We said goodbye to the German punks who had driven us across the border just outside the customs area and walked down to the on ramp which was only a few hundred metres away. As luck would have it, we were picked up after a relatively short wait - and a relatively short wait on that particular journey meant about an hour. We were offered a ride by a German hippie sort named Karl with long straight hair, wearing sandals and Birkenstocks. He had an immaculately clean Volvo and had always dreamed of going to Canada. His interest in hearing about Canadian landscapes was insatiable.
Having completed a trip across the country on the Trans-Canada the year before, I had plenty of material to contribute to our discussion. After our first stop John and I switched spots so I could break our usual routine and take the front seat. We easily chatted away the 100 km Karl originally offered to drive us, which lengthened into the next major city and by the end of the afternoon became an offer to drive us all the way to Flensburg, on the German/Danish border.
Part way through the journey, Karl shared his sandwiches with us and at dinner time, he paid for our dinners. When we approached Flensburg he pulled over to call his girlfriend and consulted with her before inviting us to spend the night at her place. In the morning, he mentioned, his girlfriend's brother would be driving into Denmark and could give us a ride as far as Kolding.
I grew to very much like Karl and his girlfriend Marlene during that part of the trip. They were a bit older, but not by much, and I imagined that given the opportunity, we could easily become friends. They were both very keen to visit Canada and mentioned they would look me up if they ever happened to travel across the ocean to visit.
But those days were different. I don't think I knew what an email address was at that point. Facebook and Twitter were over a decade away and, as I was traveling, I had no phone number and no fixed address to pass on. The short of it was, I had no contact info to give them, other than to let them know that I was from London (the other one, in Ontario, Canada) and that they should try to find me in the phone book if they ever happened to pass that way. Hopefully I'd be there...
As I had come to understand on previous trips - realistically there was next to no chance that any semblance of an ongoing relationship would come out of our meeting. I think that's a big difference between then and now. When you traveled people would come in and out of your life for a short span of time and when you said goodbye, it was almost a given that you were saying goodbye forever. Sometimes that was a great, and sometimes not so much.
A few friends have asked me to write about how I came to use the name, theotherlondon, so here it is: a collection of stories from June 1993 to October 1994 that include my experiences working in Switzerland and the UK; my engagement to a German blacksmith in Paris; our road trip across North America in a ’67 Volvo with an Australian footballer, and oh yes, my introduction to something ‘new’ called the Internet. You can find the first post here.
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