The Blind Leading the Blind

Have you ever been in a group of a dozen tipsy adults, lost in the woods in pitch black darkness in the middle of a rain storm?  After tonight, I can resoundingly answer yes.  Exiting the Royal Lazienkowski Park turned into a surreal episode, as our little crew of tourists ventured down a series of unlit paths looking for an exit to this huge, sprawling, 74 hectare park. We encountered a padlocked gate at the first exit we came across, and things quickly descended into an absurdist comedy from there. 12 jet lagged confused foreigners wandering through pitch black woods in the rain makes for a pretty good horror movie premise, and the idea of vampires or werewolves lurking in the darkness stopped being quite so amusing after the first ten minutes or so of fruitless wandering.  The rain, which had been threatening all evening, started coming down quite hard, and our pack of desperate tourists began a frantic search for an exit back to the sanctuary of our hotel.  The paths through the carefully tended baroque gardens were indistinguishable in the dark, and we circled through the labyrinthian park getting progressively more soaked & disoriented.  Eventually we returned to the Belvedere, re-routed our way through puddles in a parking lot, and found our way out through a nondescript gate... The rain left us drenched to the bone, and we eventually all found our way back to the safe, dry, warmth of the hotel...

Moral of the story?   

When you're walking around a foreign city with a bunch of tipsy tourists, without a map, an address, or lights, and it starts raining, maybe you should expect to get lost...  I thought I'd learned this lesson before, but these episodes of collective disorientation & lost meanderings seem to occur rather frequently at these meetings...   

Here's a pic of the indomitable Nicola Novellone after he finally herded all the delegates out of the park...soaked to the bone, with a smile on his face, still clutching the ever-present Cuban Montecristo Cigar...