Spring broke: Once there was a train in Spain — and I got booted off of it because of $7

Seven dollars I didn’t have. At least, not in pesetas, the pre-euro currency in Spain. He would have also accepted French francs — but I didn’t have any of those, either.

I sheepishly showed him the extent of my worldly fortune: a cloudy Zip-Loc bag full of British coins, containing about $70 worth of pounds and pence that I had earned busking in the streets and Underground stations of London during the first two months of our spring semester abroad. I was quite proud that I had managed to earn real money performing music. The conductor was less impressed.

My friend and traveling companion, Adam, had actual, useful money. Having already exhausted my study-abroad stipend by early March — who thought it was a good idea to give 20-year-olds a semester’s worth of rent money on their first day in a new country? — I was running up a tab with Adam on this spring break trip, paying him back in pounds, pints, and promises. “Mi amigo tiene el dinero,” I desperately explained to the conductor. “Está en el baño!”

Adam really was in the bathroom. We had been drinking warm beer in a park for several hours before boarding this train, discussing the meaning of life, chatting with stray dogs, and generally killing time in a small town because we’d already flubbed our first attempt at overnight rail travel. (On a train from Nice to Barcelona the previous night, we awoke to a lurching sensation around 2 a.m., but fell back asleep. The next morning, we arrived not in the Mediterranean metropolis of Barcelona, but in a sleepy border town called Irún. The train had split in the middle of the night, sending the front half down the coast to Barcelona and the rest of us clear across Spain.)

I imagine the conductor thinking that, even if this supposed bathroom friend existed, there would be little use in waiting for anyone associated with the scuzzy, long-haired vagabond before him now frantically sputtering boozy scraps of 10th-grade Spanish. Either way, Adam wasn’t back yet, the train was already slowing down, and when it hissed to a stop at the next station, he tossed me right off. And that’s how I discovered the lovely seaside city of San Sebastián.

When the train pulled away, I found myself alone on an outdoor platform, in the center of a strange city, with midnight fast approaching. This was 1997: I had no map, no phone, certainly no TripAdvisor app. After indulging in a bit of self pity, I started walking around, and soon found a beach. It was a lovely one, and the night was mild, but I wasn’t sure if I could sleep outside without getting arrested or mugged.

The fact that I was nervous but not utterly terrified speaks to the immense privilege I enjoyed being an able and well-enough-off white guy. To wit: I had a low-limit credit card my parents had sent me abroad with for emergencies. This certainly seemed to qualify. But after a few too many, um, “emergency” trips to the off-license back in London, I knew the card was almost maxed out. So I kept wandering the quiet, empty streets for over an hour until I finally found an open hotel that was both dirt cheap and credit-card capable.

For his part, when Adam returned to our couchette, he was understandably alarmed to learn that his friend had been booted off the train. He convinced himself that I must have outsmarted the conductor — that I was simply hiding somewhere on board — and spent much of the night searching the train for me. Upon arriving in Barcelona, he waited at the station for over an hour, expecting me to sneak off the train once everyone had disembarked, and then dutifully returned later that night to check incoming arrivals. Such was life before cell phones.

The next day, on the other side of the country, I went straight to the San Sebastián train station, and found they didn’t accept las tarjetas de crédito. So I was singularly focused: I needed to make about $20 in Spanish cash — enough to pay for some food and the reservation fee on a ticket to Barcelona.

So I got busy walking the streets of San Sebastián with my guitar, looking for the spots where people gathered. The architecture of Old Town was beautiful, but its narrow lanes weren’t quite teeming with tourists on this weekday in early March. Once I found the city’s majestic pedestrian promenade, though — whose iconic white railings have graced La Concha Beach since 1910 — I pulled out my guitar, opened up the case, and started singing.

Here’s the best travel tip I can offer: If you play a portable musical instrument, bring it along the next time you travel. It’s a pain to carry, yes, but it can absolutely change your trip for the better. With the exception of skeptical customs officials, people everywhere are warmer and friendlier toward musicians, eager to start a conversation. You’ll meet more and different people, locals and other tourists alike. You may even find yourself invited to parties or hidden hot spots.

And in a pinch, you can jam your way out of a jam with a bit of busking, which thrusts you into the local culture in a way no guided tour ever could. By contributing to the soundtrack of a city, you become part of the very place you’re visiting; you won’t just be in your own vacation photos and memories, you’ll exist in other people’s as well.

Early in the day, I wasn’t having much luck. But seeing as my only commitment was a 10 p.m. train — for which I didn’t even yet have a ticket — I just kept singing, making mental note of which songs resonated with people. (Nobody seemed to know Tom Petty, but Nirvana and Bob Dylan went over well.) Then, as the afternoon sun melted into the hills that cradle shell-shaped Concha Bay, the tide came in — a tide of people. They flooded onto the seaside promenade for their sunset strolls, and my guitar case started to fill up with pesetas.

In any language, street music elicits smiles from the gracious, trained disregard from the busy, glassy-eyed gazes from the old or the lovestruck, and either playful jubilance or hypnotized stares from children. In a place as magical as San Sebastián at sundown, it also seemed to bring out the best of humanity. Several groups of locals stopped to chat with me — my B+ high school Spanish buckling beneath the weight of real-world conversation — and, upon hearing my situation, one foursome even invited me to stay the night with them.

Music is such a strange, powerful thing. It stirs our emotions and dances deep within our brains, connecting us to each other and to ourselves through time and place. The ability to turn sound into song is something of an acoustic alchemy that people genuinely tend to marvel at, and one of life’s great honors and blessings.

By nightfall, I had earned enough money to buy a train reservation and a dinner near the station. As the train rolled out of San Sebastián a while later, I couldn’t stop smiling. Things had worked out. Music had saved the day. I pulled out my pocket notebook and started writing a song about the whole misadventure.

When I reached Barcelona the next morning, I looked all over the station for Adam but didn’t find him. Knowing next to nothing about the city, I walked first to the beach, and came upon a single long-stem rose someone had left stuck in the sand — a poetic welcome to the shores of the Mediterranean. I sat in the sand and pulled out my guitar, not playing for tips this time, but to set the words I’d written to music.

I only got to spend the day in Barcelona before it was time for a grueling 16-hour series of train rides back to London — no sleeper cars this time, but the magnificent and modern train station accepted credit cards — where I’d finally reunite with Adam and hear his half of this story. But the trip was hardly a bust. In fact, my accidental detour to San Sebastián remains one of my fondest travel memories, and one of my favorite songs I’ve ever written.

Jon Gorey is a regular contributor to the Globe Magazine. Send comments to magazine@globe.com.