HAARLEM DAY TWO
The Fleuret family was busy this morning. Susie and I left our guest house and walked and walked and walked around Haarlem, almost three miles, along and over its many canals, to the city square beside a huge cathedral, past storefront after storefront, dodging the constant stream of bicycles on the bicycle lanes. Everything was beautiful. Everything was in good taste. Everything was clean and swept up. The Netherlands is marvelous.
We got on our first train at 1. We had bought Eurailpasses, for foreigners only, in the USA. We couldn’t get it to work on the first leg, on the second leg from Amsterdam to Hannover in a swift and silent ICE train we first sat in our reserved seats and then in the dining car with its huge windows and delicious, inexpensive food and were having the time of our lives until a conductor asked us to show our Eurailpass on our phones and we were unable. In fact, we couldn’t find the tickets we had paid about $535 for anywhere. Susie sent a message to the help desk at Eurailpass. I sweated and searched, swiping here and there, and being told that my search was forbidden for some reason. Not only might we have to pay a second time for the tickets but we might be fined. The train trip across Germany we had so looked forward to had become a nightmare. A conductor sat beside us, looked at our Eurailpass messages himself and finally smiled and told us to figure things out before we got on a train again, and left. We were home free, but frazzled and exhausted.
We got to Celle in time to catch a bus to Winsen, found Wildblume where we have a room, and fell in bed.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 