Back in May I wrote about our plans to take Ethan, Oliver’s dog guide, to Europe with us for a family vacation. We’ve been there and back, and here are a few notes on how the experience went:

• Condor, our airline from Halifax to Frankfurt, was simply fantastic: all of the arrangements I’d made with their special services office in advance were on our file, and so they were ready with us for both legs, with no fuss nor hassle.
• Halifax International Airport has a wonderful area for dogs just outside the terminal beside the new parking garage. It’s clean, fenced-in, and has poop-bags at the ready. Every airport should have such a facility.
• On the Halifax-Frankfurt flight we were boarded even before the “preboard” phase, and when the flight attendants saw us sliding into the economy seats with little legroom they immediately upgraded us to “premium” economy, which gave us just enough legroom to allow everyone to fit comfortably. Ethan spent the entire flight at Oliver’s feet, didn’t make a peep, and most of our fellow passengers had no idea he was there.
• Clearing the border control in Frankfurt with Ethan was quick and easy: I showed the border guard our health certificate (record of an exam by Ethan’s vet, counter-signed by the “official vet” at the Canadian Food Inspection Agency) and we were through in less than a minute with no issues at all.
• Our flight to Frankfurt was delayed enough that we didn’t have time to take Ethan out for a pee: we had to quickly make our way to the Lufthansa terminal, never venturing beyond security. Ethan, bless his heart, gamely held on.
• Despite several email exchanges, and a telephone conversation with the medical office in advance, Lufthansa had no record of Ethan being a service dog accompanying us in the cabin. Fortunately we were taken under the wing of a helpful gate agent who made all the arrangements for us and so this ended up being only a small bump in the road.
• Upon arrivel in Düsseldorf I enquired at the information desk about a place to relieve Ethan and was told that if I headed out to the sidewalk, turned left, and just kept walking I might find a patch of green somewhere; they seem perplexed by my request. We did find a patch of green, and Ethan had a long, long, long pee.
• For the return trip, we arrived back at Düsseldorf with plenty of extra time, which was good because, again, Lufthansa had no record of Ethan and the very notion of a service animal riding in the cabin seemed novel to them. Again we were lucky: our gate agent was tenacious, made a lot of phone calls, spent a lot of time at her computer, and, after about 45 minutes came up with the magic certificate we needed to be allowed to board.

On all of the flights we took with Ethan he was the very picture of a well-behaved service dog: he scrambled into his place at Oliver’s feet and simply remained there for the duration of the flight. Even, as on our return flight to Halifax, when the flight was 7 hours long.

The oddest Ethan-related event of our trip was surely when the Düsseldorf gate agent asked his weight.

“He’s 61 pounds,” I said, realizing that even as I said this she was expecting the weight in kilograms.

“Oh, no, I mean, oh, around 120 kilograms,” I jumped in, forgetting that I needed to divide not multiply.

She looked confused and asked me to put him up on the scale. Which is how we came to this:

I was terrified that somebody was going to press a button that would suck Ethan, suitcase-style, into the baggage handling system. A delightful scene for a Disney movie: less delightful a prospect when it’s your family service dog. Fortunately it didn’t happen.

Our general marching orders from Dog Guides Canada when they sent us off into the world with Ethan was “life your life as you normally would, but with Ethan along side.” And so that’s what we did, and why we went to the trouble of arranging to have Ethan accompany us on the trip. Because this was our first experience, with a learning curve and two airlines, it probably added 5% more to the travel planning process, but I expect that for future trips this would be less.

When I last wrote, we were in the waterworld of Maasbommel looking for floating houses. We found them, and, after looking at them from all angles, we moved west, meandering through the countryside toward Utrecht. The Maas is traversed by several small car ferries along its length and we took the opportunity to sail back and forth a couple of times – the cheapest way to get out on the water – and we diverted into open studio day in the town of Zaltbommel for a couple of hours, so it was late afternoon by the time we arrived in our campground, Camping de Boomgaard, outside of Utrecht.

This turned out to be the perfect campground for exploring Utrecht: 10 minutes walk from the train station at Bunnik (which is a single stop from the central station), and in the middle of the city suburbs, yet set in an orchard and buffered from the noise of the train and the highway by trees. There was laundry, and lots of space to walk Ethan, clean washrooms, and friendly staff. It was one of the nicest campgrounds we stopped at, and I’d highly recommend it as a Utrecht base.

The next morning, Sunday, we woke up early and headed into Utrecht for the day, with the University Museum Utrecht as our destination. This turned out to be a combination science centre and paean to the greatness of the university; there were some really great little exhibits – a tour through the human body was compelling – along with a lot of dry material about the evolution of the university campus. The highlight was the “Jeugdlab” on the top floor, an area for young people to explore and experiment that was well-constructed and staffed by a very talented facilitator who was a big help in our enjoying of the experience.

Sunday night we rendezvoused at a nearby Indonesian restaurant with Edward Hasbrouck and his partner Ruth. I’ve been corresponding with Edward for more than 10 years, but we’d never met, and their cycle trip through Europe came close enough to our camper trip through Europe that they graciously arranged to divert from Belgium into Utrecht to meet up. It turned out to be a great meal with kindred spirits, made all the more interesting by the fact that Edward’s book, The Practical Nomad: How to Travel Around the World, has been so influential in shaping my own thoughts about independent travel.

Monday morning we were faced with a fork in the road: we needed to be in Düsseldorf on Wednesday morning to return our VW camper, and so we had one night of camping left, one more destination to squeeze in. Given that Belgium was so close – the western part of the country only a little more than an hour from Utrecht – I advocated for a quick overnight jaunt there; my advocacy prevailed, and so late that afternoon we pulled into Campinastrand, just outside the town of Dessel.

The campground was one that had obviously seen better days in an earlier time: the vestiges of a glorious well-equipped past were everywhere and, while not without its charms, we found it rough around the edges compared to other campgrounds we’d stayed at. The owner was a friendly man, however, and he got us set up with electricity at a spot beside what could charitably be called a “lagoon.” We enjoyed some Belgian beer on the terrace, took a nice walk around the fishing lakes that dotted the campground, cooked a meal in the camper, and then tucked in for a night punctuated by the arrival, in the middle of the night, by a gaggle of young rock festival refugees stopping over for the night: when we awoke we found a trailed parked 3 feet from the back of our van.

The next morning we packed up and headed west toward Düsseldorf, stopping in the pleasant city of Eindhoven for the afternoon for some lunch and shopping (and, for me, a pleasant hour at the beautiful Eindhoven Public Library). By supper time we were re-installed in the Rheincamping Meerbusch campground north of Düsseldorf where we’d spent our first night two weeks earlier. After a nice meal on the patio at the campground bar we set to work packing and cleaning, readying for our return of the van the next morning.

We woke up early on Wednesday, did a final round of packing and cleaning, and headed off to our Airbnb apartment in central Düsseldorf, where I dropped off Catherine and Oliver, and then onward to the DRM franchise in the southern part of the city to drop the van. I then headed back into the city by train, picked up Catherine and Oliver, and we headed for lunch with our friends Pedro and Patrícia. We spent the afternoon with them, grabbed supper at a nice Italian restaurant near our apartment, and then fell fast asleep – in real beds for the first time in weeks! – packed and ready to head to the airport on Thursday morning.

Longtime readers will recall that a regular feature of our small family’s travel exploits is forgetting to eat. Or eat least leaving the eating for far too long. Today was no exception.

We started off so well: with a tour of the Kröller-Müller Museum planned as the central element of the day, I lobbied for an early lunch so as to take in the van Gogh et al on a full stomach. The family rallied around this idea, and so we enjoyed a heaty lunch of “maaltijdsaladesat” – it’s a meal, in a salad! – at Monsieur Jacques, the museum’s busy café. We were fed and heavy into the Vincent by 12:30 noon.

Three hours later, with our minds full and our hearts satisified, I hopped on one of the free white bicycles and dashed back over to the nearby park visitors centre to pick up our van, returned to pick up Catherine, Oliver and Ethan, and we were off, leaving our two days Nationale Park De Hoge Veluwe behind us with happy memories.

We’ve been navigating around the Netherlands using a combination of my phone’s Google-powered navigation app (when I have a SIM that’s data-enabled), notes scribbled into the sides of brochures from a morning fill of wifi (when I don’t have mobile data) and by the seats of our pants (when all else fails). Today was a little bit of each: I eked out a little wifi on the way out of the park, scrawled down a few notes, and we knew the general direction of our trip to the watery region of Maasbommel (choosen as today’s destination because we both fondly recall a documentary watched years ago on its amphibious houses).

Unfortunately, this ad hoc approach to navigation failed us today, and we ended up on more than one “oh, that was the wrong turn – and there’s not another exit on this highway for 35 km” misadventures.

And so a promised 59 minute trip quickly stretched into a couple of hours.

But every unwanted diversion has a payoff, and so we found ourselves sailing across the river Maas on a tiny ferry built for a half-dozen cars:

While the high of unexpected water-journey was enough to keep us out of catatonia temporarily, soon the skies opened up with rain, and the struggle to find a campground took over, and that early lunch started to look foolhardy as it receded in the past.

We pushed on, however, and resolved, once our campsite was secured, to find a grocery store and restock the van’s pantry.

This too was easier said than done: we found a sign for “Supermarkt,” followed it, but none manifested. We reversed and still found nothing. Finally we spotted a man walking along the road; we slowed, Catherine rolled down her window.

“English?”, she asked, tentatively.

“Deutsch!”, he proclaimed.

“Supermarket?”, I asked, thinking this a universal enough term.

The man then proceeded to recite directions to the village supermarket in German.

At the conclusion of which we thanked him heartily, rolled up the window, looked at each other in surprise and the simulataneous realization that we’re understood absolutely every word he’s said. Despite knowing only 10 words of German between the two of us.

Wordlessly we followed his directions to a T, and five minutes later I was in the grocery store buying yogurt, bread and pasta.

Our campsite, available for a single night only, alas, is right on the side of the same body of water we’d crossed earlier in the day by ferry, looking out at a collection of ducks and geese and with the sounds of water lapping at the shore to lull us to sleep.

Tomorrow we’re on to Utrecht.

I am the last generation to have used “travellers cheques” as a regular part of international travel: kids today, with their fancy ATM cards have no idea.

Travellers cheques, for those of you younger than me, are perhaps best described as “money that you can get back if it’s stolen.”

One went to the bank and handed over cash: in return one received a numbered series of registered “cheques” that could be turned back into cash during travels. There’s an American Express televsion ad from the 1950s that explains it well. The system was based on a system of dual-signatures: you signed each cheque on receipt, and then again on cashing. If your signatures matched, presumably you were the owner of the cheques. Should the cheques be lost or stolen during travel, they could be replaced.

And, in fact, this actually happened to me once: I was in Seoul, South Korea visiting my brother Steve in 1998. We’d checked into a tiny hotel on the night of my arrival and somehow, between checking out of the hotel in the morning and arriving at the train station several hours later to book travel south, my Thomas Cook travellers cheques went missing. We went back to the hotel and scoured the room and the garbage, but to no avail. So I figured out how to call Thomas Cook from a pay phone and was given instructions as to where to go for replacement. We made our way to the 10th floor of a shiny office block, found the office, and within 30 minutes I walked out with new cheques.

By the time we visited Thailand in 2002 (after a 4 year break from travel during which we moved house and Oliver was born) the shift to debit cards had begun: in theory I could put my Metro Credit Union debit card into any ATM in the world and withdraw cash. And, generally, that worked in practice: there were always a few ATMs on a trip that would spit out the card for some reason – wrong network, etc. – but more often than not it just worked.

And twelve years later, here in Europe, we generally don’t give how-to-get-cash issues a second thought: ATMs are everywhere, they work 99% of the time, they dispense whatever the local currency happens to be, and the surcharge for currency conversion is generally reasonable (for example, I withdrew 150 EUR from my account on Wednesday; this cost me $224.75 CAD; the Bank of Canada exchange rate for EUR to CAD for that date reports $218.91).

What’s gone missing in all of this is: what happens if you lose your debit card?

It’s never happened to me, but I imagine it most have happened to many thousands of others.

I wonder if most banks and credit unions have a system for quickly replacing debit cards that matches the old travellers cheques replacement system in speed an convenience.

I’m not in a hurry to find out, of course.

Ton took this nice photo of Oliver and I presenting about Printcraft:

How to visit a national park that’s bicycle friendly – bicycle obsessed, in fact – with a service dog and a kid who’s averse to the tippiness of regular bikes? In the Netherlands this isn’t a problem: a cargo bike for Ethan the dog, a tricycle with lounge seating out front for Oliver.

The dedication to cycling accessibility in this part is truly something behold. We had a great day out on the trail, rambling about in the reconstructed wilderness of De Hoge Veluwe National Park.

Careful readers will see that I’ve entered the On Golden Pond phase of my life.

Every summer when we were kids my father would go “in the field.” We assumed, I think, that every father did this, so it didn’t seem unusual: for him it meant going to a different spot on one of the Great Lakes every summer to do field work for his job as a near shore sedimentologist. Often we got to go along for at least part of the summer; indeed we watched the Moon landing on a tiny black and white television set in a VW microbus on the shore of some lake or another.

As I type I am sitting aside my own VW microbus. My “own” in the sense that we’ve rented it for 2 weeks for a tour of the Netherlands

I too am in the field, but in this case simply because I actually am sitting in a field, in campsite “Natuurcamping De Hoge Veluwe” that’s part of the De Hoge Veluwe National Park in the middle of the country. The view from my chair looks like this:

That the “sanitary station” you see in the distance, an ecologically-designed place to shower and wash dishes and ablute. It has a green roof. And a free lending library. Oh, and there’s wifi, provided as part of the site rental along with electricity.

We arrived here late this afternoon after spending a pleasant day slightly to the north in the town of Meppel. Last night we camped between a highway and a canal; we cooked breakfast and then headed into town for a lunch with Bill Whelan and Michelle Coutreau, Islanders who, as it happens, are also touring the Netherlands by VW microbus this June (this required, as you might imagine, a rendezvous: how could we not!).

We spent the afternoon at the Drukkerijmuseum Meppel, the nicest little printing museum you ever did see. Where Oliver was taken under the wing of a kindly Dutch printer who guided him through the process of making paper, setting type, and printing:

We even got a demonstration of an Intertype machine (cousin of the Linotype), the most marvelous of marvelous machines:

Oliver has a slug of “Oliver Rukavina” burning a hole in his pocket, which is sure to attract the eye of airport security, or at least public health, as we make our way home.

Hoge Veluwe seems like a truly magical place: the campground is more wildernessy that others we’ve stayed at (something that Catherine, who has seen real wilderness, would dispute if she was reading over my shoulder, and that the presence of wifi would seem to contradict). There is a fleet of freely-borrowable white bicycles at the entrance and visitors are encouraged to leave their cars at the gate and bicycle about. Our plan for tomorrow is to borrow a tandem bike for Catherine and Oliver, and a cargo bike for Ethan and I, and do our own tour about.

Oh, and did I mention that in addition to all the wilderness, there’s also a museum on the grounds filled with works by Seurat, Picasso, Leger, Mondrian and others? So maybe it’s not wilderness at all.

We’ll likely stay another night so as to be able to take advantage of the twilight “Wandelen of fietsen naar een wildobservatieplaats” after supper.

And then it’s on to… not sure yet. One of the great things about being in the field – at least this one – is that there are no plans.

(Photo by Elmine)

We made our way from Düsseldorf to Enschede, just across the Dutch-German border, on Thursday and settled in at Stadscamping de Twentse Es, which turned out to be a friendly campground with lots of bandwidth and a lot of rabbits.

A lot of rabbits.

For Ethan this proved a frustrating novelty, at least for the first few hours. Rabbit! Oh, rabbit! Rabbit! Then the novelty wore off, and now he hardly notices the rabbits at all.

With our bones still tired, and the scheduled start time of Make Stuff that Matters (our nominal reason for being here) set for 9:00 a.m., we decided to cook dinner, then get to bed early.

We did not do that.

Well, we cooked dinner – Catherine make a nice salad with fresh strawberries – but then I recalled that Oliver and I were due to deliver a talk on Printcraft, that “make stuff in Minecraft, print out on a 3D printer” technology that’s simply delightful. So we rallied, came up with a practical need – a dispenser for the rolls of blue dog poop bags that were unravelling around the camper – and set to work on a design. Without a ruler, we were left to use a ruled notebook as a proxy: we measured things out, figured out where the bags would come out and how we could make a slotted lid. We ended up with this:

We then set to work building our model inside the Printcraft world, staying up far too late for our own good. When bedtime was finally upon us, we had this:

The basic idea was to build a box that was “roll of poop bag”-sized, with a slot in the top for a sliding lid, and an outlet on the side where a single poop bag could be extracted. Oliver “walked” over to the Printcraft control panel, and hit it:

This generated an STL file – the lingua franca of 3D printing. We were ready for analog.

The next morning at Make Stuff that Matters at Ton and Elmine’s house, with Elmine pointing the way, we installed Cura, the app from Ultimaker (the brand of 3D printers in the house for the weekend) and converted this STL file into a G-code file required by the printer. We immediately realized that to print the box full-size was going to not only hog a 3D printer for much too long – 2 hours and 41 minutes was the estimate – but that were we to do so we’d not have the object in-hand for our demo in the afternoon. So we shrunk things down in Cura to 30% of full size, which took the print time estimate down to 19 minutes.

We put the G-code file on an SD card, put the SD card into the printer, selected the file and hit the “do it” button. Eighteen minutes later, we had a tiny poop bag box:

Truth be told, to allow the lid of the box to slide into the box required 10 minutes work of post-printing finessing with sandpaper and a pair of scissors (photo by Elmine Wijnia):

But it worked!

A few minutes later, Oliver and I were “on stage” in Elmine and Ton’s living room telling the story of the poop bag to a diverse group of interested people (photo by Elmine Wijnia):

Among those people listening was a young lad named Floris, a Minecraft savant: our little presentation was enough to enable Floris to make an very detailed castle in Printcraft; on the screen it looked like this:

Once the castle was printed, it was just amazing (photo by Ton Zijlstra):

The level of detail was a testament to the painstaking effort Floris took in Printcraft, dropping each block where it needed to go.

The opening salvo in Ton’s scene-setting for Make Stuff that Matters was a suggestion that we come to look at “making” not as a solitary digital act commited behind a screen, but as a participatory act of community. The exercises that Ton and Elmine designed to nudge us to that point got us in that direction, but to really get Oliver and I there all it took was a few “all you need to do is to stick it on an SD card” answers for Floris and his dad – the free sharing of otherwise mystical incantations.

In the months leading up to this event I’ve been thinking a lot about what “matters,” parsed out of “stuff that matters.” As there is a lot of evidence to suggest that most of what comes out of 3D printers is little more that tchotchkes 3d-waste, I wondered whether you could truly create something that “mattered” in a setting like this.

What I came to realize – or, really, simply have reinforced – is that the “stuff that matters” is the process, not the product.

If, as a community of consumers, we can collaborate to understand more about our consumption, and more about the production of what we consume, and more about how we can effect, control, or drive that production, what we will have achieved is far more substantial than whatever comes out of a 3D printer. 

But the great thing about 3D printers is that, in spanning the digital and the physical, offering the possibility of on-demand fabrication, and simply being something we can all stand around as magic appears to happen within, they can catalyze conversations about stuff that (actually) matters.

So we made a tiny poop bag box.

And made some new friends.

And had some revelations.

And passed on some knowledge.

And learned a lot more.

And had some fun.

That matters.

The thing you don’t realize about The Amazing Race is that while it might look simple to, say, “catch the bus to the heart of Rome, find a pushcart vendor selling cashews, buy a bag, and deliver it to the Vatican Library,” doing this while jet-lagged, brain-addled and on only a few hours of sleep is an entirely different prospect.

The prize at the end of our own amazing race that began Tuesday was not a Polaris Sea-Doo or an amazing trip for two to Cancun, but rather supper on the banks of the Rhine.

But I am getting ahead of myself.

We left Charlottetown at 1:00 p.m. on Tuesday and drove to Halifax, making good time and arriving 3 hours in advance of our flight. We parked the car at the Hilton, caught the shuttle to the airport, and found the Condor check-in desk.

Where we were told that our flight was delayed by two hours.

Oh well.

Condor had record of Ethan, made no fuss about his traveling in the cabin with us, and the only requirement was for us to sign a waiver, the contents of which I cannot recall now (perhaps “if your dog eats another passenger, it’s not on us” or something like that?).

We occupied our extra time with eating, drinking (at the pleasant-respite-from-the-airport-feeling Alt Hotel lobby cafeteria) and making merry in the nicely-appointed dog area (under the bridge to the parking lot: it really is a wonderful feature of the airport).

The plane boarded around 10:30 p.m. and, what with Ethan being in our charge, we got super-deluxe, take-the-back-way-in, board-even-before-the-children boarding privileges.  What’s more, the purser, on seeing us trying to squeeze into the almost-no-room-for-Ethan economy class seats immediately upgraded us to “premium” economy. He did this quickly, and in an “of course we will do this” manner that made me fall in love with him instantly. And premium economy, by compare, was dreamy: Oliver and Ethan and I got three middle seats to ourself, so Ethan got a full underseat to call his own, and Catherine got the entire row behind us to herself. We even got one of the swanky “amenities kits” that I last remember receiving on a BOAC flight in 1972.

Ethan weathered the trans-Atlantic flight in fine form: he did what he was trained to do, which is to gamely and calmly stand by. He neither complained nor barked nor made a fuss nor tried to climb up on the seats nor did he eat any of the other passengers. He was a dream-dog.

We arrived in Frankfurt on-time and, all things considered, in pretty high spirits. We found our way to the next terminal over, found the Lufthansa check-in desk, got a boarding pass for Oliver which, mysteriously, they had been unable to print in Halifax, and addressed the “oh, he’s a service dog riding with you in the cabin!?” nature of Lufthansa’s electronic non-record of Ethan (it was handled quickly and efficiently and we were re-seated three-abreast rather than in different parts of the plane).

By 2:00 p.m. we were in Düsseldorf Airport looking for a place for Ethan, who had gamely held his bladder for the entire trip from Halifax, to pee. Patch of grass beside the parking lot located there was, as expected, much peeing to be had.

We flagged a taxi, handed over the the address of the DRM camper rental outfit south of town, and then enjoyed the little tour of the edges of the city, bearing witness to the devastation wrecked on the city a few weeks ago by a suddenly-arising “super cell” storm that uprooted what appeared to be every second tree.

Picking up the camper was easy: handed over driver’s license and credit card, signed a few forms, received a walk-around and guide to using the VW camper’s complex system of push buttons (raise the pop-up, turn on and off the fridge, etc.) We filled up the water tank. I figured out how not to stall the camper in 1st gear. And we were off.

On our own amazing race.

Goal: buy dog food, find a SIM card for my phone, get groceries, find our campsite.

The challenge: jetlag setting in, an unfamiliar vehicle, no maps nor GPS (a chicken-and-egg problem involving the SIM card), streets crowded with downed trees.

The dog food was easy: there was a Fressnapf outlet only a block away from DRM.

Dogfood in hand, we headed off to find the “real,-” (yes, that’s how it’s set) store that, the web told me, would be the get-everything-else-you-need store. Miracle of miracles, following only the rough “Turn right on Fredrichsomething” notes I’d taken in the airport the night before, we found our way.

We bought groceries, negotiated a thicket of mobile operator offerings with a helpful (though non-English-speaking) clerk, and even remembered to buy towels and get a Benadryl-like cream from the pharmacy across the hall.

Back into the van and the degree of difficulty went to 11: the simple-seeming directions I’d written down for this leg of the trip – grocery store to campsite – turned out to be some sort of abbreviated list of street names that the Google Maps directions app gave me rather than a detailed route. So what turned out to be a 30 km journey on all manner of different roads and tunnels boiled down to a list of streets and tunnels only loosely connected.

But wait, you might be saying, I had a SIM card now, and thus should have had a GPS to guide me.

Except that the one downside of the “all you can eat high-speed data for a month” SIM I purchased from Blau was that you had to be online to register and activate it. And so until I could get online some other way, I couldn’t get online from the van.

My ace in the hole was parsing Rheinbrücke, one of the random street names Google gave me, into “Rhein bridge.” I knew where the Rhine was, because my friend Pedro lives near it, and he also lives near the big highly-visible tower in the city, so putting all that together I came up with a plan: head for the tower, find the river, drive over it, and hope for the best.

It worked!

We got close enough to where we needed to go that the final street names on the list started to fade into view, and having a general notion from the name of the campsite – Rheincamping – that it too was on the river, we found our way there.

The “booking” I thought I’d made the night before turned out to have been only an “enquiry”; fortunately, because we were only staying a single night, they had a site for us, right on the banks of the river.

With hardcore addling now setting in we nonetheless somehow managed to: find the site, put up the pop-up, make supper, figure out the complex toilet-entry code system, make up the beds, feed and water Ethan, and then, gloriously, sleep.

Our amazing race, or at least that little part of it, was over.

The next morning we woke up to fresh air, a constant panorama of river boats, and the fog of travel lifted – mostly – from our heads.