Trip Notes

Not too long ago, I heard about Contiki. Knowing it had something to do with travel adventures I remember that I Googled it but misconstrued things and thought you had to be a citizen of Australia to go on one of their trips. I heard about it via four Canadian boys who decided to stick it to The Man and start checking things off of their bucket list. They rode around the continent in a bus named Penelope and they did neat things like help deliver a baby and play basketball with Obama.They got lots of attention and eventually a show on MTV. I was in my second miserable year at SCAD and Ari kept calling and harassing me about watching their show. I was in no rush because I didn’t have a tv and I wasn’t allowed to watch MTV growing up and wasn't sure at what age that rule became null.

I did finally watch the show and I was so inspired I dropped out of school two months later. I even wrote a letter to the four boys to tell them so. I was really excited. Anyways, none of this has anything to do with my trip except that the four boys recently went on a Contiki adventure and so I googled and ruled out my ability to partake in Contiki.

Our Contiki trek started in Austria and ended in Italy. We moved through countries briskly in an enormous tour bus with just enough seats for the lot of us. I’ve got oodles of things I could tell you so I’ll try to cut it down and do so in a organized fashion. As a whole, this romp through eastern Europe acted as an elevated continuation of my perpetual research study of Ellen Union. Ellen and I stopped living together 4 years ago and since then we have not spent an extended amount of time alone together. While I wanted to marvel at foreign sites and customs I was more intrigued by Ellen. What a complex creature.

But I’ll start this log elsewhere. There were 54 of us traveling in a group through tiny Slavic towns. The lot of us existed on bread products and minimal water because we had nowhere to go to the bathroom for 80% of most days. We were a group made mostly of Australians and Canadians and Ellen and I made up 50% of the Americans present on the tour. There were two kids from New Zealand and a girl from South Africa. In a not too surprising surprise, everyone got along really well. Lots of the Australian girls clumped together in a high school-esque gaggle but they were still in great spirits if you came to chat with them or had to ooze past them on the bus. We befriended lots of fun folks on the trip and almost all of us have wound up in a Facebook group where we share photos and longings for reunions and mini-trips to see each other.

An average day meant waking up in a hostel with three roommates and having to gobble up breakfast and pack your suitcase before the bus pulled out of town. By "breakfast" I mean bread and cheese and by "bus pulled out of town" I mean you better have your fanny in your seat on time or the bus would peel off down an unmarked highway, leaving you on the sidewalk in a town you can’t pronounce with no shoes or photo ID. People did get left behind and it was up to them to find a way to meet us in the next town. This notion terrified me and I hustled Ellen along every morning to make sure our suitcases were stowed and we were buckled in before our tour guide even sat down for breakfast. This was a double whammy effort because there was a hierarchy of valuable seats on the bus and they got more worthless as you went back. The front of the bus was a cooler temperature than the back of the bus. The front of the bus was also less sickening when winding through the twisty mountains. If you didn’t want to be hot and carsick, you needed to be in the front of the bus. 

There were caveats to this though. The fun, trouble-making and typically hungover crowd sat in the way back of the bus so you felt very left out when an eruption of laugher would burst forward and the chain of “What did they say?” had died down before it made it’s way to the front rows. Also the speakers were louder in the front so if you hated the music (and any sane person would) you had to sit strategically between speakers in the front as far forwards as possible when riding through the mountains and a few extra rows back if the guide was going to be doing lots of talking that day and you were feeling extra sleepy. My point is, filing into the bus each day was cutthroat and tense and just about the only time of everyday where there was an "every man for himself” mentality. Once you claimed your space it was yours for the day and you could move about the bus without fear of losing your seat.

These photos are some of our trip friends on a night out in Poland.

Where was I? Oh yes, a typical day. Once up and on the road our guide Kayla would tell us what we were in for that day; how long the ride was (we had rides from 3-10 hours long), where we would be stopping for lunch, and how to say 'please' and 'thank you' in our next country. Kayla is a master at her job and she found ways to keep us entertained during our longer rides. We played games like Bus Olympics where she would shout out an item and each side of the bus would compete to find that item and have everyone on their side of the bus touch it on it’s way up to Kayla. This meant it was most efficient to have the trouble-makers in the back find the item and send it forward and even I, possibly the least competitive human ever, found my self shouting and squealing as I watched the other team pulling ahead. Items were things like pens and water bottles but one time Kayla shouted “a bra!” and one was produced, from the back of the bus all the way forward, in under six seconds. We collectively marveled that anyone could get out of their bra that quickly.

We also had Speed Dating where the people on the aisles would move up one seat every two minutes just to give us a chance to chat with or meet someone new. The only bus thing I really hated was the music. Kayla played calm music while we were riding along and it was mostly fine but we had what she called 'Guest DJ's' where anyone could come up and plug in their iPod for a half hour and it was truly tortuous. I think Ellen was the oldest person on this trip and there were about four people my age. The rest were between 18-23 and they listened to awful shrieking club music that pounded in your chest and isn’t actually created with any musical instruments. Ellen really liked it, especially the rap music, and she even had her own list of songs to play if she hadn’t been too shy to plug in her Pod. I detested every moment of Guest DJ time and sat with my ears back and tail between my legs.

Life on the bus was otherwise sedate as most people had been out all night and felt sick and sleepy. The bus would typically come alive after our lunch stop and Kayla would give us a rundown of life in our next town.

As a proud advocate of hostels and budget travel, I had little to complain about when we’d file into our rooms each night. While some were put off by the primitive lodging, I was delighted to have running water and a bunk bed of my very own. There was a consistent problem with bed bugs though and one girl was chewed on so much that her leg swelled up and she had to go to the hospital. We learned a lot about bed bugs on this trip and Ellen became one of the most sought-after bedbug locaters in the group. Ellen and I escaped this the facet of life on the Euro-road (Euroad) until our very last night. I checked into my room with two other girls and low and behold – bed bugs. Ellen was safely tucked into another room and was horrifed to come out into the hall and find me standing there, cradling my luggage. 

“No!” she gasped. 

“It’s true!” I squealed. In an effort to apologize the hostel said they’d put me in a private room. Everyone was jealous. 

“Laura’s getting her own room!” they sneered and the message flooded the hallway. I walked slowly down the hall, rolling my suitcase at my side, and avoiding sharp glances from people rooming with strangers. Even Ellen got mad and said, “Man! Why do you get your own room?” and I had to remind her. “Because bed bugs.”

I followed the signs to the top floor and down the hall to the private rooms. Starved for privacy and solitude, I had a dozen people walking behind me, just to catch of glimpse of that kind of luxury. People harassed me. I’d have a bathroom in my room on the top floor of the hotel. 

“Views of the whole city.” someone behind me dreamed up. As we walked, the hallway got narrower. And then darker. And then hotter. We rounded a corner, took a small staircase, and passed a broom closet and a water tank.
“Where are we going?” Ellen asked. Curiosity and amusement was oozing from my naysayers. I held on to hope. It’ll be fine. I told myself and with a few more steps we had found room 316.

“We’re here!” someone said and the group formed a semi-circle around me and my suitcase. There was a cobweb in the corner of the door frame.

“I don’t know about you guys,” one kid said, “but I wouldn’t sleep up here.” and he looked over at his friends and they agreed.

“This is super creepy!” one girl sneered and then she and her friend ran back down the stairs. I put the old brass key in the door, turned the latch, and pushed the door open. 

“Oh no!” one nice girl wailed, meanwhile my contingency of swarthy dude friends burst into laughter and ran away snickering and pushing each other down the hall. 

My room was a 6'x6' wooden cube. My twin cot touched the walls on either end. There were no windows and the ceiling tapered down with the slant of the roof. It was the attic of the building and I could stand in the center of the room and touch all four walls with the slightest little lean.

Additionally, there was a dead, black spider at the foot of my cot and in the bathroom was a collection of webs, both cob and regular. The longer I stayed in the room the more character I found. I enjoyed taking one step from the cot and arriving in the bathroom. The bathroom had a shower curtain, hung by wire coat hangers, that ran through the center of the bathroom dividing into a half with the sink and a half with the toilet. I had to hold the shower curtain up and out in order to use the toilet. The shower head was effectively a garden hose and the whole shower rig came tumbling down when I pulled back the curtain to turn on the water. It was dark and hot in there and I wondered how many spiders were hiding just out of reach but you know what, I slept really well that night.