23 Going On 30

Soooooo, the Space Star has already done us proud. She’s successfully navigated the cutthroat highways and back roads from Bratislava to Prague and on to Graz, Austria – which brings me to my next anecdote: as we rolled in to my buddy’s flat (yes, I’m trying to sound European by calling it a “flat”), we were greeted by a university pre-party that was just getting juiced-up to go to Graz’s kick-off-the-summer-get-wild-then-regret-it-the-next-day university party of the year. (BTW, not relevant, but Graz is the town that the Governator hails from). Anyway, as anyone who’s ever been there knows, Jaegermeister prac-tically flows freely from the taps in those Ger-man-speaking countries, and this party had – no joke – 15,000 people who were loving every drip of it. It was as if Elise and I went back in time to 2004 McGill and so we partied like we were 23. Ahhhh to be young again…….

That’s not a predicament in of itself. But, as we jumped into my buddy’s compact BMW 118 to take a trip into Austrian wine country (seriously, Austria has wine country – and it’s a heck of a lot more scenic than Ontario’s), I grabbed a slice of plain bread from the loaf that had been slow cooking in the Space Star for the previous two days. I needed something to keep my stomach from imploding. (Also, I was already getting used to eating plain bread for the odd meal during extenuating circumstances on the road). As I mentioned, it was a plain slice of bread, but after half a slice I remarked upon a bluish- green topping that covered nearly an entire side. Yup, mould. “A little mould never hurt anyone, right?” I asked Elise. “Of course not”, she said. She was wrong (for once!) After an hour of cruising the windy European roads I gave the final notice to the driver in that serious, pithy way when you know the “upcoming” event is imminent. “Pull over. Now”. Let’s just say you should avoid all Austrian 2010 vintages from now on as some poor vintner’s crop GOT IT GOOD from The Gool. It wasn’t the placebo effect and it wasn’t the combination of the tortuous mountain roads of the European backcountry and my day-after-huge-party state of being. It was the mould. I swear.

-G

P.S. Big shout-out to Andy for letting us stay in his "Pension Huber"!