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I had hoped to scribble my mad
thoughts in private, but when I descend to Edelweiss’s breakfast room with my
leather journal in hand, JL, Mazey and Van Stein are already seated, eyeing me
with incredulity after our imaginary friend psychoanalysis over dinner.
They’ve
stopped talking. What were they talking
about?
Our mission this day is to visit
Liechtenstein, a tiny principality about 60 miles north.
It is important to me, in the
context of my day job, to visit all of Europe’s odd pockets, the microstates,
and Liechtenstein will complete the set.
The views, weaving through
mountains and valleys, are ceaselessly spectacular, if road signs are brutally German.
Our destination is much less spectacular.
In fact, Liechtenstein is downright
anti-climactic, evoking memories of Andorra, and of San Marino, to which I’d
trekked six months earlier, not with Van Stein in search of creativity and
madness, but with JL, on princely microstate business.
At least San Marino has a little
culture: two torture museums and a wax
freak show. Liechtenstein possesses nothing—except for a Transylvania-like
castle that hangs precariously from a mountainside.
Van Stein quickly dashes off a dismal landscape; JL, Mazey and I take refuge in Hotel Sonnenfeld’s parlor for
coffee.
A revelatory discussion clarifies how two parallel paths in my life have unexpectedly crossed: my madness stuff is getting serious and my serious stuff is going mad.
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On the drive back, every time we pass an Ausfahrt sign Van Stein whoops, “Exit-stenchtialism!”
...a link, perhaps, to expulsion therapy?
