Utrecht is both a place Futh reaches and a destination he later cannot manage to revisit. First associated with Carl’s invitation and a journey to his mother’s house, it returns as a possible escape from the final day of Futh’s Rhine walk; missed transport and a flat tyre turn that possibility into another postponed arrival.

A destination reached

Utrecht enters Futh’s travels through Carl, whom he meets on a ferry. On a journey the following weekend, Futh accompanies Carl to his mother’s house there. The visit establishes Utrecht as more than a place name: it is connected to a particular household and to an invitation that Futh can later imagine accepting again.

That earlier connection also travels with Futh in small, tangible form. On the road, he stops to eat the meat pie Carl’s mother gave him. Its taste prompts a memory of a family picnic in Cornwall, shortly before Futh’s mother left. The pie links the hospitality associated with Utrecht to a much older memory of family life and departure.

A return considered

During the Rhine walk, Utrecht becomes an alternative to completing the itinerary. By the morning of the final day, Futh is stiff, his feet are tender, and he seriously considers abandoning the walk to go there. He remembers that Carl invited him and reasons that he could find the way to Carl’s mother’s house even without the address. The plan is conditional, however: he must first get back to his car in Hellhaus, and he hopes to travel by bus with his suitcase rather than risk its arriving separately.

Futh looks for the information needed to make the journey. With the hotel proprietor absent and no timetable available inside, he goes out to find a bus stop. About a mile from the centre, near the river, he finds a timetable listing three direct weekday buses to Hellhaus. The first bus after breakfast seems to offer a workable route back to his car, from which he could drive on to Utrecht and arrive around lunchtime, before Carl returns home in the evening.

The plan unravels

The first bus does not arrive when Futh expects it. He checks the timetables at nearby stops and rereads the first one, considering whether he has mistaken the time or the day. After almost an hour, he concludes that the bus may have passed before he got there, perhaps because his watch is slow, or may not be coming at all.

He still considers the evening bus and whether he could reach Utrecht late enough for supper. Hitchhiking brings no lift, and he has seen no taxi; walking back into town to seek one seems both difficult and too expensive. He waits for the final bus, takes it, and gets off at the wrong stop before making his way into Hellhaus. The return journey has cost him time without bringing him closer to Carl’s home.

At the car, Futh finds a flat tyre. The spare in the boot is not usable: it is the old flat tyre he had removed by the roadside before driving home and finding Kenny leaving his house. With the car unavailable until he can sort it out in the morning, Futh gives up the plan to go to Utrecht and returns to the hotel for the night.

Reaching and missing the city

Utrecht’s narrative importance lies in the contrast between Futh’s earlier arrival and his later inability to repeat it. He has been welcomed at Carl’s mother’s house, and the invitation remains vivid enough to shape his decisions; nevertheless, the later attempt is defeated by a chain of ordinary obstacles—an uncertain timetable, a missed or absent bus, an inconvenient route, and a useless spare tyre.

That sequence belongs to a wider pattern of travel in which movement does not guarantee control over direction. On his continental drive, Futh misses a motorway turning and can only continue in the wrong direction until he can leave the motorway. Later, lost on foot, he cannot get his broken compass to guide him. Utrecht consequently stands as a real point of contact and a repeatedly contemplated destination, while Futh’s routes toward it expose how readily intention gives way to delay, uncertainty, and return.