Previously: Euro Pilgrimage 1985-2025 Pt. 11: Sligo respite, Live Aid, then back to France for the D-Day beaches.
(I’m not a Bryan Adams fan, but his song from ’85 about ’69 is the one I come back to.)
With an informative and respectful pilgrimage to the D-Day beaches completed, it was Thursday morning in Bayeux, and things were about to get hectic.
My provisional itinerary for the remainder of July called for a sweeping rail movement north and east, traveling from Bayeux via Paris toward Copenhagen in Denmark, with an undetermined stop in between. A week-long sampling of Scandinavia would follow, with the ultimate destination being Helsinki, Finland, just before month’s end.
Helsinki represented the summer’s only truly fixed and immutable date, because it was to be the meeting point for my prepaid group motor coach trip to Leningrad, USSR (now St. Petersburg, Russia).
In the end, after diverting from Copenhagen through Norway (Oslo-Bergen-Oslo), crossing Sweden to Stockholm, and hopping an overnight Silja Line ferry to Finland, this final peripatetic first-time tourist’s rail pass extravaganza covered roughly 2,700 miles over 12 days, half of them spent sleeping on a train or boat.
My 25th birthday fell during the Leningrad residency. Consequently a stop in Amsterdam in route to Copenhagen seemed the logical choice to begin an end-stage party, although not for a commonly assumed reason.
That’s because I’d never been any more than an occasional consumer of marijuana, and in fact swore off weed entirely two years before the Europe trip owing to an adverse reaction (read: embarrassing paranoia) caused by an unexpectedly potent tray of brownies. This self-ban lasted until a temporary relapse in 1996, followed by consistent abstinence until the present day.
Still, when in Rome (or in this instance the Netherlands) perhaps a brief loophole might surface: “resolutions are not applicable outside North America,” or some such ginned-up gimcrackery.
Given that my primary complaint about pot was never knowing the exact potency of what I was being offered, only to find myself in a state of catatonia after five minutes, Amsterdam might have been the very best place to consume the equivalent of light beer in leafy form.
There, they’d know the facts.
But the prime lure of Amsterdam was beer. I stocked several famous Dutch golden-colored lagers at Scoreboard Liquors, my part-time place of employment and the import capital...Read more
