Today is mom’s birthday. We want to call her. In this train where we didn’t sleep well, sitting in these seats, we call mom; she’s happy. We sit down again and we start talking with the American and our neighbor who is a young Croatian vacationing in Romania.

When we arrive near Budapest, I think about the train we have to take from there and I wonder if we we’ll miss it. Finally, we arrive so late in Budapest that we miss it by a half hour, even with the one-hour time difference. We get off, say goodbye to the American and go to the international ticket sales office to see if there is another train from Budapest to Vienna. Luckily, there is one at 5 p.m. that will allow us to catch our train from Vienna to Strasbourg. We buy our tickets and in the meantime, dad sees a man who is quite old and round with a French beret looking a little lost. Dad tells him what he needs to do and the man thanks him. We go to the restaurant to eat and drink a little before taking our train. This time, so that we don’t have to run after our train, we go a little early. We end up next to this man and I learn that he’s French. I start talking with him and I learn that he’s a former member of the Resistance and who, at 35 years of age, was Mayor of his town. During the Second World War, he was arrested. At the end of the war, he decided to go live in Romania with his son. I ask him for some political advice and I am fascinated by the life of this man named Louis Gallet. We watch the landscape and we see in Austria a mass of windmills. Finally, despite our worries, we arrive in time for our train to Strasbourg. We go in our sleeper compartment and settle in. Tomorrow we’ll be in France! I can’t believe it.

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