The last nine miles

There comes a point in traveling when you just don't want to do it anymore. You don't want to rifle through a bulging suitcase to find your socks. You don't want to do battle with yet another inscrutable hotel shower. You don't want to keep moving every few days to a new place. You don't want to learn thank you and where is the bathroom and check, please! in yet another language. You don't want to drag your bags through any more airports, or train stations, or strange foreign streets.

For me, that day was today.

They say that marathon runners hit a wall sometime before the end of the race. In Run, Fatboy, Run, which was one of the four movies I watched on the plane from Portland to Frankfurt (only two weeks ago, but it feels like several years), this is portrayed as a physical brick wall a thousand feet high blocking the entire road, which, if Simon Pegg's character can break through it, he might just finish the race.

That's how it felt today. Here we are in another city which I really wanted to see, but I was too tired and too tired to enjoy it. I discovered this morning that the head of my razor had cracked in my bag, and I cut my leg with it in the shower. A few days ago, the hairbrush I have had for nearly twenty years simply snapped in half while I was brushing my hair one morning. I have been using the stump with the bristles ever since, but it's not quite the same. (Yes, I am pretty sure they sell hairbrushes in Europe, so I could get a new one, but I have never found a replacement that I liked as well as this brush.) In Italy, I sat back on a park bench and got gum stuck to the back of my shirt, which I then got on the strap of my bag and everywhere else.

Which is how, with all of us tired and weary from traveling, wanting to make the most of our time but also not anxious to leave our hotel rooms, I came to be weeping on the street outside our hotel in Stockholm in broad daylight this morning.

Don't worry, I'm fine now. That's the thing about a good cry: I feel so much better. And we had a pretty good day, with a boat tour of the harbor and some shopping for Swedish glass, followed by dinner in the hotel. I have always wanted to have dinner in the restaurant of a nice hotel where I was staying, but I never have until today. It was raining too hard to go out, and Stockholm itself is expensive enough that the hotel's meal prices were very reasonable. It felt very decadent to eat salmon and new potatoes, drink white wine, and finish off with a chocolate petit four.

And now I am going up to my room to watch a little TV and read my book before bed. On today's boat tour, we learned that Sweden's national television service never dubs movies or television shows, but broadcasts them in their original language with Swedish subtitles. Hurrah for the Swedes!

I hope all of you are well. Send me an email or a comment when you have time!