Today we are in our hotel room. If you don’t move, you can feel not overheated, so that is nice. I went down to get apples from the lobby for breakfast and just went right out the door. It was so much cooler outside, so I just stood across the street, eating my apple. Several cars honked. I don’t know if it was at me (why? Why would it be at me? I was just standing there), but what would they have been honking at? There isn’t an intersection…there were just some cars driving by. Weird.
Keith slept in bits of one and two hours. As did I. He would cough himself awake. I was just HOT. It’s my thing. He was hot, too, but he does better sleeping through that.
We were going to Lucerne on the train today (just for the day) but unanimous vote had us just stay in the room. Keith slept most of the morning and I read and took a ColdShower™.
We tried to go out for a 2pm meal. I read all the menus of the restaurants around us and selected the only one that was open during the daytime – Zur alten Taverne. Keith got showered (ColdShower™) and dressed and we walked the two blocks. It wasn’t really open. Well. The door was open. Literally standing open. We walked in. No one was there. No one. We said hello. We stood there. We left. We found a Lidl grocery next door.
It was air conditioned! Not just when you walked in, then it went away air conditioning, but real American style cool. We looked at every single thing in the store. Slowly. It was great. Then Keith was tipping over and feeling bad (and he used up all of the many tissues he had brought) and so we had to go back to our warm room. We bought cheesy rolls and Keith got salami and I got ham. I also bought a little jar of pickles and mustard, because ham on bun just sounded too sad. The mustard is so good! It’s really zippy. Maybe I was really hungry, because I was really hungry, but I really enjoyed that ham sandwich. I checked the US border people’s attitude about bringing mustard into the US. They say condiments are okay. So, I am taking my mustard with me.
I spent most of the day looking at my phone, which was kinda fun. For the entire trip, it has been burning through battery, so I’ve had it in airplane mode during all the day times, Sitting here, plugged into the wall, I looked at many, many lists – from amazing things you didn’t know you could live without to the timeline of Jean-Luc Picard (I am going to go home and watch all of the Star Trek movies, except the first one, which is the dumb one). I read a book by actor John Cho. It was good.
I will take a moment to mention a couple things. This has happened before, but I don’t get it. The hotel gives you a tiny little hand soap. The housekeeper comes in and takes the tiny soap that has been used maybe 4 times and gives you a fresh bar. Why? I hate the waste of hotel amenities and usually travel with my own things, so I can leave theirs untouched and hopefully used by someone else, or never used. I even take the tiny bar of soap from the first hotel of a trip and use it every day of a trip. So, the housekeeper here came in and took my little bar of soap from Dresden and gave me a new bar from here. I tricked her, though. I stepped into the shower and used the pump in there when I washed my hands. That brings me to the second thing. Most of the hotels we have stayed in have given us pumps of soap, shampoo, and lotion that do not leave little single use plastics. Yay hotels! I really like that.
Something serious I would like to mention is that I have heard in the news that over 1000 people have died from the heat in Portugal, and nearly that many have died in Spain. After the hot day we had with 8 trains and a sick man, when there was just nowhere to go to cool off, it really hits me. That day, everywhere we went, everyone else seemed to just be taking it in stride. People were going on with their daily life, cars were going past with windows rolled down instead air conditioning, it made no sense. I don’t turn the AC on at home very often, but I really, really, really appreciate that I can.
Don’t want to get ahead of myself or anything, but it’s time to pack again.