vacation books

Everyone has a couple of books that they associate with a particular place or time. Here’s one of mine:

 Dancing Girls by Margaret Atwood

The summer after my sophomore year in college, I went to Europe with a friend. We spent a few days in Lucerne, Switzerland, which is close-ish to Adelboden, Switzerland, home to one of the four Girl Scout World Centers. I wasn’t going to get that close to it without visiting, so I tried to rent a car. After many, many phone calls, I found a place willing to rent a car to a 20 year old. When I went to pick it up, though, I couldn’t prove that I’d had my license for four years, because I’d just had it renewed. She asked where I was going, and I said “Adelboden, near Frutigen.”¹ “Oh! You’re just going to Frutigen?! You don’t need to rent a car! You can take the train! Look, just change trains here and here, it’ll take 15 minutes!” Really? Oh. Well, ok. … Looked at the train schedule… rats. The next train to go leaves only 30 minutes before the center closes. Not enough time. She says, “Well, take a taxi!” Sounds good to me. 

So, I went and got a taxi. He took me to Frutigen, no problem. Except that apparently the towns of  “Frutigen” and “Furigen” sound pretty much the same when you’re in Switzerland, and I was in the wrong one. Crap. But now, there’s no time to get back to Lucerne to figure out how to get to the real Frutigen, about an hour and a half away (never mind the actual goal of Adelboden), so I went there in the taxi. It cost, um, a lot. But it was totally worth it. I got personally chauffered through the Swiss countryside. It was the most beautiful drive ever. The taxi driver was Italian and between his Italian and my Spanish, we chatted a little. I got to go to the Girl Scout World Center, meet a bunch of European Girl Guides… it was great. But then I had to get home. I found the train station, bought myself a baguette (I put on 10 pounds while in Europe, all in baguettes and gelato), got on the train, and pulled out my book — Dancing Girls — and read all the way back to Lucerne. It was an awesome, awesome trip.²

¹Looking at Mapquest now, several years later I see that it’s not actually that close, but it looked like the closest big town on the map she had.

² It was a wonderful trip, and I don’t regret it at all. Looking back on it now, though, geez, I feel like I was 100% the obnoxious American tourist. Ag.