Nick and Nancy Take a Trip

by Nick Jenkin

  But thanks goodness we are down to earth and not snooty. The tables for 2 were all taken by couples who had dressed for the occasion, but on the other side of the aisle there were the bikers, still dressed in their biker gear, already on their third beer or bottle of wine. It was brilliant, very real and honest. We said hello to our fellow bikers as we sat down and lots of them raised their glasses. It was warm, friendly and fun. Here we were, different nations, different outlooks, different tribes, all locked together in this metal tube for the night, hurtling across Europe, hurtling through time and space, thrown together by circumstance.

  I made a fuss over a bottle of wine, as promised, and then studied the menu. Basically, there were 3 choices for each of the 3 courses – meat, fish or vegetarian. Five star it was not but it threw out a few challenges. We both started on carpaccio, you know, thin slices of raw dead things, in this case beef. I love prosciutto, thin slices of raw pig but had never had carpaccio beef. I don’t often choose beef. I can’t help thinking about cows, how each one has become so deformed to produce as much meat as possible, that they can hardly move the different cuts around on their spindly little legs. Anyway, it always tastes like tough cardboard to me. But this first course was interesting and acceptable.

  As the wine flowed, the evening grew more relaxed. I studied the company, as is my want. On the table behind, Nancy there was a couple who looked like they had escaped from a 1940s’ movie. She was thin, about 45, wearing a slinky mauve dress with an enormous artificial flower pinned on her left shoulder, and black stockings. Her hair was black, drawn back severely from her thin face, and she wore bright red lipstick and round, gold wire glasses. Her partner, with his back to me, was stocky but wore an oversized grey suit, with a thin stripe. His shoes had been polished to a shine but his hair was thin, in strands that sat unhappily on his scalp as if it was just waiting to blow away. They could have been fugitives from the film ‘Casablanca’.

  Across the aisle were 2 old bikers, one with a black t-shirt saying “Evil one” but he was a round faced, happy looking chappy, and the other with a black t-shirt saying “Leave you in the dust” but he seemed to have left all his hair in the dust, somewhere along the way.

  And then there was Nancy and me, 2 odd-looking, English people, wearing creased clothes, and broadening smiles as we became slowly inebriated. The second course was, again, a choice of meat, fish or vegetarian. Nancy chose the beef.

  Nancy – I wish I had chosen the fish. The beef was thinly sliced, pre-cooked, served with packet, frozen veg. The potatoes were very good and the gravy just about held it all together. Nick chose the pork but it could have been beef.

  Nick – I thought it was not bad considering they had an impossibly small kitchen in which to prepare it. It helped that I was hungry and drank more of the wine than Nancy. Also, I was happy just to be there. As I’ve grown older, I’ve got better at recognising those moments that will become memorable and try to savour them as fully as possible while they are happening.

  The Rhine continued to swan along outside our right-hand window and we marvelled at the views, praised the waitresses and generally mellowed until Nancy decided that it was time for her bed. But for me the night was young. Not that we were in for a party or anything but when again would I find myself in a dining car of a sleeper train heading south to warmer climes. I ordered a German beer, to indicate my intention of returning, then saw Nancy to our compartment.

  On my return, things were much the same. The wheels clacked on through the night, more drinks were called for, a bottle of wine was spilled, much to the biker’s embarrassment (one would have thought they would have been deliberately smashing their glasses by now) and I sat raising my glass, watching the Rhine outside and the people inside and generally melting into the atmosphere.

  Gradually, people paid their bills and made for their beds, so I began to worry about the next day and headed back.

  The cabin was cosy now the beds were made up and the lights dimmed. Nancy was still just about awake but snug in her bunk. I stowed my clothes under the seat in case the hostess arrived with breakfast the next morning and saw my underwear strewn across the cabin. Then I climbed the Matterhorn into the top bunk. Even Nancy woke up enough to manage a laugh at my expense. The night was done, the lights were off and the fields and mountains, tunnels and bridges were free to pass by without us checking. We fell into sleep lulled by the rocking of the train.

  Day 3, ‘We Next Play Verona’

  Nick – The whole journey from London to Symi had naturally divided itself into 6 stages: the first from London to Dusseldorf, the second from Dusseldorf to Verona on the sleeper, the third from Verona to Venice, the fourth the boat from Italy to Greece, then across Greece for the final stage on the boat home to Symi. We had done all the hard work on the first stage; the sleeper was not work but pure pleasure. Now we were faced with the hop from Verona to Venice, not a problem. At 74 miles, we could have done it in one and half hours even at our snail’s pace.

  We had left London on Thursday morning to catch the train on Friday night which meant we arrived in Verona bright and early Saturday morning. The boat out of Venice to Patra, Greece, was not until midday, Sunday, so we had decided to park ourselves up for the night just a half hour drive from Venice, at Padua.

  The train was due to arrive in Italy’s Verona Porta Nuova Station at 8.30am but was 15 minutes late. After 12 hours and 600 miles, after crossing Switzerland and the Alps, 2 national borders and, while we placed out trust in it as we slept, it was 15 minutes late? Outrageous!

  When we had gone to bed, we had left our little train chugging gamely through the night with the dark mountains of Germany towering above it. When we awoke the next morning, sunlight was streaming through the ill-fitting curtains, begging to be let in. We threw them open and there were flat dusty fields with sunlit vines, trailing away into blue distant hills. Where the buildings of Germany had steep sloping rooves for snow to slide off, now the rooves were low pitched and terracotta on yellow stone farmhouses. This was Italy, land of the olive and the olive skinned.

  Nancy – We both slept very well but I think we were lucky. I caught a glimpse of our hostess’s room as I passed and it could only be described as a cupboard with a small bed, surrounded by boxes, towels and everything else she needed to service us, the travellers. She told us that before returning to Dusseldorf she only had a few hours in which to clean and prepare for her final lot of travellers. What a job! But at least this was her last trip of the season before she became an office worker for the company over winter.

  Breakfast was at 7.30 so we made sure we were washed and ready. Nick was a little slow climbing down from his bunk. No change there. He is not at his brightest early in the morning!

  I decided that, the next time we were on a sleeper train, I would take the top bunk. Nick seemed to have more room up there and was quietly tucked out of the way.

  Nick – For me, it was an obvious choice. I always thought I was a cut above the rest. That is a joke, honest. When I was in the merchant navy, as a lad, I was on the bottom bunk, and in rough seas I was in constant vertical motion, my bum first hitting the floor below then my nose hitting the springs of the bunk above. I felt as if the guy above was suffocating me. Now I hate being too enclosed.

  Nancy – When breakfast arrived, it was a continental affair which means it was not cooked and didn’t contain bacon and eggs. But it came in a charming little box containing a croissant, a square of butter, a pie, a cake, a fruit drink, a nutty bar and other odds and ends. It also including a hot cup of coffee which was enough to get us on the road without the need to stop.

  Nick – After saying our farewells to Astrid, we made our way back along the platform to the unloading yard where all our train mates were also waiting. Isn’t it funny how, when you go on a journey like a flight for example, you start with a lot of smart strangers but end up with familiar looking friends with drained out faces, crinkled clothes and messed up hair. There were
several of the bikers from the restaurant the night before and the woman with the stupid little dog we had seen in Dusseldorf, (where did that dog do its poos and wees over night?)

  Nancy – There was one very annoying woman, however, who I had spotted on the station at Dusseldorf. She was wearing an immaculately ironed skirt, a sparkling white blouse and high heels. Her nails were perfectly polished and her hair looked as if she had just left the hairdressers! This morning she was clothed in a completely new outfit that looked equally immaculate.

  Doesn’t it get right up your nose? Well it did mine especially when I looked down at myself in my crumpled travel gear!

  Nick – You looked lovely darling. Who wants a woman who is afraid to get her hair messed up?

  Being the first one on the train means being the first one off, you can hardly expect all the bikes to reverse along the carriages now can you. So we were long gone while the rest of them were still thinking about it. Nancy was brilliant. She had studied the map and spotted the first sign out of Verona. I helped with my innate sense of direction keeping the sun at 10 o’clock so we were travelling roughly south.

  Nancy – Yes!

  Nick – The sun was out, we only had a 45-mile drive to Padua and all the signs read Padua, so when Nancy shouted over my shoulder and pointed manically to the E70 motorway I decided to take the B road instead. I thought it would make a nice change to drive through the countryside and see all the Italian villages.

  I could feel Nancy shaking with anger behind me and, suddenly, I felt peculiarly vulnerable. After 20 minutes of driving through rural industrial estates with roundabouts at every 400 yards, when Nancy pointed to the E70 again, I surrendered and headed in that direction.

  Nancy – But we still had nowhere to stay in Padua that night so I got Nick to stop at a service station that had Wi-Fi. Amidst the coffees and croissants, I got out my tabloid and booked us in at a B&B on the outskirts of the city. We both made a mental note of the map and I wrote down the address and phone number. Sorted.

  Nick – The E70 is a fantastic, pan-European highway connecting stretches of motorway in 10 countries from Spain in the west to Georgia in the east, and to join it we had to take a ticket so we could pay our toll as we left it at Padua. No problem. Nancy grabbed it and tucked it safely away in her pocket. Very organised.

  Out of the corner of my eye I thought I saw the number “249” on a large sign, in the middle of some confusing Italian, but I ignored it.

  The E70 drivers were the worst we had encountered across the whole of Europe. Confronted by a cute little scooter, they would ignore us, drive up to our backside, toot so we nearly fell off as we jumped out of our skin, then cut us up as they passed. I tooted and waived back at them, always wanting to jolly along angry people. The lorry drivers basically tried everything they could to drive us into the side of the road.

  But as the road hummed beneath our wheels and the sun beat down on the fields around us, I switched off and let my brain do its own thing. Then I noticed an earworm at the back of my head. It had been there ever since we had left the train. It went like this:

  ’We open in Venice, we next play Verona, then onto Cremona, lots of money in Cremona.

  Our next jump is Parma, that heartless, artless menace and Mantua and Padua, and we open again – where?

  We open in Venice and…’

  Round and round it went, stuck fast. It was that blasted song by the rat pack, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davies Junior, from Cole Porter’s ‘Kiss me Kate’, based on Shakespeare’s ‘The Taming of the Shrew’.

  ‘We open in Venice…’ argh!

  So, when the turning for Padua popped up I was quite happy.

  There was the usual shouted discussion, above the road noise, as to whether this was the turning for the north, south or central part of the city but unable to hear clearly and with Nancy gesticulating in front of my eyes I was past caring.

  Driving can never be a democracy. It’s just not possible. Think about it. If it were a democracy, a carload of travellers would have to stop before every action, hold a discussion to consider everybody’s point of view and then take a vote on it!

  So, I turned off. Nancy paid the toll and we pulled over next to the car park for IKEA, Padua. IKEA, how refreshing, how exotic and how uniquely Italian.

  We had never seen Padua but we knew it had an ancient university founded in 1220 and Galileo was once a teacher there.

  When I was reading about it, an interesting fact came to light.

  ‘No!’ I can hear you say.

  Yes… in 302 AD the Greeks, in the form of the Spartans, decided to invade Italy, as you do, and sailed up the river to Padua. Unfortunately, after a lengthy naval battle they were defeated and then, apparently, just gave up the whole idea. Well, 10 out of 10 to the Greeks for audacity but nought out of 10 for persistence. Italy could have been part of Greece now!

  In a city of 240,000 people, how do you find a house without a detailed map or sat-nav? Answer – you don’t! We knew it was to the south of the city and that it was next to one of the rivers and the ring road. We did 2 circuits of IKEA trying to spy signs for Vigonovo but without success, so we headed for the city centre. Our thinking was that we could then head south into the sun, knowing we were in the correct sector of the city.

  Nancy – We were very impressed with Padua, its history and its architecture but our first task was to find our digs. Safely unloaded we could then head back into the city that evening.

  Nick – It was Saturday, early afternoon now, and we found ourselves in Piazza del Santo with the magnificent Basilica di Sant Antonio. We were definitely in Italy. It was beautiful. There were market stalls and children’s rides, arcades and expensive shops but no sign of where we were staying that night.

  Then Nancy, being her usual heroic self, volunteered to phone the owners. She had booked it and had the details so, instead of hanging on her shoulder and mouthing things in her ear, I thought it wise to leave her to her own designs and went off to ask stallholders and shop keepers if they knew our hotel. No luck. When I returned, she was looking victorious, again. It was a woman on the other end of the phone and she had given Nancy directions in her broken English. I am sure there is a conspiracy going on or is it just that ‘Women hold up half the world’, as Mao put it.

  Nancy – I had saved the day once again. We had to go past the hospital, the general hospital not the other one, turn right then left, alongside a canal, then straight on until we saw a pharmacy. But where was the hospital?

  Nick – I went off again and asked where the hospital was and found 2 answers the same as each other, so off we went: past the hospital, turn right, over a bridge, down ‘Gata-something’ road.

  ‘What road was that dear?’

  Nancy – The woman on the phone said something like ‘Gatamala’.

  Nick – ‘Okay, good!’ I said but under my breath I mumbled, ‘Never again without a sat-nav.’ We couldn’t see any road names but we had to turn right along the river, or was it a canal, until we came to a park or was it a playground, then across another bridge over what, Nancy wasn’t quite sure, turn left, carry on, how far on was unknown, until we saw a pharmacy on the right. If we saw a pharmacy on the right, I would eat my helmet.

  After several U-turns, because it didn’t ‘feel right’, I was shocked when we saw a pharmacy. We did another U-turn and went up a residential road without a name. This couldn’t be it. We turned round and drove back down the road when suddenly a miracle happened. A woman emerged from a door and waved at us. Gosh! I think Chairman Mao helped out a little.

  Nancy – The way I see it, it was probably Saint Anthony who gave us the help. Anyway, I don’t know what all the fuss was about, I had the directions very clearly, and now you can eat your helmet.

  Nick – The owner was not the owner, she was out, but we were to come in anyway. No wonder nobody knew where this hotel was, it was in a block of 2-storey apartments, in a residential road, in a quiet resid
ential district. However, when we got inside, talk about style. The Italians certainly know how to do it. It was cool and spacious with gorgeous tiles everywhere and a large, turning, wooden staircase. At the top of the stairs, there was a wide landing, turn right and that was us. The apartment was so big I was surprised we found our room without a sat-nav!

  Isn’t the 21st century amazing. That morning we didn’t know where we would be staying but now, following an instant exchange on a thing called the internet and then a brief call on a little, mobile, hand-held box, here we were in our own, beautifully decorated room with magnificent sunlight emanating from windows on 2 sides. The tiled bathroom was so memorable that Nancy took photographs of it so we could copy it for our own house in Greece.

  As soon as we had dumped our gear, we were invited down to the spacious kitchen for a very strong coffee but, knowing what the English were like, they managed to rustle up some milk. The cakes were sticky and delicious and we immediately made ourselves at home.

  Then the doorbell rang and, in the absence of anyone else, I answered it with a smile, wondering who this stranger was standing on our doorstep. She looked at me and I looked at her and eventually she said in broken Italian, ‘Hello, I’m Lucia.’ She was the owner, so I let her in. We went through our story again, the one we had told countless times along the way, about England, the ferry, the train and Greece. As usual, she was suitably impressed and told us all about her trip to Athens.

  We retired to our room with our coffees, got into bed and fell asleep in front of the TV, as you do.

  Nancy – When we awoke, I wanted to drive back into the centre but even I had to admit I couldn’t face getting lost again. Padua would have to wait for another time when we could make a more leisurely visit, maybe in a luxurious, central hotel, if money would allow. So instead we decided to visit a restaurant, the owner had told us about, which was just around the corner.

  Nick – But before we did, I wanted to move the scooter into the safety of the owner’s parking area. As I went outside, the neighbour was standing admiring it, so I told him our story, then the owner came down and took photos, and then her friend came along and I told her our story…half an hour later the job was finally done and we set off on foot for the restaurant.