First time, at the medeterrainian sea!

In this article, I will attempt to recreate the one I was about to post up the day before yesterday but didn't get to post because readcash decided to copy a recovered something into the cache memory clicking on write full article.

Now i admit, i wasn't entirely 100% attentive to details at that time, which was the cause that i then accidentally pasted the crud that readcash had put in the cache over the story in the text editor. Before i knew it the story was "ins blaue hinein" as the Germans say.

It was gone.

It took me until i started writing this article to mentally recover from the blow. I took that hard because it was one of the best works i've ever written. But…I guess shit happens, little goats stay you keeping (don't ask) and so, i'll try to recreate the story from memory as much i can. I'll write the explanation why that in itself is almost a miracle but i'l stick to the story itself for this one.

And that story? What is it?

It's something that happened to me a long time ago, when i was 16 years old. It happened on a Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday of the weekend in which the FIFA World Cup 1990 Finale was played between Germany and Argentina, on Saturday.

I dedicate this story to Chryselle. "I am so sorry, Not for what i…we did but for what i didn't do after that weekend."

Auto Quotus Interruptus.

Hang on, sorry to interrupt but you can't start something like this without some context!

So here i am jumping in to interrupt myself, even before i got to the actual start of the actual story. I do this because i think i need to tell you about the "me" in 1990. I turned 16 in March that year and, because they felt a man should be able to ask a woman to dance at a wedding or other events, my parents had sent me to dance lessons as one of my bday gifts. I was the quintessential nerd, with parents who were his grandparents and those grandparents were…i don't want to say rich, but everyone i knew would have described us with that word. My weekly allowance was easily 5-10 times that of the average 16-year-old. So when i became a member of the dance school for the lessons i found out about the "free dancing Saturdays" for members of the school. It basically meant that members could come and dance for free on Saturday evening with cheap pricing on the drinks (no profit). In practice, it was a club on Saturday that was cheap and closed at 00.00 at night.

On those Free dance evenings, I learned the hard way that I had pretty much nothing going for me to gain the appreciation of the opposite sex, and I didn't fit in with any of the guys there. I usually sat alone, drinking way too much, and then went home at least tipsy, sometimes shitfaced. Just two weeks before the family vacation i discovered that there was one thing that i had that girls seemed to like more than they disliked me. I had money. How i found out is maybe a story for another day in itself, but anyway, that was me when the vacation began. Now i should also ad that it was the first time our vacation was going to the south of France, the Mediterranean sea no less, and we went to amping there with our caravan.

A huge Caravan!

A luxury edition, 7+ meter double axle caravan. (average is one axled, 4-5 meters long, and nowhere near as luxurious. I hated our caravan, as it stood out like a sore thumb every place we had ever been camping.)

The picture shows the caravan without the hook on extension tent which expanded the space available with another 2,5 meters outward from the caravan!

Ok enough of that. You got the basics: Nerd, 16 years old, socially underdeveloped (c64 assembler coding overdeveloped), and going out on Saturdays and drinking for 4 months, with more money to spend than any 16 year old should.

Setting off for le sud du France, well prepared

Wednesday morning At 07:00 sharp our family, everything packed and ready set off to drive to the south of France. I had given up trying to change my folks' minds and go to our normal vacation spot in Luxembourg the evening before so I wasn't as excited as i could be, more like in a "meh whatever" kind of mood. I had a walkman (an actual Sony Walkman cassette player" and some handheld games (Pacman and another i can't remember.) as well as some reading stuff for the road, and the whole back seat of the car to myself. Ma, which is what i called my grandmother and my grandfather was Pa, had made about 30 or 40 "bollekes" with an astonishing range of bread spreads to choose from and we each had 2 bottles of drinks so we were well prepared (we thought) and could hold out for the long drive ahead.

Well, that turned out to be relative and did not measure up to the practical situation.

The weather was unbearably hot. In the car we had 38 degrees Celcius, with our air conditioning on. That caused the bread spreads of some Bolletjes to take liquid shape, and then run out of their bolletjes and onto/into/over the others. So by 14:00, no one had any interest in any of the bolletjes. It was also one of the first times we learned about the traffic issues that strangely happen when The Netherlands, Germany, and Belgium have their vacations at the same time, and 22% of the tourists drive towards the south of France at the same time. So by 23:00 that evening, i was bored out of my mind, almost nauseous from the heat in the car, and we had only just passed Paris an hour before. We stopped then at a gas station/truck stop/parking lot which had a restaurant and toilet facilities rolled down the struts on the caravan and went to bed.

Yeah, sleep... no way Jose!

Thing is that parking lots like that are busy 24/7 with people that aren't exactly aware or caring of people trying to sleep. Refrigerated trucks have their engine running all the time and.…well, let's just say it was not sleepable at least to me. Pa snored like he was cutting trees with a chainsaw on top of it all so when we resumed driving at 06:00 i was not in a good mood and tired as ..…you know.

The rest of the drive was as miserable as the first day and when we finally did make it to our target area, meaning we had eyeballs on the Mediterranean sea, i found out there had been no reservations, no planned location, and we'd wing it as far as finding a camping spot went. An incredibly awesome strategy of course. So we had to spend another night at a gas station before we could go look for a free spot at a camping in the morning.

Oddly enough there were little to no free plots available.

Well, it was 13:00 ish on Friday when we finally found a spot, but it was only free for two days, so we'd have to move on again. You can imagine my joy, knowing that I'd be there for no more than a couple of days before having to go through the packing up, moving to another location, packing out (i refused to sleep in the caravan, so i had to pitch my tent and break it down again for that. Two things that make having a 4 person tent for me alone not a positive thing.

It was horrible!

The camping was horrible too, just to make things worse, with no entertainment, no swimming pool and the beach was 30 minutes walk away from the Camping. That was the start of the vacation for us in 1990. This went on for a week until Thursday. Moving from shitty camping to shittier camping, getting more pisssed every day. But on Thursday our luck changed.

Paradise!

We found a Camping that was fully decked out in facilities, 50 meters from the beach. This was the beach exit of the Camping itself:

The plots were nice and roomy, and clean. The neighbors across the "street" from us:

and there was a spot open for the next 3 weeks because of a cancellation!

Nerd go exploring

So when i woke up on Friday, at about 10:30, i double checked "this is the place we're going to stay for the whole vacation?" to make sure they hadn't changed their minds, then ate a good breakfast, changed into my "Hawaiian" clothes (Bermuda shorts and a blouse with Hawaiian print), snapped my sunglass covers onto my glasses, cashed my allowance (tripled because vacation) and set off exploring to see what was out there. in today's money, i think i had about 500 euros worth of cash with me. Back then every European country had its own currency so i had a shitload of Francs in my wallet.

Exploration commenced

Now scouting out the area on the first day of vacation if we were somewhere new was something i'd perfected over the decade or so that our family went on summer vacations to campings, and that year i knew i would have to find the entertainment, ie. bar, a good distance away from the Camping i was staying so i would not risk running into my folks while i was drunk. Because…well, my pa was an ex-commando who'd served in Korea voluntarily for 3 years. I think you can imagine what my folks would have been like when they found out that "oooh a few drinks if the atmosphere is good, nothing more" which i told them when they asked if i drank alcohol wasn't entirely accurately describing my alcohol intake at times. And i was planning on increasing said intake that vacation. I was planning on going into wild party mode, taking full advantage of the anonymity that being 1000s of kilometers from anyone that knew me would offer.

So after a good long walk, noting every spot with "party potential" i was kind of getting acquainted with the so much adored Mediterranean Sea by walking along the coast. I had surprised myself with the distance i'd walked because instead of packed beaches and rampant tourism i was in an area with a rocky surface all the way into the sea, no tourists, no locals, no nothing in sight for Kilometers. Far in the distance, i saw the town on the other side of which was the camping i was staying. I had already done "the going French maneuver" by that time so…picture it: An overweight (not yet obese) 16-year-old with clip-on sunglasses, in Bermuda and Hawaiian blouse, carrying an authentic french baguette (1 meter long) under one arm and two bottles of wine in my hands.

The little hidden bay with the awesome beach.

That is how i stumbled across the most gorgeous little beach in a sort of little bay, in between the rocks, 2 to 3 meters below the surface of the rocks, ie. out of sight of everything and everybody, with almost white sand, gently lapping shoreline and two (not sure if they were palm trees) trees that provided shade. And there were only a few people there! Two girls and 4 guys were there, and except for what i assumed was a couple (they looked to be constantly arguing, switching to and thro from English to French while throwing in some German every now and then. The others were busy picking up drift trash, and discussing (i learned later on) where they'd going to put the campfire, the beach chairs, and so on for the beach party that they'd be having on Saturday night after the World cup finals.

Not confident, just stupid brave.

After a couple of deep breaths, i thought "Fuck it, i'm going to introduce myself" and walked onto the beach. When i got within a reasonable range to identify features the girl arguing with the dude looked my way and caught my eye. I literally gasped open-mouthed, stumbled, and dropped my baguette and wine before just barely managing to keep myself from falling flat out on my face.

I would later learn her name was Chryselle.

She was… probably the most gorgeous human being i'd ever seen in my life, and would hold that title for some years to come. (hey back then we didn't have pornhub or anything. We had TV, and magazines. And we didn't have the magazines if you catch my drift. We didn't have the volume of…comparative samples available...)

I didn't get close to her though. Even if i had been in the opportunity to do so i probably wouldn't have had the guts to say anything anyway. I was awestruck, dumbstruck, and starstruck all at the same time! But des all not to plus this was a moot issue anyway because the other 3 dudes had detected me, turned to an intercept course, and blocked my way further onto the beach within 100 meters of me touching the sand. My first observations were "2 Germans, one French and probably local, all of them the athletic type, but only one probably actually working out, lifting weights and stuff with the muscle and strength to back up the look." The second thing i picked up on was that at least two of them were less than sober. Third thing was that they all didn't want me to be there. Wildy gesturing, with the local, arrogantly shouting at me in French they walked to me. When the Germans noticed my "Zje no parleey french" they began telling me to fuck off in German. I decided not to reveal i was fluent in German and feign ignorance some more, just for fun, and pretty soon they'd devolved into "You GO, private. You GO, no allowed"

Continued in Part II!!

So i notice that its better to make this into a 2 part article series. The "me" interrupting me to tell you more about me before i could start telling the story about me has made this article a bit longer than i'd thought it would be. I promise part II will be posted BEFORE Sunday morning CET though!

Thanks for reading this!

Stay safe and Stay happy!!