Dear friends and family… For the 8th year, I will be riding in the North Valley Caring Services bike-a-thon to raise money for this great community organization that supports the emergence of this poor mostly Hispanic community in Panorama City, just a couple miles east of where I live. This year’s event is on Saturday, April 16, just two weeks after my 61st birthday!

From its beginnings as a soup kitchen, NVCS has grown to offer an array of programs that help individuals and families, including Adult ESL Courses, Early Childhood Education, and Parenting Classes; a Youth Program and a Workforce Development program. They have additional services including a holiday toy give-away, free Thanksgiving meal, health screenings and referral services.

Please support my effort by making a donation of $25, $50, $100 or whatever amount you can give by clicking the “Donate” button below! This is the one time during the year I ask my network for money, and my goal this year is to raise $1000 for this critical organization!

To learn more about North Valley Caring Services and the great work they do, go to their website at www.nvcsinc.org.

It was late morning on Sunday November 11 when Steve and I left the Rue Titon hostel in Paris and its coterie of vivacious young female types, including foxy, flirtatious though thoroughly fascist Jeanette, who worked at the hostel desk and railed about the supposed scourge of criminal Algerians in Paris. Turns out, besides being Sunday, it was Armistice day, a big French holiday to celebrate the day in 1918 when the French and German governments agreed to stop slaughtering each other’s soldiers on the battlefield and finally put a stop to World War One. We had originally planned to stay in Paris one more day, but since the museums would all be closed, we decided we might as well depart. We also heard that there was a “food strike” in Paris.

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Part 17 – Rue Titon

On Thursday November 8 1973 Steve and I left the hotel where Walter had put us up for the night after picking us up hitchhiking just outside Hendaye in southwestern France and driving us some 800 kilometers to Paris. Along the way he had treated us to the most extensive and expensive meal either of us had had since leaving the States. He had been such a gracious and giving host, but also had revealed to us in conversation, just this morning, his right-wing political orientation including sympathies for Adolf Hitler, whose army he had fought in as a young adult soldier during World War Two. I was still struggling to reconcile all of that, him taking us under his wing and into his confidence for the day. Did he think we would share his pro capitalism, pro Hitler, anti communism worldview? Did he think he could sway us to that worldview? Or was he just simply sharing honest feelings that we could take or leave?

It was a quick walk to the Gare du Nord train station where we phoned the hostel on Rue Titon, where we had stayed previously in Paris, and confirmed they had beds for us. So we took the metro there, checked in, dropped our packs off, and then headed to our backpacker oasis of sorts, the American Express office. I was delighted to get another stack of mail from my mom and dad and several of my friends back home. I read my letters as we walked from there to the German embassy off the Champs Elysee where Steve was going to check out about the possibilities of getting a job in Germany. Turned out the embassy was only open until Noon and it was already past one in the afternoon. I agreed with Steve that it was ridiculous that the embassy would have such short office hours. So we stopped at a bar for a beer and some pinball and returned to the hostel.

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Our train left the Madrid central train station a little after 10:30pm on Wednesday November 7 1973, headed north to the French border. From there my travel partner Steve and I planned to hitchhike back to Paris, where we had met each other three weeks ago. After spending a couple more days in the French capital together, we would finally go our separate ways having traveled together through Spain for those past three weeks. He to Switzerland to look for work to extend his stay before returning to the States. Me on to Italy to continue seeing the sites.

I was ready for us to part company. Back when we met I had been so lonely, homesick and with very low morale, and the two of us had quickly bonded, really enjoying each other’s company. Now, though we had been through alot together, there was more of a competitiveness to our relationship, and I felt like he was treating me more like a younger brother with whom a strong sibling rivalry prevailed. Of course when I said no to his request to have sex with me, that was certainly a big change point. At this moment, though still homesick, I was feeling much better about letting the last month of my travels play out, and traveling again on my own, before returning home to the States in mid December.

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It was an overnight train to Madrid and we used it to save the cost of a night’s lodging. Having boarded at its starting point in Malaga Sunday night November 4, we had managed to score seats on one side of a compartment, with no one ending up sitting between us, giving us room to at least recline and try to get some sleep. The elderly couple sitting across from us were doing the same, and I thought it was cute how they cuddled with each other and smiled at Steve and I as we tried to find comfortable positions at opposite sides of our bench, not touching each other. In the early morning hours, when we came into Cordoba, the couple debarked and we got even luckier as no one else boarded and took their seats. So we each took a side, stretched out and I at least got a reasonably good rest of the night’s rest.

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It was Wednesday October 31, Halloween back in the States, when we left behind our hotel in Granada and Steve’s sexual proposition to me, to hopefully move on. While we stuck out our thumbs to try and hitchhike, I wondered what my brother was doing for Halloween, and imagined that he would be at his best friend Greg’s house creating a spooky display to scare the kids that came trick or treating. I also wondered if Alice Cooper would be on TV in honor of the holiday tailor made for his onstage nightmarish persona and antics.

But the Spanish highway did not treat us to any success in that department. After three hours trying to satisfy my travel partner’s wish to at least try to avoid the added expense to him of the train, Steve relented and we headed to the station and boarded an early afternoon train to the southern Spanish city of Malaga. The city was on the Costa del Sol, the “coast of the sun” in English, and after six weeks traveling in mostly cold and wet weather, it sounded heavenly in both Spanish and English.

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Monday October 29 1973, some 20 hours after we boarded the overcrowded train in Benicarlo it finally arrived in Granada, our current destination. We had spent the last couple hours sharing a compartment with two of our backpacker cohort, American guys like us headed for this beautiful old city nestled in the hills of the south of the country. When we got to our destination the four of us found a hotel together, their room right next to ours.

Spain continued to not disappoint its billing as heaven for thrifty travellers. We bought delicious freshly baked pastries at a storefront bakery for just five pesetas (that was just ten cents U.S.) each. Dinner with Paella, real steak, and wine for just 110 pesetas each ($2 U.S.). And finally the hotel room, with two beds, tile floor and a small balcony with a stone railing and a great view of the Alhambra on the hill across town, just 160 pesetas ($3 U.S.). Real easy to eat well and sleep in nice lodgings and still stay close to that six dollars a day budget! So we were living relatively grandly for a while. We spent the rest of the day doing nuts and bolts things like buying groceries, cashing traveler’s checks, washing some more clothes, and writing and mailing postcards. These things, in a foreign land where you don’t speak the language, can be a logistical challenge that takes all day.

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Thursday October 25 1973 was our last morning in Barcelona. The sun pushing its way through the narrow window of our room in the little pension inspired us to get up early and enjoy being out in its bounty of heat and illumination in this beautiful old Gothic Quarter neighborhood of bricks and stone. We had agreed last night that we would try to hitchhike south to Granada. If I had been travelling on my own I would have used my rail pass to take the train, but Steve did not have one, and he wanted to avoid the expense of the train if at all possible given his limited budget. I certainly appreciated that, having very limited funds myself, beyond that key asset of the pass. And I so enjoyed having a travel partner, at least for my time in Spain.

Other than the difficult hitchhiking, Spain was living up to its advanced billing as heaven for low budget travellers like us, at least in the food and lodging department. We went to a little grocery store across the plaza from our pension and picked up supplies for our anticipated day on the road. I noted the prices in my journal…

Spanish sardines in oil 10 pst
4 (125cl) tubs of strawberry yogurt 32 pst
2 glazed donuts 10 pst
Biscuit cookies 9 pst
100 gm cheese 22 pst
2 bananas 9 pst
6 smallish tomatoes 3.5 pst
1 liter of Coca Cola 15 pst
Total 110.5 pst

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So it was mid afternoon on Monday October 22 1973 when Zo and Randall’s beat up old VW minivan, surviving the thorough going over by Spanish customs, finally entered the eastern Spanish port city of Barcelona, my travel partner Steve’s and my destination. Our hosts on the journey had picked us up outside of Lyon France and given us the longest single ride I had had to date or would ever have hitchhiking. With lots of hugs and some emotion, our two fellow-traveler hippie-esque Canadians parted company with us there, as they planned to continue down the coast to the south of Spain and an intended crossing over to Morocco in North Africa.

As Zo wrapped her arms around my waist and pressed her short but stocky body against mine for a long hug, her wild explosion of red hair, somewhat contained by her ever present red Canadian flag headband with the white maple leaf, gently tickling my chin and cheek. As we momentarily held the embrace, it struck me how connected I felt with this woman that I had only known since yesterday. Though I had always been shy about any physical intimacy with women, Zo had made me almost instantly comfortable with her and I had had no discomfort sleeping very close to her last night, albeit not sleeping together in any sexual sense and with our clothes on sandwiched between our travel companions. My trepidation really was in initiating the physical intimacy, but if circumstances led obviously in that direction, I had no problem being intimate, and really enjoyed it. If only we were in a world that was not so patriarchal and women were more comfortable initiating more intimacy, it would be a boon to a shy male type like me.

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So Sunday morning October 21 Steve and I hoisted our packs and walked from the Rue Titon hostel we had been staying at to the main drag that headed out of Paris south towards Lyon, and stuck out our thumbs. I was a bit wistful to leave Giselle and her striking daughter Laurence behind, but was happy to have my new travel partner at my side, even though he was also male and not the subject of my romantic fantasies. Given that biological shortcoming, he seemed a good companion, a bit more gregarious than me, smart, funny and even-keeled, and all with a low ego. He did not seem to have the bouts of moodiness and withdrawal that had plagued my last travel partner Jack.

Standing on the side of a big Paris thoroughfare packed with cars zipping past and lots of pedestrians as well briskly walking by us on the wide sidewalk, I wasn’t sure anyone would pull over and give us a ride. But someone finally did. A young guy, one of our own cohort with his own long hair and bellbottom pants, driving one of the funkiest beat up little runty car I had had the occasion to see in either Europe or the States. Later when I asked him, he told me with a dose of hippie pride that it was a Citroen “Deux Chevaux”. I knew enough French to figure out that that meant “two horses”, and I was ready to believe that the little engine, sounding more like a lawnmower under the front hood, might only be two horsepower (it was actually just nine). It was the cutest little ugly duckling of a car, his with a canvass rollback sunroof, which was closed on that crisp October day. Steve sat in the front passenger seat next to our host while I sat in the semblance of a backseat squeezed next to our two backpacks taking up most of the space along with our driver’s duffle bag and cardboard boxes of random stuff.

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