Gold is trading below $35 an ounce; the Dow has sunk to 631; and just the year before, men have for the first time, walked on the moon.
And now here is a girl in bell bottoms with a brown leather shoulder bag all swinging free walking towards me. I don’t know her but she reminds me of Goldie Hawn.
I was sitting on the famous fountain at the end of the famous limestone-paved street in Dubrovnik (formerly Yugoslavia) drinking a bottle of cheap white wine.
“Care for a swig?” I said to the girl as she came close.
We were three sheets to the wind at the fountain that afternoon; later taking a ferry from the medieval port city across to the tiny island of Lokrum where we went swimming in our underwear.
Dreams happen from days like this.
Marilyn continued her travels across Europe to a kibbutz in Israel, and with my holiday over I went home. We had exchanged addresses and wrote a couple of times over the winter. Marilyn was born in Alberta, grew up in Edmonton but had moved to the States a number of years before and now lived in the Big Apple—New York City.
The following year she came over to Europe again, not just for the sights but to check out the English boy she had met in Dubrovnik and the Israeli boy she had met in the kibbutz.
We met up in London, and Retsina got the better of us—well me anyway—for we not only broke the ice but I lost my glasses, car keys and two false teeth in the proceedings!
We took off to France with a tent, backpack and umbrella. We ate cheese and wine beside the road hitchhiking in France. We got kicked out of a pension in the middle of the night in Barcelona for getting too happy on Spanish grog. We hitchhiked south to Peniscola, “The City in the Sea” with its Knights Templar castle that later would be a filming location for Game of Thrones.
Back to Barcelona where I brought a large paella pan which spent the rest of the trip swinging off the back of my pack so whenever I turned a corner I risked dinging someone. We took a huge ferry to Genoa, then a train that caught fire (they put it out) to Pescara on the Adriatic, where we took the ferry over to Yugoslavia and a second visit to Dubrovnik and the fountain (also used in filming Game of Thrones).
We caught the Orient Express from Skopie to Istanbul. Across the Bosporus then buses to Cappadocia and the Goreme Valley with its fairy chimneys and 1500-year-old cave churches. To Izmir and to gaze, holding hands, upon the ancient Roman auditorium of The Great Theatre of Ephesus. From Izmir and ferries around the Greek Islands.
By the time we saw the Valley of Butterflies on the island of Rhodes we had fallen in love. When we got to Athens we bought a gold wedding band . . . .
Geography had triumphed, for when you fly east from North America England happens before Israel!
This story was first read on CBC Radio // info@thejasperlocal.com
