WSOP Europe Trip Report Part 1

After all the hassle, the money did successfully make it to Cannes, so I am all bought in and ready to go! Play starts in a little over two hours, but I´m already having a great trip and have the beginnings of a trip report to share with you. I’m trying to set up Nico´s phone so that I can send occasional tweets, but since he´s in a different country it´s not cheap and I probably won´t be sending a lot of them. I’ll definitely update the blog at the end of the day though (and hopefully not before!) Until then, here’s what I’ve been up to so far (pictures forthcoming):

Our journey began at the tobacco shop, where naturally my continental companion needed to stock up on rolling papers, tobacco, and filters. Then we were on the road, zooming past revelers preparing to celebrate Fiesta Virgen del Pilar. The land surrounding Madrid is dry and brown, scorched by an eternal sun burning through a cloudless sky. Occasionally a crumbling stone cathedral set into the countryside would break up the monotony, but overall it was a dreary landscape, and I told Nico as much. He assured me it would get better.

It did. The brown hills turned green as we pressed northward. Mountains rose up out of the arid brush, and a dense fog clung to the horizon. We were in Basque Country.

We stopped in Bilbao to see Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum and drank cervezas on an expansive patio. A river ran through the city, and the view from the numerous ornate bridges that spanned it would have been even more impressive without the close-hanging fog.

A short drive brought us to San Sebastian, our stopping place for the night. At an internet cafe we compared last-minute hotel discounts and found a 250 euro room going for 79 euros. After settling in, we found a place to eat dinner that looked to be a relatively straight-forward, 15-minute walk from the hotel. We promptly got lost and ended up taking a cab to the very pleasant Basque pintxos restaurant.

Overwhelmed by the task of selecting 4-6 small plates in a foreign language, I chose a grilled monkfish with a fried langostino as my only concession to local custom. I first ordered agua, but after hearing Nico request a cerveza, I told the waiter, “Dos cervesas” and he chuckled and nodded. Me, I was just proud to have figured that much from their Spanish conversation. The food was very good, and we passed a pleasant evening out on the terrace with a second round of cervesas.

We found our way back to the hotel without difficulty and agreed to leave at 9AM, as we had a long day of driving ahead of us. I’m glad we visited Bilbao and San Sebastian, but it meant that we’d covered only about four of the twelve hours of driving that lay between Madrid and Cannes.

I woke and was surprised to see that it was 10AM. “Nico,” I said. A grunt from his bed indicated some level of awakeness. “It’s 10:00.”

He grunted again. “I guess we can’t leave at 9 then.”

“It would be difficult.”

“Unless we leave at 9PM,” he muttered and rolled over. I showered, and he was up by the time I got out, but we still didn’t get on the road until after 11.

The first few hours passed slowly. A heavy fog still obscured what might otherwise have been a beautiful view, and I was tired and hungry. In less than an hour, we passed into France and noticed an immediate improvement in the quality of the roads. I soon learned that France assesses steep tolls for use of its highways, but you could at least see where the money was going. We encountered neither a crack nor a pothole our entire time in the country.

The weather improved, and after lunch at a roadside cafeteria, we lingered on a sunny hillside inventing games to play with acorns. Nico is a former member of the Spanish national ski team and twelve times the athlete I am, but I proved more adept at both acorn baseball and a game where you toss one acorn into the air and then attempt to throw another acorn to hit it in mid-air before it falls.

It was another two hours or so before I saw the sign: “Carcossone”. Perhaps you’ve heard of the famous board game, in which players vie for control of a medieval city. I told Nico that is a favorite of my girlfriend and me, and he asked if I wanted to stop.

“I suppose it would be cool to take a picture,” I said, and so we exited and followed signs for Carcossone. The road narrowed and passed some old-looking buildings. “I guess this is it? Maybe we can walk in a little further?”

We parked and set off on foot through the narrow, one-lane streets. “It’s old, but it’s not medieval,” Nico said.

“I don’t know. It seems like this is all there is to it.”

“I think that if leave now and later we google ‘Carcossone’, we are going to see something we are not seeing right now,” he argued We agreed to check at the office of tourism, and sure enough that was an entirely separate Old City on the other side of a bridge.

When we first caught sight of it, we could not have felt more foolish. Towers and ramparts stretched for hundreds of feet across the top of a broad hill. It was a magnificent sight. We followed a road that traced the outside edge of the fortified walls, finally choosing a parking spot near the main entrance.

Nico spotted an aperture in the wall, and sure enough it led to a steep flight of crumbling stone stairs. When we reached the top, we were up near the battlements. We looked out at the countryside through narrow slits that once would have enabled archers to fire from a covered position on an attacking army.

A second, higher wall still stood between us and the Old City, but we wandered the ramparts for a while before going in. Though beautiful, the interior was a little more disappointing because it was full of tourist shops, restaurants, and hotels. The streets were still stone and the buildings mostly looked original, which was impressive, but they now sold postcards and plastic swords. We were too late to enter the castle proper, but we got some fine views of it from elsewhere inside of the walled city.

As made our way to the exit, the sun was setting, casting rich light upon the fortifications and intricate shadows on the ground. Back in the car, Nico took out a CD called “Trancenation” that he told me he’d been saving for dark. “It’s really good music to just get into a zone and drive,” he promised as he prepared his next few hours’ worth of cigarettes.

“Roll me one of those?” I asked. I don’t smoke, but I figured that if I’m going to drive through the French countryside in a Volkswagon listening to techno music I might as well smoke a hand-rolled cigarette while I’m at it. Nico turned up the music until the baseline hummed in the back of our necks, and we exhaled out of the open windows with wind whipping through our hair.

The sun set and sky grew darker. Neither of us had said anything for half an hour, each in a trance of his own. I thought of a college road trip in California and then further back to my first-year roommate, a Cypriot who loved loud techno music and also rolled his own cigarettes.

We turned a corner and each of us turned toward other in unison, hands pointing straight ahead. The moon had appeared suddenly, fully formed and hanging huge and round, bright orange and perfect just above the horizon. We both grinned broadly and nodded our heads in time with each other and the music, the perfection of the moment passing unspoken between us.

The next four hours flew by and we were in Cannes, greeted by palm trees and beautiful old buildings. At the small duplex we’d rented, the heavily perfumed landlady seemed convinced that we were gay, taking our insistence on figuring out how to work the fold-out sofa as mere pretense. Our place is just two blocks from the beach, and even at night the beauty of the place is evident. Pinpoints of light dotted the horizon in every direction save one, and behind us the dramatically lit facades of casinos and hotels were a glamorous sight.

After a moment of confusion, everything went smoothly at the tournament area. Jack Effel personally accompanied me to verify that my wire had been received, and as unhelpful as he and the staff were online in the preceding days, he mostly made up for it in person.

After a late-night dinner of beer and kebab, we made our way back home. The streets, now filled with fall-down drunk French youth and aggressive prostitutes, seemed somewhat less glamorous, but it was still a great evening.

They say that every cigarette you smoke takes 11 minutes off of your life. I’d gladly trade 11 minutes for another day like this one.

Edit: Supplemented the narrative with a few pictures.