Note. This blog post is being written retrospectively roughly 25 years after the fact so bare with me! It’s half my lifetime ago and I was stoned for a lot of it but it left marks.
Background:
2001 wasn’t a great year for me. I spent several months of it in bed, pretty much constantly, maybe getting up occasionally to eat or wash. There were a combination of problems. It wasn’t long after my mother died, I didn’t like my job, I was living alone and lonely and just a bit lost in general. I was in a band though. A Doors cover band and our singer was struggling a bit too with relationship problems. One day I left work as usual on East Wall road (I never went back in!) and met him in town for a few drinks in Eamonn Dorans, Temple Bar where we played most of our gigs. We were still there at closing time after having hatched plans to go on an adventure and live a little to try get out of our slumps! The initial plan was to go “On the Road” Jack Kerouac style across America but budgets wouldn’t allow that so we settled for Interrailing around Europe.
The “Trip”
Paris
We got our Interrail tickets, packed the guitar and bought one way flights to Paris, booked a shitty little hostel in the Pigalle area at the foot of Montemarte and where the Moulin Rouge and nitelife is and headed off. It was November, rainy and cold. It was my first time in Paris or France and I couldn’t get over how many foreigners there were there! It wasn’t as much of a thing in Ireland back then. It looked a bit rough all the way into the city from the airport on the train too so maybe not great first impressions. My mate got a cold pretty quick too so that killed the overall mood a bit but we got out and about in Paris still.
Memorable attractions included the Moulin Rouge, the retro Metro system, Montmartre steps and the fabulous Basilica de Sacre Coeur from which there are fab views of most of Paris including the Eiffel tower which we also walked close to as well as the Arc de Triomphe, Notre-Dame, Gare du Nord and the Pont Neuf bridge. But perhaps the standout attraction, not surprisingly given our musical background was Père Lachaise cemetery. We took the metro over and began our search for our old buddy Jim Morrison’s grave. It took most of the day to find, even with a map! It’s fairly well hidden. But along the way we happened upon Oscar Wilde, Chopin and Edith Piaf among others. What a fab place! One other great memory I have of Paris was a great night we had in the hostel playing tunes with a German guy on accordion call “Till”. One not so great memory is a pint of moldy cider in a local Irish pub. I can still taste it.
Amsterdam
After our few nights in Paris we decided to grab a train up to Amsterdam. This is when things changed a bit! It was my first time in the lunacy of that city. As one does, we headed straight for a weed shop as soon as we settled in our Aussie run, pretty loud hostel on the outskirts. We bought a bag of mushrooms and went back to the hostel to figure out how to take them. We basically divided the bag between us, chewed them neat and waited! Nothing had happened after an hour or so so we decided we’d been had and headed back out into town on the tram. About half way in on a pretty sharp bend, a middle aged woman standing up to get off at the next stop, lost her grip and went flying through the air almost completely horizontal and landed heavily against the tram window, blood everywhere, tram stopped, ambulance called. Very unfortunately this moment was precisely when the mushrooms started to take effect and we got the giggles. It was mortifying. Everyone thought we found the poor woman’s misfortune hilarious so we had to get off and run!
The rest of the night and indeed, the subsequent 2 nights we spent in Amsterdam are a bit of a blur. I have vague memories of things like sitting having cheese toasties and massive cone joints then walking out to go see the Arc and my mate getting hit and spun around by a tram. We had wondered what the frantic bell noise was! He’d a pretty sore shoulder the rest of the trip but was lucky. Then there was the absolute surreality of the live sex show which I wont go into detail about but my mate got pretty involved. There were feather boas and bananas to the tune of “These Boots are Made for Walkin”! He also got very involved with the “ladies in the windows” but I was too shy. No stoner trip would be complete without the munchies so when we couldn’t find our way out of the main Dam Square to get our tram home we kept walking around it in circles (or squares!) and we’d keep passing a pizza place and buying a slice each time! I thought I’d be trapped in that square forever. I also remember getting stuck in a room of the Sex Museum with a pile of identical looking, fat Bulgarian men who had just got off a coach. Awkward. Other less controversial memories include seeing the Van Gogh museum and watching Ireland qualify for the 2002 Word Cup finals in Iran in a cool bar with the most gorgeous waitress!
Barcelona
We finally managed to escape Amsterdam and got the TGV super fast train back down through Brussels and Paris and then a regular train from there to Barcelona. We had a long wait in Gare du Nord for our Spain train so we busked and jammed which was cool but we were mostly ignored! We’d bought a bag of skunk to do us on our onward journey so when we seen police with sniffer dogs on the train from Amsterdam and arresting some kids we got a bit nervous but somehow we escaped the same fate. Arriving in Barcelona reminded me a lot of Paris, It has very similar buildings and layout. Weather was a bit better than up north too. We stayed in a retro little apartment run by an older lady in an old building which felt a bit to me like the kind of apartment Jim died in. We went up and down the Rambala lots and seen the mini Arc de Triomf and harbour and had some beers in the Irish pubs but apart from that I don’t remember much of this place! I blame Amsterdam! I think we only stayed a couple of nights.
Malaga
This bit will be short! We only decided to come here from Barcelona because we got a bit tired of the cold and longed for a bit of sun. The most interesting thing about this bit was the journey there. We got a pretty old, overnight train with pull down beds and shared our cabin with 2 old Spanish guys! It was pretty awkward until we ended up watching the Liverpool Barcelona match with them! Our team Liverpool lost but football unites eh!? When we arrived in Malaga I had to use the train toilet before we left and when I flushed it it exploded upwards and nearly hit me full in the face! We realised pretty quick that Malaga wasn’t going to be warm in November so we left the train station and went across the road to a travel agent and booked a flight to Tenerife! That should do it we thought. And so it did.
Tenerife
A quick word about the flight to Tenerife. We still had that bag of skunk and were still pretty stoned almost constantly so it was a bit bizzare to go through security and have a metal teaspoon confiscated but have the drugs missed! Esp when they were just casually thrown into my mate’s bag! This was about a month after 9/11 too unbelievably. It could have been a much different trip if we’d got arrested either on the train or in the airport.
Tenerife was lovely. Between 20 and 25C for the couple of weeks we ended up staying there. We had a lovely hotel with pool and a karaoke bar on the strip that we frequented lots. We were stars of the show each night being in a band! I particular remember spot on versions of California Dreamin complete with harmonies that impressed a particularly gorgeous English girl and her friend. We seen her topless at the pool the next day but we both knew she was out of our league! The drugs gave us the courage to sing I presume but so too did the line of happy hour pints we bought each night. Spot the Irish! The skunk lasted so long too and was so powerful. I remember lying in bed in our apartment one day looking at a fly for hours and imagining a whole life story for him! I miss that guy.
Things took a little turn for the worst for me in Tenerife. My mate met a girl and was off with her most of the time leaving me alone. I realised after a while that even though we were on an adventure that was supposed to fix our problems, for me it just made the world seem like an even bigger, lonelier place and I became increasingly depressed. One night, after another rake of pins in the karaoke bar I decided I wanted to go drown myself in the sea so I stripped off and swam out pretty far. Instead of drowning though I ended up having such a nice, night time swim! The sea was still warm and dead calm and the stars reflected in it and made me feel like I was swimming in space! I often compare it to the scene in the “Immortal Beloved” film about the life of Beethoven when he gets clattered and deafened by his father and runs away to a nearby lake to have his own little swim, all with Ode to Joy playing. The scene still makes me emotional today whenever I watch it as it always reminds me of that night.
My serenity was broken when I noticed some people going through my stuff way back on the beach so I shouted at them and waved them off but by the time I swam back in they’d gone off with my camera (why I have no photos of anything after Barcelona!), wallet and hotel key. I had to go find my mate to get his key and he wasn’t happy to see me enter a crowded bar calling his name, soaking and wearing only my underpants! He got someone else to bring the key over to me and off I went back to the hotel to shower. I sat naked on the hotel balcony playing guitar as people passed by below on the way home from niteclubs. I’ve never felt lonelier or more invisible.
First thing next morning I went back down to the beach to see if I could find my mate but couldn’t. He hadn’t come back to the hotel either. I noticed how far I’d swam out the previous night and it scared me a bit so I decided I needed to get home so I got a taxi to the airport and booked the first flight home via a long, lonely night in Madrid airport.
The End
Looking back, I think this trip was a defining moment in my life. After I came home I went to see my doctor and counsellor and they came up with a plan for me which involved some happy pills over the Xmas period and new year. I was supposed to go back to them then for reviews but I never did. I decided to take control of my own life and go live a bit. Or maybe I just got bored of being down. Who knows. But I got a lot better shorty after and eventually found my way in life. The trip allowed me to see a bigger picture and see the world and my place in it in a different way. Somehow, even though the trip made me feel even more insignificant, it also showed me how silly some of my problems where in the grand scheme of things. The sea swim was a lesson too. I went in wanting to die and came our feeling alive. At least briefly!
I have some great memories of our Europe 2001 adventure. I got to see and experience some of Europe’s treasures as well as scraping the bottom of the barrel and coming our stronger.
