Account Overdrawn

My body has served as a reservoir of energy and curiosity from which I have generously deducted for the past two months. Each experience subtracted some of that liquid exuberance and replaced it with a diamond memory. As the tank fell to its bottom level and I scraped the jewel-laced dregs in these last few weeks, I have finally come up dry. The account has been overdrawn.

The beginning of the end was my last night in Munich. Our crew was insistent on one last night at Oktoberfest. I knew that I had picked up some sort of virus the night before when my throat started a steady burn late in the evening that kept me up through the night. But nights like those come rarely, and I had to capitalize. I went out and threw back a few too many liters of beer and really exacerbated the situation.

Now Rich and I are in Zurich. I am nursing this cold and he may be starting to come down with it. We’ve got about ten hours until our plane leaves and this town holds about 30 minutes of interesting sights that don’t involve spending $200. We’ll walk the river, the lake, maybe see a museum or a church, and then find a place to curl up and wait for our train. That train takes us to Paris over night, where we’ll depart for SFO the next morning.

I can’t say that I made the wrong decision in Munich to have that one last night. But once you see the videos of us standing on the beer hall table, making up words to songs we couldn’t understand, and screaming “Poland!” and “France!” to toast our tubs of beer with voices that ache and falter, you may say that I made the wrong decision. But, hey, I’ll recover in the states with a few hours of sleep in my cubicle on Monday morning.

My bags are packed for the last time. I’ve taken my final European shower and a shave. I may be done with the ATMs. But given that I took many gigabytes of pictures, the work has not yet begun. Don’t give up on this site, people, the good stuff is just getting started.