A Trip to Make This is a multipart story. It is pretty long, so I will break it down to 4 or 5 parts. This is part 1. I couldn't help thinking that this had to be the most uncomfortable seat I had ever sat in. For a person of my build, a chair built for a pair of smurfs, with sagging springs and a broken position adjuster was damn annoying. To compound my problem, flying over the Atlantic in a rickety Lockheed L-1011 was not helping matters much. I mused over the fact that this must be the hell run for pilots, punished for some unmentioned faux-pas, such as sleeping with the Airline Director's daughter or something. You could tell from the tone in the man's voice when he would crackle the intercom every once in a while. "This is the ... Captain speaking. We are currently flying over, well, I'll be, its Newfoundland! We are a little behind schedule ..." Then muffled sounds, "So our arrival time a Paris Orly will be 9:37 AM local time ..." more muffled sounds, then a laugh, followed by a different voice. "Our cruising height will be 34000 feet, at a speed of 475 miles an hour." Once again, the Captains voice, with strained cynicism, "I do have one announcement to make and that is that our film projector is damaged and therefore there will be no movie on this flight." Just great! Seven-plus hours strapped in this seat, with no quiet interlude in between. Just me and 253 noise-making, snoring, annoying brutes and whiners! My trip to Europe was not beginning auspiciously! A year earlier, I was going about my daily hum-drum existence of school and work in beeeautiful, downtown Ottawa, only to have it interrupted infrequently by immature drunken follies or sojourns to far off places like Montreal or Toronto. My life had become complacent, with only one direction, straight to civil service hell. I was a Political Science and History Student at Carleton University, on the outskirts of beeeautiful downtown Ottawa, and working part time for the Department of Supply and Services, a great globule of bureaucratic bullshit that inoperates the massive paper machine that is the Government of Canada. A file clerk! My entire life loomed before me that spring telling me I was destined to be a file clerk. My friends Jeff and Chris had just come back from Australia, talking of life in the outback, of having to lug your pack 40 miles just to get a bed in a cockroach infested hostel and loving every minute of it. Of having lunch with the Hare Krishnas, of getting high with the natives on some local berry juice and fending off Kangaroos trying to steal your last loaf of bread on bought with your last dime, and loving it. Meanwhile, back in the "real" world, I was worrying if my bus was going to be late again, or if ... just possibly ... just hopefully, it would be on time and make my century. The experiences they had set of a tiny little alarm in the central left region of my brain -the so-called creative part that I never hear. Well, I didn't hear it this time, but it kept on ringing. For weeks after their return, I kept thinking about their trip, but as enticing as their adventures were, Australia was not really a place for me. After all, wasn't Australia more often than naught compared to Canada, in that our two peoples are similar and society and history are the same? Hell, the country was younger than Canada, and the politicians were just as fucked up as ours were, if not more. This kind of stuff doesn't interest a history student -- castles and forts and palaces and ruins and ancient societies do. Take for instance my particular preoccupation with King Arthur: For years I have read various publications on Arthur and his supposed Knights of the Round Table, from fiction to fact. Places such as Camlann (Camelot), Mount Badden, Glastonbury, Tintagel, and Avalon are forever embedded in my mind. I have seen these places, both in dreams and photographs, but to actually visit them, well -- that would be something. Another place is Dieppe, the site of one of Canada's greatest tragedies in war. 25000 Canadians, along with much smaller numbers of English, American, French, Australians and others stormed the beaches at Dieppe, for what was later termed as a "practise run" for Normandy, the D-Day invasion. On that day, thousands of Canadians died, trying to run up a cliff that was fortified by unimaginable amounts and types of German pill-boxes. From what I have read, the fields near Dieppe a filled with marked and un-marked graves of those brave Canadians. Now that is something I would like to see. But Europe -- me? Ha! I couldn't save up enough money to buy a pair of shoelaces, much less financing a trip to Europe. Nevertheless, lingering thoughts started in the back of my mind, and when joined with the tiny little alarm, the two caused a low hum that would cloud my subconscious thoughts, especially when I was dreaming. One night in June, I dreamt of my high school days and the times I spent with Aliese, an Italian exchange student who was attending our school during the fall term in 1984. I had met her through Sandro, actually Allesandro Zanolla, one of the other exchange students. We dated for an eternity. I was deeply in love with her, and she broke my heart by leaving for her country on a chill December afternoon. I relived the tears at the airport we shared, the tense hand on mine, not wanting to let go, but having to and the feel of my knees buckling as the "Exit to Runway" door closed with a wisp behind her .... I remembered the first night we met, the magic ... "...And now here's Dan Mooney with the local Traffic Report, brought to you by Cantel Cellular. You can always tell if its a Cantel. Now Dan, what sort of foolishness ..." Well, what did you expect? It was a dream, the kind that is always disturbed by some heavy truck, your girlfriend telling you to stop snoring, or in this case, the blare of the morning radio. Of course it was dream, nobody lives that kind of soapy-opery life, do they? The truth of the matter is that I hung around with Sandro, and we had gone out a few times and really hit the rails. One night his "host" parents (from hell) were out of town visiting some Nazi shrine or something to that point, and Sandro decided to throw a little impromptu party. Aliese had shown up, and after immense amounts of alcohol, we started foolin' around. He had a few dates after that, and although it tore me up to see her go at the airport, I was saddened even more by Sandro's departure. I wrote to the two of them from time to time, but after a few years, had forgotten all about them. Then thoughts started up again. I dug out my High School yearbook and found both of their addresses. I wrote to both of them, hoping that they still lived in the same place, or at the very least, the people that did live there would be able to forward the mail to Sandro and Aliese. Stay tuned to this spot for the next installment in a EuoTale, coming in a few weeks. Click here to get to the other stories.

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