On our second trip to Europe about five years ago, Mark decided he needed to bring along enough clothes. To Mark, enough is three changes of clothes per day for the ten days we were gone. To accommodate this wardrobe, he found what he considered the cutest suitcase. In reality, it was the equivalent of a medium sized bedroom dresser. It had already caused problems in Amsterdam, but the leg of the trip from Cologne to Prague was worse. I had bought first class train tickets to Prague, but when we got on the train I realized, because of language problems, we had been put on an economy class coach. When I pointed this out to the conductor, he told us to just walk up front to first class and find two unreserved seats. The walk to first class was no problem for me, and I found two nice seats in one of those little semi-private cabins like you see in old movies. When I looked back for Mark he was nowhere to be found, I had apparently lost him a few cars back.
The train was probably as long as two football fields, and when I found Mark he was still five cars back trying to drag his huge suitcase through the narrow aisles of the second class section. What was making it even more difficult was the large fat teutonic woman the size of a NFL linebacker between Mark and me. For some reason she thought Mark shouldn’t be allowed to go past her from that train coach to the next, and she stood immovable smack in the middle of the aisle. If she wanted to she could have just sat on him and it would have been all over. Because of language, we had no idea what her problem was and she didn’t know why we should be allowed through. To my astonishment Mark solved the impasse by getting behind his suitcase, and with a running start of about five feet, used it as a battering ram. This convinced her to move. It probably took us another fifteen minutes of huffing and puffing to move through the remaining cars, including the dining car, up to our seats in first class. The suitcase from hell continued to haunt me as we changed trains in Regensberg for Prague and had to drag it up and down the stairs of the old train station. Days later at the Prague airport, Mark dragged it up to the counter only to find out it was overweight. This required the redistribution of his crap into my bag. International travel is very educational. In fact Mark has learned that there is one word that means the same thing where ever we go. That word is Laundromat. Now he packs light and while we do a couple of loads of laundry, we can learn how the locals live.
