A scorching European vacation

Joel Furman

It was a sizzling, stifling and generally sticky summer in southern

Europe. When I think back to my family’s summer trip to England and

France, the heat first comes to mind.

It seems that we planned our August trip to perfectly coincide

with one of the warmest summers to ever grace Europe. Temperatures

frequented the century mark; add to this a healthy dose of humidity

and a lack of air conditioning, or even fans, and you probably see

why this is what I most clearly remember about our experience.

Despite the substantial amount of time we devoted to finding

air-conditioned buildings and unmelted ice cream, we did manage to

see a lot, and in fact had a great, albeit (I’ll mention it one more

time) hot, excursion to the other side of the pond.

We spent most of our time in London, staying in a residential

building called the Mansions, which though adequate did not exactly

live up to its name. On our tourist hit list were all the usual spots

and touristy things -- the Tower of London, double-decker buses,

Harrods, Hyde Park, Carnaby Street, Big Ben, Stonehenge, you get the

idea by now.

One of the funniest incidences of our journey took place at Madame

Tussaud’s Wax Museum, which was actually cool. My brother Daniel

found a good spot and stood frozen in place, as were the 30 or so

celebrity mannequins strewn around the room. No worries that my

brother is not a celebrity, does not look like a celebrity and was

not dressed in celebrity-suitable attire.

His impression was convincing enough to get some even more

out-of-their-element visitors to stare at him for a good 20 seconds,

believe that he really was fake, and go to take a picture with him.

Their reactions when they discovered he was actually not really fake

were priceless.

At the Tower of London, we watched an overgrown blackbird chase

(if you can call it that, more like hop after) a terrified woman up

three flights of stairs. And of course when my brother, dad and I, in

search of a pub, stumbled into a gay bar that the next morning we saw

was clearly demarcated by a huge rainbow banner.

Being Harry Potter fans, we found Platform 9 3/4. Unfortunately, I

must speak the truth -- it doesn’t go to Hogwarts. In fact, it’s just

a wall that some tourist-pleasing official decided to label platform

9 3/4, but seeing it made us happy nonetheless.

Our substitute for the magical and exciting Hogwarts train was the

slightly less exciting and entirely nonmagical Chunnel. One moment we

were in England, then poof, a few hours later we were in France.

We Furmans spent the last three days of our adventure in Paris. We

saw all the of-course spots and the whole Louvre Museum, which even

though we raced through still took hours to conquer.

Now after reading “The Da Vinci Code,” by Dan Brown, I wish we had

spent more time in certain areas. But hey, what can you do when there

are thousands of famous paintings, which you don’t care anything

about but still must see if you want to be a good vacationer.

Overall, in spite of the already exhaustingly mentioned

conditions, I, and I’m pretty sure the rest of my family, had a

really good trip. We went, we saw, and we saw some more. We had

unique experiences, which we probably won’t forget, and experienced

things we wish we could forget. But we did it all as a family, and

without too much bloodshed. Just because of that, I’d consider our

trip a success.

* JOEL FURMAN is a resident of Newport Beach