If you don’t live in box, or in a closet, or in a box that’s in a closet, then you know that round trip airfares generally cost the same as one-way. If anyone knows why this so, tell me. I don’t even have a smart-ass theory about it. My story goes like this: last summer, we only needed a one-way ticket to Amsterdam. I won’t tell you why we needed one-way, it will bore you to death. Just accept that we needed one-way, but I bought a round-trip, because that’s just what you do. I was tempted to actually buy the one-way just to see if the airline would call me and say, “What, are you stupid? The return costs nothing. It’s like a free ticket.” I couldn’t bring myself to do it, no matter how off-the-chart daring it would have been. Instead, like the million travelers before me, I bought the round-trip. And like those millions, it bothered me to no-end that I was buying a return ticket that I would not use. Why do airlines torture us with a free ticket that we don’t want? It’s like selling a Braille book to the blind, and throwing in the print-copy for nothing. Actually, it’s not even that good, because one can at least sell the print-copy, I can’t do anything with the return ticket. Well, I couldn’t let a free ticket pass me by, so I came up with an elaborate scheme to use my free return. The answer: Take a $500 train ride to Holland, then fly back for free. Genius, huh?

It wasn’t hard to convince the Attaché to spend this exorbitant amount of money to use our “free” airline tickets–she finds money spent on travel as necessary as buying food, paying bills, purchasing antique parrot brooches on ebay or replacing brand new ipod headphones when she’s merely misplaced them. So the real challenge for me was not convincing her to spend the cash, she would readily to it, but to convince her to go on the trip for the reason I wanted to go. (Easy, I’m not talking about Amsterdam brothels or pot here.) You see, her travel goals revolve around punching a new hole on the countries-I’ve-been-to list or sleeping in Bavarian castles. We’ve been to Holland already and Bavaria is not in Holland. But I got to thinking….

We go to Apeldoorn, I told her. It’s east of Amsterdam. Supposed to be a gorgeous little town. Yes, I know we’ve been to Holland, but you’ve never been to Apeldoorn. She looked suspicious. She knew there was moreI had to spill the beans. Half-marathon, I admitted. But it’ll be flat, I explained. It’s got to be flat. Holland is flat like that shirt I just ironed for you. “Or flat like the growth rate on that mutual fund you just bought,” she replied. I didn’t tell her I wished the growth rate was flat on that mutual fund.

So Apeldoorn, Holland it was. Our first European train adventure. A half-marathon in a new city. It was to be a flat run in land of wooden shoes. In the middle of winter. Oh, I left that part out….