Bascomb's Regrets

Late lunch in Placerville–now up 50 for the twisties.
If you don’t see a post on Saturday morning, then my bike is here at echo lake put-in!

Henning and I had varied success in finding a place to sleep. On this particular night we had stopped at a summer camp for kids in a neighboring village (thinking it was a pension or something), and asked whether there were any places ‘like this’ to sleep for the night. The young woman there gave us careful directions, and after a few more kilometers and a car ride from a friendly local, we arrived at…another summer camp for kids. So we ate noodles and meat served from a metal trash can. Whether food is ‘good’ depends a lot on what you’ve done that day before you eat it.

1. Realizing I need bifocals
2. Staying out til dawn … without working (well, it’s the first time in a while, anyhow)
3. Speaking to a young woman on the plane, saying ‘du’ to her the whole time while she says ‘Sie’ to me: it was odd, but I recognized it was an appropriate way to allow her distance: 5 years ago I would have just told her to say ‘du’–

When I got off the bus at Ferihegy airport, I bought a pastry and a cup of coffee–then I looked into my wallet to discover I had just 15 Forint left. That’s about $.02. It seems, the better you come to know a place that you visit, the more likely you are end up at the airport with just a little left of the local currency. In this case, I just got lucky.

Performing conversions was simpler in Forint than it usually is for me: the exchange rate is almost exactly 200 Forint to the dollar, so you just move the decimal point and divide by two. Or you just program your eyes to look at a 1000 Forint note and see a five-dollar bill. I am always happy to get home and see how good US currency looks compared to all the Monopoly money out there.

When I first arrived in Frankfurt, I started making notes for a new post: ‘Germany on $200 an hour’. To American tourists in Europe: stay as far away from the euro as you can.