I have a lot of memories from that one trip. Mostly, because it was the trip of my life.

I remember planning it, us boyhood buddies, us distant friends, acting as if five years hadn’t passed since we last talked, as if we weren’t adults now, grown and changed and different people.

I remember walking in the moist evening air to the simple stony old inn in Portsmouth after landing in London, after eating fish and chips from a cart off of a road.

I remember waking up the next morning in a cold room covered with a mass of covers, the gray morning light of day entering the room and shading the white walls.

I remember crossing the Channel on that ferry boat, and the light of the setting sun yellow on the water to the west when the clouds finally opened- about the time the Queen passed us by in her big skiff.

I remember flecks of light glistening off of the wet pebbled streets when we walked about the castle in Caen as night shushed the town. We had new friends from the boat, and we four fellas walked the old lanes for a few hours to greet the arrival of the morning.

We caught a late night train and awoke in the sleeper car pulling in to Paris, the sunlight bronze and strong reaching across the blue morning skies. We found a train and took it to the neighborhood of our pension in the Left Bank, full of market stalls, cafes, and bakeries.

I remember the noisy hostel house in Nice where we had shared a whitewashed attic room, and college students multiplied in the halls and on the stairs. It was a rainy afternoon when we went to the drab empty beach and two gulls flew around by us.

I remember acquaintances coming and going, people we met walking, in hostels, in buses, in museums, in restaurants, and feeling lost, but you talked with them well.

We traveled together, but we wandered alone- different people at different places, not sure if bridging the gap was worth it.

And I remember my first night alone in Amsterdam, after we split up and that morning you took a train headed to Switzerland, and it was a warm humid evening and I sat alone at a small round table on the sidewalk of a cafe and felt the sun on my back as I ate some pasta in marina sauce and I was unsure about being alone in Europe.