The Urge to Travel

The season has hardly begun, and in some areas the snow has barely melted from the roads, but the first motorcyclists are venturing out, letting the breeze blow – symbolically – through their hair as they blow the cobwebs off winter-stored bikes and warm leathers. I sit, almost every working day, in my commuter train and dream of places further afield, of packing a small bag with the bare necessities, and just taking off again.

But I am no longer a teenager. I may well be a life member of the Youth Hosteling Association, if it still exists, but my travels over the last few years have been more within the comforts of a train, than on the open road with a rucksack and sleeping bag. My overnight stays have been in comfortable hotels and hostels, with restaurant meals in place of the hastily cooked eggs and ham of my youth. I am, though, still tempted.

Today I am underway again, at relatively short notice, to the city of Würzburg. It’s not where I need to be, but the closest I can get where there is a large, interesting city, a selection of relatively inexpensive hotels, and a good selection of restaurants. Tomorrow I need to be elsewhere, in a small tourist town, to attend a funeral. There are many reasons why we travel.

I was tempted, as I looked through the listings for hotel and hostels in the area, and torn between paying over the top for a few nights of extreme comfort, or taking a less expensive option with as much comfort, but not the same level of luxury. And then there was the third option: the hostel where, for a few euro, I could spend the night in a dormitory-style room, ten beds, strangers travelling as I am, and recapture something of the old days. Close to, perhaps. No sore feet, of course, and no need to do my laundry in a sink after ten days out on the road; no mashing a few ingredients together for a hasty meal in a shared kitchen; no trying to sleep when others are either talking late into the night, or snoring more than I do.

Perhaps I have grown soft in my old age. Sleeping in the stinking stairwell of a car park at the Gare du Nord in Paris; a sunbed on the beach at Rimini; an underground car park beneath Euston Station; the wonderful concourse at Venice train station; under different bridges in I don’t know how many other cities; an auto workshop in war-torn Bosnia-Herzegovina; the cold, hard sands of the desert between Saudi Arabia and Iraq; under the stars in the mountains between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

These days, in my old age, I’m more concerned with the noise coming in through an open window; the firmness of my pillows; whether the breakfast on offer is a simple meal with toast, a boiled egg and perhaps jam or marmalade (Göttingen), or a real buffet selection with no apparent end (Stuttgart), or a fight to get to a seat at some fast food table, after a stuffy night’s sleep far above a city where the street lights were never turned off, and police cars shot down deserted streets with the sirens on full blast (Baltimore). And will there be a good Indian restaurant in town?

Image © Urban Camera.