The Iberian Peninsula is a vague corner of Europe for me. I’ve traveled there only twice, my trips decades apart. On the last one I jetted to Madrid and caught a high-speed train to Seville where I had been invited to participate in a conference on hypertension. The organizers had booked me in a room going for the equivalent of nearly $500 per night, and I was eager to inspect the luxury they were providing for me. When my taxi pulled up in front of a nondescript building with a faded hotel sign on one corner, I told him it must be the wrong place, but he insisted it was the address I’d given him. How correct he was!
The world fair, Expo 92, was in full swing at that time, and lodging costs in Seville had soared through the clouds. My room and bath turned out to be large and serviceable, but I could detect not one smidgen of opulence. After the conference ended, as a good tourist I spent a day on the Expo grounds and had my pocket picked (the police later found my wallet, cash absent but all else intact). On the following day, still troubled with a twinge of traveler’s remorse, I high-speeded back to Madrid and boarded a plane for Munich where I was living at the time.
That brief trip was completely different from my first look at the region, which had unfolded nearly forty years earlier. That one also began from Germany and was planned not long after my weather unit had transferred from Landsberg to Ramstein, an American Air Force base near Kaiserslautern. It was early fall, the air was cooling, and friend Bruce and I, yearning for warmer climes, were on alert for any military aircraft soon to head south. We found one scheduled to head for Portugal in about five weeks, thus giving us plenty to time to have our furlough orders cut. Here’s what part of my orders said, in typical Air Force speak:
A/1C Kenneth L Goetz . . .31st Wea Sq, is granted twenty (20) days ord lv of absence eff o/a 6 Nov 53 for the purpose of visiting US and French Zones of Germany, Spain, Portugal, France, Switzerland, and Austria. Reservations and visas where nec w/b obtained by the indiv. Travel via US mil acft on a space aval non-revenue basis auth.
Two points of explanation: 1) The last sentence authorized the travel perk I mentioned in earlier posts, namely that I could fly free to my destination, which in this case was Lisbon. 2) Although Bruce and I planned to travel by train from Lisbon to Madrid, and then on to Barcelona, we weren’t yet sure what rail path we would take from there back to our base, so Switzerland and Austria were added just in case our train travels wandered a bit eastward from our more direct path back to Germany through France.
On the appointed day, Bruce and I each lugged a suitcase aboard a C-47, the workhorse of Air Force transportation then, and settled in for our flight to Lisbon. The C-47 was the military version of the Douglas DC-3 commercial version, but don’t envision the C-47 as having soft reclining seats. What it did have, on each side of the cargo bay, was a row of metal seats, about14 per side. As I remember, each “seat” was essentially a concavity shaped for you to plunk your rear into. And you couldn’t lean back because the wall of the fuselage was right behind you, and it curled inward as it rose, so you tended to lean forward as you flew. Were there any windows to look out of? Some C-47s had a few portholes, some didn’t. Did I ever complain about these little details? Not once! Being young and flying free was a beautiful thing.
C-47s were driven by two husky propellers that enabled the planes to cruise along at about 160 mph, so our flight to Lisbon stretching over 1,100 miles, probably took about seven hours, dismally long when compared with today’s jet schedules, but for Bruce and me, the only passengers on that flight, our air time tingled with anticipation, not boredom, and the hours flew by.
The Hollywood movie, The Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima, had come out a year before our visit to Lisbon, and Bruce, being a good Catholic, was hot to visit the site. We had learned Fatima lies north of Lisbon, a drive of about 80 miles, so on our second day in Portugal, we found a car and driver and negotiated a fine cheap fare. This was before credit cards were in vogue, so before leaving our base we had purchased plenty of American Express travelers cheques in dollar denominations, these being easily exchangeable for the appropriate foreign currencies as we moved from one country to another. Unlike today, the U.S. dollar was a mighty beast at the time, and we were able to exchange each dollar for about 170 Portuguese escudos, a rate making our expenses in that country amazingly inexpensive. We didn’t throw our money away, but we happily splurged. Free flights and the powerful dollar allowed us to travel in style!
To nourish us on our excursion to Fatima, we loaded up on fruit and sandwich ingredients from a small grocery and had all packed into a large paper sack. Our driver was a serious fellow who spoke no English, and we of course no Portuguese, so sign language carried the day. As we made our way steadily northward, Bruce and I put together sandwiches in the back, downed non-alcoholic bottled drinks, and marveled at the unfamiliar terrain. The passing groves of olives caught our attention early, but soon became commonplace. We urged our driver to sample our tasty snacks, wanting him to enjoy what we had carefully selected, but he shook his head vigorously and indicated it would be illegal for him to eat or drink while driving.
Fatima had its charm. Some places were familiar and brought back to me scenes from the film, but the story of the miracle told by local guides was more complicated than the movie’s version, at times being noticeably inconsistent with it, a conflict that confused the entire matter for me. Despite all this, the visitors we spoke with, coming from several countries, were clearly in awe of the surroundings. Most importantly, the entire day formed itself into a perfect motor trip. Bruce and I filled it with endless energy as we bounced through the hours, our attitudes lofty and quite worldly, and all lasting through our return journey. Our careful driver steered us safely back to Lisbon, dropped us off at our hotel by late afternoon, and drove off smiling with his parting tip.
Nearly everyone can recall certain incidents that abruptly jerked their lives onto totally unexpected paths. Bruce and I had one of those moments as we were leaving Lisbon. We had taxied to the train station, bought our rail tickets to Madrid, exchanged our remaining escudos for Spanish pesetas, found the appropriate track for our departure, and were idly watching as clusters of fellow passengers gathered around us. Suddenly an abrupt chorus of loudspeakers blasted our ears with what sounded like an urgent message. The crowd around us muttered, picked up their luggage, and drifted away, leaving Bruce and me gaping at each other.
As we watched the exodus, two young men of about our age noticed our hesitancy and came back to ask, in English, if we understood that the train to Madrid had been moved to a different track, a useful bit of news and a happenstance that reshaped our immediate future. For at that instant Pedro and Alvaro became our travel companions. We four found adjacent coach seats and became acquainted as we sped into Spain, Bruce and I having no inkling of the marvelous exploits that lay ahead with our new friends. Without them, we surely could never have found such an insanely inexpensive boarding house for our stay. Nor would we have explored Madrid, day and night, with the uninhibited gusto we managed with our new companions. And, had we not been with them, we certainly would never have been locked into a Spanish hoosegow. I’ll tell of our sudden arrest, and other Madrid adventures, soon.
