My nonstop bus from Manchester to London arrived at the Victoria Coach Station shortly after dark. I remembered from my last visit that the Victoria Train Station, a significantly more massive building than Victoria Coach Station, was just a couple blocks down the road. I made my way there, entering through the back via a conjoined shopping mall. After standing in the wrong line twice for information and then fighting with an automatic ticket machine that didn’t want to eat my crumpled money, I finally got myself on a train to Kingston Upon Thames to visit my old buddy Cheeseman again.

I joined Cheeseman at an international student holiday social event at a church that saw us chowing down on English sweets, playing Christmas music, and laughing with an eccentric collection of college students visiting Kingston college from all around the world. Cheeseman still had exams coming up and confided in me how disappointed he was that he wouldn’t be able to make it back home to the States in time for Christmas. I told him that my family would be meeting me in Germany for the holidays in a week and that he was more than welcome to come spend Christmas with us after his exams if he wanted. The idea stuck, and as the night went on, it slowly began evolving into a plan to travel from Germany to Spain on a whole new adventure in the new year.

I left Kingston in the morning on a train bound for London’s Waterloo station. I exited the station on the upper floor via an inter-building bridge over the busy streets below. I soon found myself back on the Queen’s Walk along the River Thame where the familiar smells and sounds of the morning open market under the London Eye greeted me. As much as I wanted to buy myself a hearty breakfast feast from the market vendors, I was down to my last fifty pounds and knew that I had to save those for a hostel bed that evening. So stomach rumbling, I pressed on to the Millenium bridge and over the Thames on a mission. My mission that morning was to return to the little music shop in Soho where I had left my Ukulele to be repaired well over a month ago.

Soho’s Denmark street greeted meet like an old friend with its instrument filled shop windows and blaring jazz music playing over loud speakers. I returned to the corner shop where I’d left my ukulele and retraced my steps through the store, into a back room, down a set of stairs to the basement where I rang the bell for the hidden workshop door. ???? answered the door immediately, and I could tell by the glint of recognition in his eyes that he hadn’t forgotten me. He invited me into his workshop and pulled my familiar little case out from a dusty cupboard. To prevent the neck and the body of the uke from bending under the tension of the new strings, he had epoxied the joint together. “The only way it’ll come apart again,” he assured me, “is if you’re using it to hammer in a particularly stubborn nail.” I had pre-paid him for the repairs, but I still owed him for the bronze wound bass string he special ordered for me. I forked over some of my last remaining pound notes with a small twinge, and as I did he told me that he had fished $250 euros out of the body of the ukulele while he was repairing it. “Yeah, I put it all in the front pocket of your case there…clever place to stash your money, but not so clever if you forget about it boy-o,” he said with a laugh.

I left Soho with a stupid grin on my face, my pockets again full and my ukulele back in hand. I meandered my way around to Piccadilly Square, whose lights and double decker bus traffic jams were every bit as striking as I remembered. I spotted the familiar sign showing a U in a circle and descended into the tube station. I had looked up a cheap place to stay near London bridge called St Christopher’s Inn and asked the man at the information desk what stop would get me closest to there. “London bridge?” he asked. “You must mean tower bridge, the more famous one.”
“No, I mean London bridge,” I insisted. “I need to get as close to London bridge as possible, near the Shakespeare Globe pub.”
“I think I know where…” he trailed off. “Yeah, get off at this stop,” he pointed somewhat uncertainly at a dot on the tube map on the wall and I memorized it.

As it turns out, it must have been the dunce’s first day because when I emerged from underground at the stop he’d directed me to, I was standing in front of tower bridge on the wrong side of the river no less. So instead of gambling on the tube again I just decided to walk the last mile there instead. I don’t regret that decision either since the view of the lit up city by the river at night from tower bridge was magical.

I arrived at St Christopher’s Inn and checked into a hostel dorm room. It was a larger hostel connected to a loud sports bar that, in my opinion, took a lot of the charm out of the traditional hostel atmosphere. The room had cost me nearly the rest of my pounds. I had just enough for the bus that I would need to take to the Stansted airport in the morning. I asked the girl at the desk where I might be able to exchange euros for pounds, and after a glance at her watch, she informed me that at this time of night anyplace that could definitely be closed. My stomach must have understood the ramifications of that statement because it suddenly roared in protest.

An idea gripped at me, and I hurried to collect my ukulele and busker hat. I figured I only needed between ten and fifteen pounds for a decent dinner at a simple restaurant, and I had made that kind of money in half an hour the last time I played in London. I smiled to myself, excited to play the uke again after so long. But as I opened the door to go outside the cold London wind spat fresh rain right in my face. So instead of returning to the tourist laden Queen’s Walk where I had played before (and also been told to scram by the police), I descended once again into the London Underground to play music for the throngs of commuters. The sound of music was already bouncing around the ovular, white tiled tunnels as a reggae singer busked at the bottom of a long escalator. I walked by, giving the man a polite nod and smile as I passed, and searched for a spot of my own. I found one in an alcove between two rail tracks where people waited for their train to arrive and therefore had time to enjoy full songs as I played. I made 12 pounds in the first hour, but was having so much fun playing and singing that I played for another hour and made an additional 25 pounds!

I made my way back up street level and retraced my steps to a Greek Restaurant that I had passed on my hike to the hostel earlier. There had been a man out front giving passersby free honey-feta samples and I had been daydreaming of the place ever since. I got myself a cushy window seat looking out on the water and ordered myself a small feast with my night’s earnings. Feeling warm, full, and quite satisfied with myself, I returned to the hostel, put my headphones in and drifted peacefully off to sleep.

My alarm woke me in the morning and I made my way out the door at 7am as a handful of thoroughly haggard looking partiers were staggering back in. I made my way back to the airport shuttle stop on Liverpool street, the exact spot where my whole adventure had started fifty-six days earlier. I thought back on all the things I had seen since then, all the people I had met, all the memories I had made. It felt more like two years had passed than just two months. But I suppose that’s what makes traveling without a set itinerary or schedule so special. Going to a new corner of the world took the options of habit and routine away from me and granted me instead with raw opportunity every day.

As I boarded my plane to return to Germany, back to my home away from home, I knew that I was leaving the luxury of pure spontaneity behind. My wayward vagabond shoes would go in the closet. My backpack would be emptied and hung on the wall, its bulging contents of various souvenirs and mementos tucked into drawers or distributed as gifts. A smoothly weathered three-pound rock that I took from the summit of Croagh Patrick in Ireland and carried on my back with forty pounds of travel gear for a month would be puzzlingly received by my grandparents and used as a tablecloth weight on windy days rather than a mantle centerpiece like I had imagined. The stack of postcards I had bought with intentions to write and mail would become the beginning of an ongoing hoarding collection that would never see a stamp. But although this chapter of my international travel might be closing, the new year held the promise of seeing Spain and sandy beaches. And after that, well, my addiction to travel would lead me to make some very interesting career decisions.