Sports and Travel

I check my watch. It is 10:00 sharp. Nervously, I enter the induction center of the Austrian armed forces in Vienna’s 2nd District. Immediately, I am surrounded by four or five young men in uniform, eager to help me find Colonel Gerhard Eckelsberger, who since 2002 has been head of the Herressportzentrum, the Military Sports Center of the Austrian Armed Forces.

Sitting on a hard plastic seat on a train taking me from Vienna International Airport to the city center, I think about all the trains I’ve been on and the various circumstances that have characterized my rides. Looking around, I notice how everyone seems to know exactly what they’re doing, where they’re going, and how to get there. I think back to the years I lived in Germany, where my relationship with trains and public transportation was born, and suddenly, I am seventeen again, and memories of train rides come rushing back.

Our steep track had been created over decades, if not centuries, by the gaunt olive-skinned shepherds who roam the arid rocky mountain passes of Las Alpujarras in southern Spain. You’d often hear them before you could see them. There’d be a gentle clanking of the small bells of the white sheep and then the flock would emerge from over a nearby fold of these infinitely ridged hills, led by the sort of boy who gives Philistine giants the heebee-jeebees.

Schloss Hof, with its dramatic stage of Baroque grandeur, is the largest palace complex in the Austrian countryside. A mere forty-minute drive east of the capital through the flat farmland of the Marchfeld – Vienna’s vegetable garden – it lies just across the March River from the back suburbs of Bratislava. A setting of extraordinary grace and understated elegance unique in Austria and rare in Europe, its gardens can perhaps best be described as a small version of Versailles or Sanssouci in Potsdam.

We stumbled out of the car on the Lungarno at around 10 pm. My legs were sore as I rested on the wall at the edge of the Arno River and stared across toward Piazzale Michelangelo. I took in deep breaths of the cool, fresh night air and closed my eyes – back in Florence again.

We are nearing the season of that sacred ritual that transpires only once every four years and brings much of the world to a standstill to watch a round ball move around a field in the hopes that it might finally pierce a net. While the World Cup of soccer ranks as the unparalleled greatest sporting competition in the world, this year’s rendition has posed a conundrum in getting fans out of their armchairs and on a plane to South Africa.

Yet another twisted tale of volcano madness. It was Wednesday, April 14th, 22:25 and my friend Roxane was arriving in Vienna from Paris. She was only staying until Sunday, but the trip was well worth it… we hadn’t seen each other in over seven months, even though we live only a two-hour flight apart. I’d been warned she was completely broke, so our four days together would have to be spent on activities that didn’t require a lot of cash. No problem.

With confusion dominating the world after a plane crash killed Poland’s President Lech Kaczynski and much of the country’s elite, the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajoekull could not have chosen a worse time to erupt, shooting clouds of ash into the atmosphere and grounding nearly every plane in Europe. The gods were clearly very angry.

Apr. 17, 2010, ICE 26 north to Dortmund, Germany from Vienna, departure time 10:40 a.m. At Vienna Westbahnhof the lines in front of the ticket counters are easily 50 meters long. The platforms are teeming with people. The numbers pulling little black carry-on bags and shouldering laptop briefcases are a clue to who these travellers are: the airline passengers stranded when the Vienna International Airport at Schwechat was closed on Apr. 16.

The “volcano-marooned,” they described themselves.

My sense of wonderment began with a night-time call of nature that I didn’t dare answer. Relieving myself would have involved crossing the uneven, dusty rooftop in a village on the edge of the Sahara. More pertinently, it would have meant negotiating my way down a rickety ladder. So I held it in and lay on my back and, for the first time, discovered the universe.