You readers of my Substack, expect a rich post later tonight. I’m headed back to Vienna a day early, to get caught up on work before going to France next week for research. It’s been really hard to keep the blog up this week of toggling between Oxford and Cambridge. I sure do have a way of bumbling right across other people’s rules and regulations, don’t I? Well, I’m glad I didn’t see it, because I would have ended up sleeping in the hallway. As I put my recharged laptop away to leave, I saw a sign in English on the far wall, instructing visitors not to sleep in the chapel. Cuthbert’s way to get me to come up to Lindisfarne without delay. Maybe this current travail of mine is St. Cuthbert to pray for a friend who is suffering. On the flight, I closed my eyes and asked St. A friend in Cambridge gave me a book called The Age of Bede today after lunch, and I read the Venerable Bede’s “Life Of St. I’ll probably end up having to be in England all next week, so maybe I can get up to Anglo-Saxon holy sites, or something. What an adventure! I tell you what, they need to build walls to keep dumbasses like me out of Europe. But I do want to thank them for their kindness, and hope their bosses reward them for treating a bumbling American traveler with courtesy and compassion.Īs it happens, the door to the airport chapel was open, and I thought, “Yep, I’m going to bed down where people pray to God.” I shoved some benches together, and I’m about to go to sleep for three hours, before I wake up and go meet the police to be escorted to my flight. I’m not being sarcastic: the two young officers, Gregor and Bütul, really did feel sorry for me - but rules are rules, and I am in the wrong. “Find a bench, if you can,” one of them kindly suggested. The police escorted me to an empty wing here at the airport. Matt and I were supposed to go next week to Mont-Saint-Michel, Rocamadour, and other places - but I can’t get back into Europe at all without a visa. I’m leaving for London on the first flight out in the morning, and will be staying with friends while I appeal to the Austrian Embassy for a residence visa so I can come back to the place I rented in Vienna and spend the rest of the summer. I had to be escorted by armed guards to go fetch my bag at the baggage carousel. The Austrian border polizei were very nice, to be honest … but they couldn’t let me in. I thought that you couldn’t stay more than 90 days in a particular country. I had this crazy idea that the clock started over after my going back to the US for a month. All the time I spent in Hungary earlier this year counted against my credit. Turns out that I have overstayed my allotted period in the Schengen Area of the European Union.
I flew into Vienna late tonight from London, but got hung up at the border crossing at the airport.
You know that 2004 Tom Hanks movie The Terminal, about the guy who gets stranded in an airport and can’t leave for years? Because I’m an idiot, I’m getting to live that movie tonight.