Some things are just too good to throw away.
Like ticket stubs from playoff games when the Bulls could actually get into the playoffs.
Or that lock of hair from the first haircut for your baby who’s now 33.
For a travel journalist, there are always some terrific little factoids that for one reason or another never made it into a trip story, but they’re still way too good to just toss. So this end-of-the-year recap that has become a tradition in our Travel section gives us one last chance to share some of those moments that made our travels memorable.
During 2001 (which, of course, was really the first year of the new millennium), I made trips for the Tribune to Springfield and Britain, and on vacation my wife, Bonnie, and I spent two weeks in Switzerland. Here are some of my favorite oddities from those trips:
Most unusual food item encountered: In the freezer aisles of a Sainsbury’s super market in London, Heinz Full English Pizza, whose crust is slathered with sausage, smoked ham, mushrooms and . . . baked beans. Yummmm.
Most puzzling non-food item encountered: Same store, different aisle–“Izal Medicated Strong Toilet Tissue For the Best in Family Hygiene.” Hmmmm.
Don’t try this in the U.S.: Traveling by rail in Switzerland from Meiringen (home of meringue) to Zermatt (home of the Matterhorn), the train on some curves comes so close to the rock retaining walls and the flowers that dot them that you could reach out the open windows of the rail car and touch them. Yes, the windows open, and no, the Swiss don’t think they need signs saying, “Don’t stick your arms or head out the window or you’ll get them knocked off, you dumkopf.”
Most unusual store name: In the Camden Lock Market area of London–Sperm. ‘Nuff said.
Wild, Wild West(ern Europe): Also in that same market, amid punks and goths and even some more normal looking folks is The Trading Post, a shop selling Native American arts. Not to be outdone, a stand at a flea market in Brunig, Switzerland, was peddling treum fangers, Native American dream catchers.
Most ugly architecture: Is it just me or does the Springfield Hilton hotel really look like a cross between a silo and a water tower?
Look out below!: High up in the White Tower at the Tower of London is a little cubbyhole that contains a garderobe. This was a Norman toilet that was really no more than a shelf with a hole in it that allowed royal refuse to plunge unimpeded to the tower interior far below. On viewing it, a young guy and I blurted out simultaneously, “sitting on the throne!” Not being a guy, his wife didn’t get the humor.
And speaking of sitting on the throne: If you want to turn on the room lights at the Jury’s Inn hotel in the Islington section of London, you have to put your electronic door card key into a gizmo on the wall right inside the door. Of course there’s nothing that tells you that, so you discover it by accident. There’s also nothing that tells you to leave the card key in the gizmo. If you don’t, you can end up in the dark . . . on the throne. Or at least that’s what someone told me.
Hats off to the best of the worst: There’s an informal competition of sorts among the Travel staff to see who can bring back the tackiest souvenir from a trip. When I was in Springfield in the spring, I couldn’t resist the nearly foot-high felt stovepipe hats on sale in the gift shop at the Lincoln Home National Historic Site. (“It’s just amazing how many of these we sell,” the guy in the gift shop said. I was amazed too.) Then, when I was in Scotland, I carried back a plaid tam, with fake orange hair peaking out from under it. (That’s it I’m wearing on today’s front page.) From Switzerland, it was a gray witch’s type hat that makes me look like a troll. Please, someone make me stop!
And speaking of Lincoln: On a cool, rainy afternoon on a boat on Lake Brienz in Switzerland, Bonnie and I struck up a conversation with four sprightly septuagenarians who, it turned out, were from Israel. On hearing we were from Chicago, one of the quartet immediately started citing facts about Lincoln: took office as president in 1861; assassinated in 1865. Another piped in about the Civil War. And I’m sitting there thinking, ” I could stop 10 people walking down Michigan Avenue and ask them when Lincoln was president and very possibly not get a single correct answer (if they even knew who Lincoln was) and here we’ve got four old guys from Israel giving an American civics lesson.”
My cover is blown: After the talk about Lincoln, one of the quartet, noting that I’d been scrawling in a notebook, asked, “What do you do for a living? You look like a journalist.” Caught red-handed, I fessed up and asked what gave me away. “Your camera tripod and mustache,” he said.
Speaking in foreign tongues #1: You’d think you wouldn’t need a foreign phrasebook in Britain, but . . . While I was ordering an ale in the pub at The Barnton hotel in Edinburgh, Scotland, a very friendly Scotsman who was also ordering struck up a conversation and insisted I join him at his table. Once there, he introduced me to his boss, who didn’t disguise the fact that he wasn’t pleased to make my acquaintance. My new friend either didn’t notice or didn’t care and proceeded to prattle on, unfortunately in a brogue so heavy that I could make out maybe one in a hundred words. So my conversation consisted most of, “Mmmm, hmmmm.” “Uhhhh, huhhh.” And, “Yep.” I drained my pint in under five minutes, thanked my gracious hosts and hit the door running.
Speaking in foreign tongues #2: In an effort to keep the Welsh language alive, it’s required that many signs in Wales must be in both English and Welsh. I was left to ponder whether that edict had somehow been carried over to the bathroom of my room at the Wynnstay Arms in Wrexham, where there was not one, but two fully stocked toilet paper holders screwed to the wall.
Best quote not used: From Julie, our Cosmos tour guide, talking about the town of Chester, England–“It’s not desperately quaint, but it’s an interesting town.”
Best restaurant name: The Rumbling Tum, a coffee shop in Moffatt, Scotland.
Best pub name: Last Drop Pub, on the site in Edinburgh where public hangings were held.
Interesting sign #1: Outside a shop in York, England–“This window sill is older than you. Please don’t sit on it.”
Interesting sign #2: In the window of a formalwear store on the outskirts of Edinburgh–“Kilt Hire.”
Interesting sign #3: On a train in Switzerland–“Enjoy the comfortable seat, but do not use it for your feet.”
Worst music tape played during my bus tour of Britain: Roger Whittaker. What, no Slim Whitman?
Almost like home #1: Not unlike Chicago, a street sign in the Islington neighborhood of London warns those looking for a parking space, “Resident Permit Holders Only.”
Almost like home #2: The people who run London’s transit system share some of the deviltry of their counterparts at the Chicago Transit Authority. Though I could get off at the Camden Town tube stop, I (and the hundreds of others who got off here to go to the Camden Lock Market) couldn’t get back on going toward downtown. And, of course, you didn’t discover that till you were already outside the station.
Homeless or hopeless?: Most panhandlers sighted in Zurich and in some of Britain’s cities seem on the young side, fairly well dressed and in uncommonly good spirits to have devolved to the level of homelessness. Perhaps begging is becoming a new career path for the 18-25 crowd?
Pressing matters: What is it about British men and freshly pressed pants? During a week’s tour of England, Scotland and Wales, I stayed in five hotels. One didn’t have any Kleenex. Another had a foldaway bed that looked like the back seat of a ’48 Plymouth. Most didn’t have air conditioning. But, they all had one of those odd, heated gadgets that you clamp your pants in to get rid of wrinkles. Are British gents that fastidious? Or, as I suspect, is it that they just like to slip into toasty warm trousers? It would seem the Scotsmen, at least, would prefer to warm up those drafty kilts.
Why is that?: And speaking of hotels–many European lodgings don’t supply wash cloths. Yet the hand towels are often huge–certainly large enough that you could cut off a good-sized chunk to use for a wash cloth and still have a reasonable hand towel left.
Sight seeing: Flying into O’Hare on a perfectly clear night, the plane approaches from the southeast, slicing across just the lower tip of the lake before the city glides into view. Amid the twinkle of thousands of golden lights the city’s skyline undulates–Sears Tower here, the Hancock there, slumbering Soldier Field farther south where the deep blue of the lake laps at the shore. What a great city!
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E-mail Phil Marty: pamarty@tribune.com
