It was 1974. I needed to get away.
I was working in Maine, in a country inn. And I met a woman who actually lived nearby. We met because she had a small green MG convertible sports car that I desperately wanted to purchase.
She was experiencing life-crisis times, and said she was going to go abroad. Did I want to travel with her and go to Scotland, to a castle her diplomat friends’ parents had bought out in the countryside?
So it was either the car or the trip.
I needed the trip more.
We got along fine on our journey. Traveling along tube stops in London, staying at local B&Bs. Or at least as I recall, that’s how it went. No obvious signs of a mismatch.
She knew how to make plans and she seemed fine taking the lead. She knew where she wanted to go.
I just tagged along.
We took a train to Edinburgh, stayed at the university, which rents out dorm rooms for summer lodgers.
Then met her friends, who collected us in their little two-banger Citroën.
And off we went to the countryside.
It’s hard to remember much that transpired. I must’ve looked out the window, but I know I was blown out as well. I wasn’t very in touch with myself in those times, and I am painfully overwhelmed when out of my element.
I think I was still shell-shocked after leaving my family and hometown, years before.
Still, once the friends entered the picture, I started feeling uneasy, excluded from the group.
I tuned to my finer senses, and I could hear them laughing.
It was I who was the butt of their humor.
I retreated into myself, but didn’t have far to go without being forced to interact with these women, who very much reminded me of Cinderella’s stepsisters.
When I found myself asking permission to go out in the walled garden, take a walk in the countryside, I felt every bit the outsider.
These were city girls after all, from Washington, D.C., diplomat’s daughters. Clearly pampered in a way that I had not been. And they called each other by their last names, way too cool for school.
I lived in the woods of Maine by choice. Spent my time alone in a log cabin where the water froze in the winter.
Not their sort at all, though unbeknownst to them, I had grown up in an upper-middle-class family in the foothills of Pasadena.
But apparently, I was not up to their fake class standards.
After all, I had come dressed in Sears jeans and a flannel shirt.
They wore satin blouses and skirts. Scuffed but clearly expensive boots.
Despite the disparities, I remember clearly sleeping in a feather bed with metal springs. A walled garden outside of my window.
I remember the comfort, alongside the extreme awkwardness of sensing I didn’t have a lot of options.
I was beholden to these three women just to get from one place to the next.
And thus our monthlong adventure began.
(Note: we were heading for Greece for a month. Thus the title.
And the photograph as the featured image is of the two girls from DC.)