Hangman on a Train

Two weeks in Europe, a lost phone charger—and an unexpected lesson in being the parent your kid deserves.

I am writing this from FUNKHAUS, an impeccably named cafe in Cologne.

My journey from California to Germany has progressed as such: car→ airplane→ bus→ Iceland → bus → airplane → car → ferry → Sweden → golf cart → ferry → car → ship → Germany → rental car → Hamburg → train → Stuttgart → train → Trier → train → HERE.

I’ve done this all in the company of my almost-15-year-old son, Cody. Today is our last full day of a two-week vacation, and I am a mix of surprise, relief, elation, and exhaustion. What could have been a mother-son travel debacle has been a delight. Mostly.

A very rough outline of our two-week route, with a stop off in Lübeck, Germany included and the arrow pointing back to Boston, where I scheduled a day to decompress before heading home to California.

Cody is a dedicated homebody whose sense of adventure extends mostly to world-building video games, so when he told me he wanted to go to Germany this summer, I jumped on it. This was my chance to give him a taste of the adventure I had as a nineteen-year old backpacking solo through Europe.

But as I pestered Claude (my AI BFF) for “fun things to do in Germany with a teenager,” little drops of dread pooled in the back of my mind. Travel has taught me that things break down, trains are missed, and plans go pear-shaped. You may find yourself sweaty and stranded, saying things like “EET EES KAPUT. NO GO.” Add a sarcastic teenager into the mix, and the chances for extreme unpleasantness, if not outright mutiny, spike considerably.

I found myself clicking from one travel site to another, only to abandon the planning session entirely. I poked around and procrastinated until I was struck by an uncomfortable realization: His age-appropriate surliness was just the fringe on the larger tapestry of my apprehension. What was really keeping me mired was our relationship itself.

My son and I are very different. A simple, but fraught, truth. One I have been navigating with various levels of success for years.

When Cody was born, I called him “my little skeptic.” He was slow to smile. Never naturally bubbly. His voice would soar in an arcing “moOOmy, nooooOOOOOoooo” when I sang to him. By six, he began referring to our mild nature walks as “death marches.”

Still, we had moments of supersaturated sweetness.

“I love you more than all the leaves on all the trees in the whole wide world,” I once told him. He turned his cherub-cheeked, Goldfish-dusted face to mine and replied, “And I love you more than all the blood coming out of everybody, everywhere.” Adorable.

Now that he’s older, my rainbows-and-jazz-hands agenda is officially kaput. No go. And, aye, thar be dragons.

Theoretically, I am still the boss of him. In practice, I can do little more than model the behavior I’d like him to emulate. These dueling realities leave me in low-key agony. He spends 12 hours online? I’m a failure. Hasn’t eaten a fresh vegetable in three days? Same. (It doesn’t help that the one thing he did inherit from me was a picky palate.)

I careen back and forth from radical acceptance to parental panic. How would this dynamic play out as we navigate multiple time zones, three countries, and two weeks of togetherness?

As the trip approached, trepidation bubbled in my gut. Still, I dug up our passports and managed to build out our Jenga-like itinerary, knowing that if one block were dislodged, the whole thing might collapse.

**********************

We took a redeye to Boston and slogged through a six-hour layover. The flight to Iceland was followed by an hour-long bus ride to Reykjavik. Not a word of complaint from my son. I was encouraged. Had I given birth to a traveller after all?

The next day was spent soaking in Reykjavik's considerable charm. On a languorous stroll, we discovered something in common: thrifting. “This place is fire,” he said as we rooted through the musty bins like fashionista truffle pigs. His enthusiasm was a win. A little reminder that we had a whole lifetime to find things in common.

Then, back at the hotel, my coveted, pink, barrel-shaped hair dryer melted. Spectacularly. As the scent of burnt hair wafted into the bright Icelandic night, I realized my fancy new electronics adapter did not function as a voltage converter.

The Great Device-Charging Panic of ‘25 had begun.

Cody presenting his favorite thrift store find: Shark jumping over volcano on glittered tie-dye.

The charging situation, already dicey given our lack of a converter, devolved further after Cody left that fancy new electronics adapter (which worked for our phones, but not for my hair dryer or our laptops) behind at a friend’s house in Gothenburg, Sweden.

She sent him a pic of the adapter with the text “are you deadass.” I interpreted this to mean “you have committed a punishable offense and as a consequence your mother is going to strangle you,” which was not too far from the truth.

Evening found us on an overnight ship to Germany, internet-free in the middle of the North Sea. Cody moaned and my vagus nerve bristled. I shelled out an obscene amount for a basic iPhone charger we could jack into the TV.

“Ghetto charging,” Cody called it, and there was temporary peace in the land.

But on our way to Stuttgart, we arrived at the narrative’s inevitable destination: alone on a train with our phones and laptops drained.

Yes…yes, son, you are deadass.

Cody slumped onto himself like a neglected marionette. I looked out the window, thinking of the hours I had spent on these very trains years ago, listening to The Doors on my Walkman, scribbling away in my journal. Just me and my thoughts, and the paper and the pen.

I reached into my bag and tapped into a different power source.

“Hey, Squiddo…you wanna play hangman?”

Cody slowly reanimated, unfurling his 6’1” frame and running his hand through his impressive head of hair. “Sure,” he shrugged.

I flipped to the back of my journal and scratched out a linear gallows along with six blank spaces. The word was TOILET. He guessed and lost.

My turn. His word was REPETITION, which I recognized as a jab at my tendency to repeat myself. Back and forth we went. SPAGHETTI. YOUTUBE. FOOTBALL. PHOTOSYNTHESIS.

The next train ride, we switched gears. Now it was swear words. SHIT STORM. ASSHOLE. BITCHBOY. GLAZER. At his insistence, we moved into F1 racers or racing teams—JUAN MANUEL FANGIO, NIKI LAUDA, TYRREL, SPYKER, TORO ROSSO. He chided me for not getting Alfa Romeo. I razzed him for changing the rules.

Win. Lose. Every guess a little connection.

As we rolled through the German countryside, something shifted in the story I tell myself about my son, and me, our relationship and our differences. I looked at Cody—my incredible, antithetical child—and I saw him as the person he is today and the man he may someday become.

I’m keeping some of the naughtier hangman words—the ones he needed to explain to me—out of the picture. (And, yeah, repetition is misspelled. Alas, paper has no autocorrect.)

We fly home tomorrow morning.

The trip has been long for him. He misses his girlfriend and his friends. His tolerance for following me through foreign streets in search of random landmarks has dwindled. I want to sleep in my own bed and cuddle with my dogs.

So we are ready to return. And if we make it home without a major travel snafu, I’ll feel relieved and triumphant. I will have introduced my son to the art of travel, and, hopefully, some of the lessons travel taught me when I was only a few years older than he is now: self-confidence, competence, asking for help when lost or confused, keeping eyes and heart open to new experiences.

For my part, the great joy of this adventure has been the new lessons travel has taught me: To see my son through a wider lens. To appreciate his evolution into adulthood. To stop self-flagellating over who he is not so I can appreciate who he is.

I hope he remembers the summer I dragged him onto an endless parade of European planes, trains, boats, trams, and cars. Maybe the connections we made will allow him to see me as the loving but imperfect mother I am, too. And maybe, someday, he’ll even travel with his own kids and teach them how to play hangman on a train.