the palm tree-lined road was light brown sand
and blue water. I could see the beach from the parking lot.

On our way out of Italy, we stopped in Pisa to eat lunch and see the famous
Leaning Tower. We ate our street vendor meal in Cathedral Square, surrounded
by tourists from all over the world. French, Chinese, German, and English
words bounced back and forth around us. People took the stupid, yet iconic,
picture of themselves holding up the Leaning Tower. After seeing the 500th
person do this, we decided it was time to roll.
I’d woken up that morning in Italy. We spent the day driving along the
southern coast of France and were finally barreling down the Spanish autopista
toward Barcelona. The sun went down hours ago, and it was just us in our
piano-black Mercedes wagon, road-weary and needing a bed. Bell sat quietly in
the back. Joey and I navigated the rental from the front. There was no plan, just
a destination.
The yellow, low-fuel light came on, and we pulled off at the next gas station.
Joey went inside to pay and ask how far we were from Barcelona. We’d finally
reached a country in Europe with no language barrier, which meant we could
ask for hotels and where the good bars were. It helps avoid embarrassing situa-
tions like the one we had in Vicenza.
Bell said he was getting something to drink and left me to fill the tank. The
pump rumbled to life, and I stepped away for a moment to admire the dim
glow of Spanish cities all around me. The autumn breeze brought the smell of
the Mediterranean inland. It just felt good to be young and living on a whim. I
gave a sigh of satisfaction. I was glad for taking a chance years ago and leav-
ing home, and for the first time in a while I didn’t miss Indiana. Out here, the
unknown was better.
I turned around when I heard the gas station door open and snapped back
to the task at hand: getting to Barcelona. Joey came out with a smile and a big
bottle of sangria.
“Look at this shit,” he said. He stuck the bottle in my face and pointed to the
label. “It’s made here in Spain. Five euros for this big-ass bottle. Hell yes! Bell
bought you one too.”
Spanish sangria in Spain. A smile crossed my face.
“How much farther to Barcelona?” I asked.
Bell came out of the gas station with two bottles of sangria, and we con-
verged on the car to figure out the quickest way to find a beach, park the car,
and open these bottles.
Joey continued, “Well, the guy in there said we already drove through Bar-
celona. Not really sure how we missed it. That GPS isn’t worth a damn, man.
We’re on the south side of the city in a suburb called Castelldefels. He said it’s
a smaller city, and it’ll definitely be cheaper to stay here. What do you guys
think? He said there’s a hotel on the beach just a couple kilometers down the
road.”
It didn’t take convincing. We looked at each other and nodded our heads.
The Barcelona plan got scrapped. Castelldefels it was. We climbed back in the
Mercedes and pointed the car in the direction of the hotel.
It was right across the street from a public beach. Inside was a cramped lobby
with a huge potted palm tree and a fat, mustached man behind the counter. He
raised his eyes from a newspaper and shot a nervous look when he saw three
Americans carrying huge bottles of sangria. Bell and I checked out the artwork
on the walls while Joey got us a room. We paid 90 euros for a night. The man
passed us a key, and we made our way up the narrow staircase to a room on the
third floor to dump our bags.
The room was small, but I’d come to learn most hotel rooms in Europe were.
It had two small couches and a bed crammed in the room in such a way that
you had to step over the bed to get to the bathroom, but there was plenty of
room for the three of us to sleep, which was all we really needed. We weren’t
going to spend much time in the room anyway. The giant can of bug spray sit-
ting on top of the TV was the only thing not to our liking.
Sangria in hand, we left the hotel. It was a warm night. The moon was big
and round, and the sky was filled with white stars. We crossed the dark street
where we’d parked the car and followed the enticing sound of crashing waves.
Past a few beachside restaurants, the landscape opened to a huge beach that
was all ours. We took our shoes off and let our feet sink into the cool sand. At
the water’s edge, we sat down and popped the tops off our bottles.
“Cheers, you assholes,” Joey offered his bottle high in the air. “There’s nobody
I’d rather be here with, drinking Spanish sangria on a beach in Spain – my
brothers.”
“Cheers, ya sappy bitch,” I said.
We tapped our bottles together and took a long, well-deserved drink of sour
wine. The spicy aftertaste warmed my throat, all the way down to my belly. The
sensation that followed afterward was particularly liberating after spending all
day in the car. The cramped legs and tension in my neck melted away.
We sat for a moment, listening to the waves, each of us lost in our own
thoughts. I thought about home again and how much I didn’t miss it. This
beach was better than any dirt road in Indiana. For some reason, I found my-
self thinking about elementary school and a teacher who once asked me what
I wanted to be when I grew up. Back then, I said I wanted to be an explorer.
She said that everything had been discovered and there were no more explor-
ers. I looked out at the open expanse of the Mediterranean and smiled. She was
wrong. What an awful thing to tell a kid. The dreamer in her was dead. Anyone
can be an explorer; they just have to be willing to discover things.
The tranquil night was interrupted by a loud, mechanical whine. It was
deafening and sounded like it was falling out of the sky. We snapped out of
our trances and looked up to see a huge plane fly close overhead. It flew out
over the sea, banked on its left side, and descended on the bright lights further
up the coast. Another one performed the same maneuver a few minutes later.
They were landing at the airport, nearby in Barcelona. We finished our bottles
of wine, laughed and watched planes land. Then we stumbled back to our room
and passed out.

The next morning brought warm sunshine to Castelldefels, and we decided to

stay and enjoy it. Over breakfast, we agreed that tomorrow we’d head north-
west into France, toward Normandy, but the only thing on today’s agenda was
beaches and sunshine. We left the little diner next to our hotel and changed
into beach clothes. Our road-weary bodies rested on towels in the same sand
where we’d watched planes fly overhead the night before. Occasionally, topless
women would walk by and we would try not to gawk like Americans. They
enjoyed their liberating stroll in true European fashion, and we enjoyed the
steady display of breasts walking back and forth. As we watched sun-kissed,
topless women pass our spot on the beach, I knew I’d shamefully forsaken so
many experiences for the comfort of home.
We ate at a beachside restaurant when the sun started making its descent.
Joey and I agreed that we wanted to hit the local bar scene before leaving Cas-
telldefels. Bell wanted to take the night off and get a good night’s sleep.
“You guys go ahead without me, but don’t come crying when you get gonor-
rhea,” he said. “I’m not a doctor and I’m just gonna laugh at you anyway.”
“Come on, Bell. I’ll be your translator for the Spanish chicks,” Joey said.
“Dude, we’re here in Spain one more night. Tomorrow, we’re in France and
French girls hate Americans,” I added. This was especially true of French girls
at the time. Remember freedom fries?
Bell kept insisting on his rest until Joey and I gave up and made our way to a
local watering hole. The bar didn’t have much room and was little more than a
beach shack. In the center was a tiki-themed square bar packed elbow to elbow
with people waiting for drinks. It was dimly lit with a red haze and filled with
patrons smoking and drinking the night away. A beautiful Spanish girl with
tightly woven blonde cornrows shook her hips near the jukebox. I watched her
dance while I waited on a cerveza. She was mesmerizing.
Joey nudged his elbow into my ribs and pointed toward a small group of girls
having their own party. One of them wore a wedding veil, which led us to as-
sume they were some kind of bachelorette party.
“Easy prey,” Joey said. “Let’s test her loyalty.”
“Hell yeah. See if they want to dance,” I said.
Joey went over to talk to the girls. He threw them a few lines and came back
with a smile on his face.
“I told them we’re construction workers, and they agreed to dance if we buy
them all drinks,” he said.
I forked over some money, and we made our way back to the girls with shots
between our fingers. We drank the liquor down, and Joey started speaking to
them in Spanish. I sat quiet and uncomfortable, devouring my beer. After a few
minutes the girls got up and left, laughing all the way out the door.
I looked at Joey puzzled and he said, “Pffff. Bitches. She’s a loyal one. We got
played for shots, dude.”
I didn’t mind. I really didn’t want to dance even though I’d suggested it. I’m
incredibly bad at it, but I know it’s necessary for picking up girls that go to bars
to dance. I shrugged my shoulders and went back to watching the blonde girl
shaking her hips in the corner.
We left the bar and walked back to our hotel to find the doorman asleep. We
tried calling Bell, but he’d turned his cell phone off. It was a moment that re-
minded me Spain was not America. There was no corporate office for this ho-
tel. No comment cards. No night manager. The hotel locked its doors at night,
and the only way in was to wake the man tasked with its security. We could see
his big head lying on the desk, lights out. He snored like a chainsaw. Perhaps he
drank more than us that night, and that’s why he didn’t wake despite our furi-
ous pounding on the door.
The doorman let us down. The cool air coming off the Mediterranean Sea
lured us away from the futile hotel break-in and toward the beach. As Joey
and I staggered toward the sound of crashing waves, we saw a group of people.
The heightened sense of survival we’d both acquired in the military told us
they were up to no good. We prepared ourselves for a fight because that’s what
drunk soldiers do in a foreign country when they encounter a group of people
at 2 a.m. There were six of them. They stood in a circle, laughing and shoving
each other, blocking our route to the beach.
“You ready to do this?” I asked Joey.
“Yeah, fuck it. Let’s do it,” he replied.
As we got closer, I saw they were young. They were just kids, probably high-
school age. There were two girls, three guys about our size, and one giant,
refrigerator-sized kid.
“Please don’t kick our arses. We’re not hurtin’ anybody here,” the big kid said
with an Irish accent.
“Dude, why are you afraid of us?” Joey asked. “You’re at least two feet taller
than me, and I bet you’ve got 150 pounds on me.”
“Well, now, ya don’t hafta call me fat,” the Irish kid said with a belly laugh.
“Why don’t Americans just use the damn metric system? What are feet?”
another kid said. He was British. “And the only pounds I know of are the ones I
spend.”
“We got locked out of our hotel, and we were going to wait on the beach ’til
the doorman wakes up,” I interjected. “We saw this huge dude, and we thought
we might have to fight.”
“I’m Andrew, mate, and the big guy is Sean.” The British kid shook our hands
and introduced us to the rest of his group. Aleks and Lilia were boyfriend
and girlfriend. They were from Russia. Eduardo and Isabel were from Spain,
but they weren’t a couple. Sean was Irish, and Andrew was British. They were
international students, except for Eduardo and Isabel, spending their last year
of high school in Spain.
“We’re havin’ a little nightcap,” Sean said. “Partake?”
He pulled a bottle of clear tequila from his pocket, which he’d hidden neatly
under his shirt.
“I hid me booze when I saw you guys,” he said, putting his arm around Joey.
“I thought this little guy might be a mean drunk.”
A stone-faced black and white Emiliano Zapata graced the label, complete
with ammunition bandoliers across his chest. Sean handed the bottle to Joey,
who took a long swig.
“Agghhhhhh. Burns in all the right places,” Joey said with a big smile and
squinted eyes.
He handed the bottle to me and I took a long drink, filling my throat and
belly with the familiar warmth of tequila. It helped shake off the chill blowing
in from the ocean just a few hundred feet away.
Andrew clapped, took the bottle, and before taking a drink said, “Fellas, let’s
finish this bottle with our new friends on the beach. Cheers, mates!”
We all walked to the beach before splitting into smaller conversation groups.
Aleks and Lilia, who spoke only a little Spanish, sat quietly in the sand, listen-
ing to Eduardo, Isabel, and Joey talk in Spanish. Sean listened to Andrew and I
debate the finer points of the English language.
“And what the fuck are pants, man? Pants? In England, we wear trousers,”
Andrew said. “And trunks are only on elephants. In England, it’s a boot. I don’t
understand why you Americans butchered our beautiful language.”
“So do you just hate all Americans?” I asked.
“No, Americans talk way too funny for me to hate ’em,” Andrew said. “But,
now, your cowboy president, yeah, everyone hates him.”
“Oh yeah, fuck dat guy,” Sean clarified.
Andrew made fun of George W. Bush, repeating silly pronunciations he
made in speeches apparently heard around the world. I made fun of trousers
and boots and told Andrew and Sean to come study in America so they could
use their accents to get laid. They were intrigued by this suggestion. Joey sat in
the sand, in a circle with the rest of the group, probably hitting on Isabel.
We were all diplomats on a dark beach, sharing the way we see our world
with one another. It made me realize that this world is big and there was so
much of it I knew nothing about. Suddenly I was grateful for the failed rela-
tionship that had brought me to this intersection, with these people. I’d never
seen it as an anchor but now realized what I’d mistaken for love had weighed
me down for years. It was part of a future I no longer wanted.
When the bottle was empty and the sun started to rise over the Mediterra-
nean, Joey and I said goodbye. We left our international friends on the beach
and made our way back to the hotel, hoping to find the doorman awake.
Our day began with the damn GPS getting us lost in the mountains just west
of Castelldefels. As the car crawled higher and higher into the mountains,
the GPS got more confused. After a few minutes “UNKNOWN” was the only
word on the screen. Bell fiddled with the radio, trying to find a station that
played music. Joey and I were still pretty rough from the tequila. We’d gotten in
around 5 a.m. and slept only a few hours. Patience was not in abundance this
morning.
“You motherfucker! Why the fuck won’t you tell me where we’re at?” Joey
screamed as he drove farther into UNKNOWN territory.
I turned my head and looked out the back window at the rapidly disappear-
ing stretch of sand and blue water that was Castelldefels. Two days ago, I didn’t
even know the small beach town existed. Now it was a part of who I was. It was
a place of discovery for me.
We wove through the mountains for a bit. It was desolate. In America, there
would have been million dollar homes all around us, fenced off and gated from
the rest of the world. But the only building we came across was a Buddhist
temple. We parked the car in the driveway to find where we were with an atlas
we’d bought somewhere in Austria. Joey squinted at the map through tired,
bloodshot eyes. Bell and I watched curious monks poke their heads out the big
wooden door at the front of the building.
“Man, where the hell are we? Damn you bitch!” Joey said. He smacked the
dashboard. “I think if we just keep driving on this road we’ll get back to a main
road, or we might get lost, killed and raped.”
“I don’t think they rape in Spain,” Bell said. “They seem like friendly people
here.”
The road we were driving on wasn’t on the map, which explained the con-
fused GPS, so we just kept driving until we started seeing road signs again. Joey
found the way back to the highway and we were off toward France.
A few miles from the border we stopped to use the bathroom and get some
drinks. We pulled into a gas station and parked by a blue station wagon with a
dark-skinned woman and her little boy eating lunch on the curb beside it. We
all went inside.
I was the first one back to the Mercedes and noticed broken glass all over the
ground. I got closer and noticed our back right passenger window was gone.
Our bags in the back were gone. The console in the front seat was open and the
tollbooth money that we’d stashed there was gone. I turned to ask the mother
by the blue car if she’d seen anything and realized she was long gone.
Joey called the police. We didn’t know what else to do. When they showed up,
Joey talked to them in Spanish for a few minutes and then they shrugged their
shoulders and left.
“No chance we’re getting our shit back, are we?” I asked.
Joey answered, “Nope. The cops said it happens about every 10 minutes on
the highway. They said it was probably gypsies. They sell shit they steal from
cars at rest stops. Luggage, clothes, you know, all the stuff they just got from
us.”
“Man, someone is going to be wearing my underwear? That makes me un-
comfortable,” Bell said, lightening the situation a bit.
“We were only gone for, like, three minutes,” I said.
“I mentioned the lady over there with her kid. They said it was probably her,”
Joey said. “Apparently that’s how gypsies operate.”
“Well, shit, I hate to be the one that suggests it, but is this the end of our road
trip?” I asked my companions.
Joey looked at Bell and then back at me.
“I think so. Let’s go home, guys,” Joey said.
We taped a piece of cardboard over the hole where the gypsy had broken our
window and turned our car east, back toward Germany.

The ride back to Schweinfurt, Germany, was stressful. Bell and I had 60 euros
between us, and Joey had about 70 euros on a credit card. With tollbooths in
France sometimes running 15 euros, our resources dried up quick. The gyp-
sies got the 200 euros we’d stashed for tolls and gas, and we cringed every time
the low fuel light came on, hoping we’d have enough money to get home. We
stopped at a few filling stations, asking the French clerks if they’d exchange
the few American dollars we had for euros, but the reply was always the same.
They’d raise their noses and say, “No English.” I didn’t take their arrogant rejec-
tion personally. It was just my cowboy president they didn’t like.
We drove through the darkness and arrived in the early morning at our
Army post’s front gate. The low-fuel light was blinking yellow, indicating we
had just a few miles to go before the Mercedes gave up. She was sucking fumes,
but we made it.

A few days later, Bell, Joey, and I examined the few items from our trip that the
gypsy hadn’t stolen. There was a shot glass from Pisa, a map of Rome, and an
Italian flag. We split the items among ourselves so that we each had a piece of
the journey.
I asked, “You know the thing I’m most pissed off about getting stolen? My
camera. I don’t have any pictures.”
“Yeah, but do you really need pictures from a trip like that to remember it?”
Bell said. “The experience is the most valuable part, and no gypsy can steal
that. Well, they might be able to. I don’t know much about their magic. But
seriously man, it’s all about the memories. The memories.”
Joey and I nodded our heads and let the thought resonate. Bell was being
Bell, but the words he spoke were sincere and honest. The memories were the
reason he’d spent his time in Germany traveling rather than going home to visit
the people he already knew in places he’d already been.
It’s been almost a decade, but I can still remember our trip vividly, more
than any of the pictures I took or the broken relationship that sent me search-
ing for something new. With Bell and Joey, I became a traveler. I learned that
sometimes you have to shake off the comforts in your life to truly live. Let your
universe unfold without a plan and jump into the unknown with no assurance
of ever making it back. Sometimes you’ll find topless girls on a beach in Spain,
you’ll most certainly meet people that teach you about yourself, and sometimes
you’ll get robbed by gypsies along the highway.
I’ll never be that kid again, scared of the “what-ifs” in life. I came back
changed. I am no longer content with eking out my existence. I left the old me
in the past and I’ve never stopped traveling. Today I say with pride that I’ve
been to 12 foreign countries and 24 U.S. states. I’ve met people all over the
world who have changed me in ways I cannot describe, and I’ve seen places
that cannot be summed up in a photograph. Each journey is a piece of who I
am, and it all started with Joey and Bell on the Great Eurotrip of ’03.
I learned that traveling is important, especially when you’re scared to take
the next step in life. It provides a good transition when you know you must
change. Sometimes you have only a vague notion of where you want the road
to take you, and sometimes you end up in place different from where you in-
tended. But on the road, wonder often overshadows uncertainty.
On the road, you gain new experiences that change who you are and you
come home from the road a different person, ready for the next big journey.
 If I Leave Here Tomorrow by The Invictus Writers is licensed under a Creative
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