I spent a winter term abroad teaching on one of Dartmouth’s Language Study Abroad programs in France. We got a ten-day break in the middle of the term and almost everyone skipped town to make good use of our Eurail passes. I palled up with Stanley Weil to visit Nice, Monaco, Florence and Munich. To keep our costs down, we took midnight trains between destinations and, splitting a couple of bottles of wine, slept as best we could on the hard third-class seats.

He had a deck of cards and we wore it out, passing the time between destinations. We played Spades, Hearts, Crazy Eights, Gin and anything else we could remember. At some point we had had enough. All the games had been played out. Continue reading →