Vampire Country – Day 1

JOURNEY START: LÆSØ, DENMARK

I apologise for how rough these coming posts are. They’re all going to be written after midnight and probably in a rush.

I wake up on the couch and think to myself, Fuck, why did I tell people I was going to X place? If I’d just kept my mouth shut, I could have stayed at home.

The reason I woke up on the couch is that I either stayed up way too late packing, or I failed to fall asleep in my bed, crawled downstairs to watch a movie, and at some point fell asleep. I probably slept for less than two hours.

There is some sort of sorcery at work when you don’t sleep in your own bed. Sleeping three hours in your bed is a shitty night’s sleep, but sleeping three hours on the couch is an amazing nap.

I went to work, got off work, packed my things, prepped the car, and then had an existential crisis for an hour or two while waiting for the ferry. I think that, regardless of how seasoned an adventurer I become, I will never be cool when it comes to actually leaving. I will always panic just before going on a trip, and I will always regret planning it until I’m on the ferry and there’s no turning back.

This trip is a bit of a special case, though, because I’ve enlisted the help of some friends, and they only had time to help me during the summer holidays, which is not my preferred time to travel. I like having the entire world to myself during the off-season, when regular people are stuck at work and I’m not.

But I need Hungarian translators because I’m going to Transylvania to investigate a weird old supernatural case, so I don’t really have a choice. It’s probably healthy to be forced to do something different every once in a while. Maybe it’ll change my perspective on something. Or some bullshit.

I hug my mum goodbye and try to talk to my dog, but he’s not interested. Then I get in my car and drive to the ferry.

I’m already regretting this whole travelling during the summer shit. The ferry is packed, and I have to hide out in the business section where the tourists can’t bother me.

We dock, and I go through my usual ritual of getting my car washed before the trip. Then I head south.

I don’t make it very far before I have to make a pit stop—not because I forgot to charge my car this time, but because I forgot I’d planned to watch a movie with some friends. I pull over, get the laptop out, and watch Cube with the gang.

It’s an amazing horror film from 1997 in which a group of strangers wake up inside a square room. They discover that doors lead to other identical rooms, some of which are trapped while others are safe, and they have to work together if they want to make it out of the cube alive.

I hadn’t watched it in over a decade, and I was delighted to discover that it was much better than I remembered. There was also a layer of social commentary that had completely gone over my head during my first couple of viewings as a teenager.

After the movie, I drove some more and then made my final Danish pit stop at a place I’ve dubbed The Last McDonald’s.

If you’re well travelled in Europe, you know that not all McDonald’s are created equal, and Danish McDonald’s is probably the best, so I tend to get my fix at the Maccas right before I head down into mainland Europe.

But there’s also something liminal about The Last McDonald’s. It feels like the edge of the country. Beyond the Maccas there’s just a cliff, and at the bottom of the cliff is a giant pile of rubbish. That’s not a metaphor for how we view the rest of Europe, but the rubbish pile does remind me of German rest stops whenever I see it.

The rest of the trip is hazy, and I’m not really sure when the day ended. It wasn’t at midnight because I was still wide awake and in transit. It was probably around six in the morning when I pulled over at a rest stop, crawled into the back seat, and took a nap.

Whenever I reach what I think of as the point of no return—which, in my mind, is crossing the border—I get lost in my own thoughts. I think about my friends, my job, my family. I think about all of my relationships over the past year, and I examine them to figure out where I went wrong in the ones that didn’t turn out the way I’d hoped.

Normally this yearly audit is just that: something I do once a year while heading towards somewhere.

But this year things are different.

There is a situation that hasn’t left my mind since last year, and, combined with an ever-increasing yearning to pack up my house and travel full-time, it’s put me on edge.

I told my mum that I was considering living on the island only part-time, and she didn’t panic at the prospect. I think she’s known for longer than I have that I either need a break or a fresh start—and that neither is going to happen if I stay.

JOURNEY END: ON THE ROAD TO BERLIN, GERMANY