Plaisance in Paris
Part 1
“I say we go to Paris for New Years,” John said to me from out of nowhere.

His comment was out of the blue, like a bird suddenly shitting on your forehead as you come out of a building, not knowing that the bird was even there, or knowing whether or not the bird did it on purpose, or maybe even just being the luck of the draw. It was one of the things I loved about John (name changed because I don’t have his permission to put him in this story). He was spontaneous, off the cuff, surprising you with a witty comeback, or an outrageous idea like ‘going to Paris’ from out of the blue.

It was two weeks before Christmas so, in a way it wasn’t that spontaneous. We would still have three weeks to work out the details of the trip, but it was spontaneous because I hadn’t even asked him. I hadn’t much thought about New Year’s yet. As a matter of fact I had just spent a ton of money shipping German keepsakes back to the states to just about every family member I had. I wasn’t broke, exactly, but I was almost a thousand dollars poorer than I had been.

“All right,” I answered. I was intrigued by the idea, and I knew spending a weekend in Paris, on New Year’s Eve with John, would amount to an adventure, and I needed one. I had just gotten back to Germany from a TDY (temporary duty assignment), had been in Germany for just over a year, and was ready for something different.

“Anybody else in,” John turned and asked the others in the room. We were in A1C Beckett’s room, like normal, having a few German beers, cutting up, entertaining ourselves.

“You guys are kidding around, right?” one of the guys asked. I can’t remember who it was, but it’s not important, the only thing that mattered is that none of them were going to go. They were going to stick to the norm, sit in one of their rooms, drink lots of German beer, and tell lots of jokes.

John looked at me and I nodded. “No,” he answered. “We’re going.”

∞

The bus was just a bus. It had four bus wheels, wrapped in four bus tires, twenty bus seats (although the seats were pretty comfy), surrounded by a bunch of bus windows, filled with a bunch of bus tourists, including John and I.

But, to us, it wasn’t just a bus. It was a teleportation device, a transformation machine, a time traveling, warp capable, ever loving, child maker, for the moment that the bus started to move, opening our eyes with wonder, filling our minds with new possibilities of what was to come, and our hearts with eager anticipation. That bus was just a bus, taking us to Paris for a New Year’s celebration, but it was the adventure we wanted, and we knew we were going to get it before we even left. For that entire weekend we would no longer be Airmen in the United States Air Force. We would be travelers to another place, wanderers, to a set destination, but not a set predicament, and not a set state of mind.

We knew we’d be up for an adventure because it wasn’t the first trip we had taken together. We were accompanied by a few of the other guys on some of the other trips. We had gone to Berlin to play rugby, which I was horrible at, Frankfurt Germany just to see the red light district, and all over south eastern Germany to see different castles. Every one of the previous trips had been a pretty wild time and Paris would be no different. Unfortunately we were going to get what we were looking for, but not in the way that we wanted to.

Every time we left the base I was always struck by the difference between Europe and the U.S.