I love this. Immediately brought me back to my days as a Peace Corps volunteer. SO much waiting around, learning how to be patient - but I was also just constantly in places where something might go wrong, or something completely unexpected might happen.
One thing I deeply miss is having experiences that I never even dreamed might be possible. Many of them weren't even all that remarkable or exciting, it just never crossed my mind that I would experience them. Skydiving is crazy and amazing, but you know it exists. Living by Lake Victoria and seeing huge clouds of lake flies blow in and cover every surface was just something I never considered being part of my reality.
Chris this is so liberating. I’m in the process of making a massive pivot in my life and I’m stressing, like STRESSING over the things I don’t have control over. I relate to my best stories often being the ones when things did not go as planned and am going to remind myself when I go down the next stress hole that it’s THIS or something better. Thanks brother! 🙌🏼💗
I still think about the time I landed in Bruges instead of Amsterdam (no place to stay) and was riding bikes with two friends on our way to the North Sea…
Just follow the canal and you’ll be there in 30 mins..
…except it never arrived and then we learned we’d been riding a canal that ran parallel to it all day and were suddenly in rural Netherlands with no indication we’d left Belgium.
When we turned a hard left to finally cross the 1km to get to the sea, my friend tacoed his back wheel and we had to walk our bikes to the shore as the Sun was setting and take a train back to the town we started in….
At the time i was so sad our day hadn’t worked out, and now it’s one of the few I not only remember, but laugh about. And retell…
This is one of my favorite things about travel, aside from the new place and people.
Flights get delayed, luggage gets lost, reservations wonky up, you buy the wrong pass for where you are trying to go, you spend a whole day fighting with the Metro only to arrive at your destination so late that it's closed. You know, stuff.
But the great part is that you learn how to get go, just that little bit more each time, of your plans and expectations. You develop an instinct for who and where the kind people are, the ones you can ask for help when you're stuck, and you learn to actually *ask for help*.
You slow down and everything because valuable in its own right even if it's a twelve hour bus ride. You learn that if you keep moving in the direction you're trying to go, you will eventually get there. No one is trapped in an airport forever, only for longer than they planned.
You learn to calculate risk but not be unnecessarily afraid of the world.
I definitely had quite a few misadventures 😅 and yes they're not very fun in the moment but they do make you stronger and more resilient in the long run
I wonder if this could be the effect the expectations we have. The good things that go good rarely make the best memories. The bad things that go bad? Same.
But the experiences that end up beyond what our imagination can handle, whether great, terrifying or in-between, end up being the brightest memories because they take us beyond ourselves.
It's as if we discover the big wide world all over again, and ourselves in it.
This was such a great essay and reminder (and OF COURSE there was an online debate about 'whether or not it counted" -sigh) .and while not a travel story--my ex-husband (note, ex) are STILL-20 years post-divorce-- laughing about the dinner party we threw where the meal I made was so bad, the guests arrived to the whirring sound of the garbage disposal. We ordered pizza and had a blast.
Chris, a year ago I house-sat with my girlfriend in southern Portugal. The stay was supposed to be for a month, taking care of two dogs and a semi-feral pregnant cat. By the time we arrived, counting two litters of kittens, there were 16 semi- and fully feral cats. The dogs were wonderful—until the full-time gardeners began working for 9 hours every day to transform the giant yard, and one of the dogs barked incessantly—and I mean incessantly—at them from inside and outside the house, with a tone that sharply triggered my tinnitus with every bark. I was going mad. When the second dog caught one of the kittens and I had to pry its dying body from the dog's mouth, we had to leave. Too many other complications to describe, but we did go to other lovely places in Portugal. The house-sit remains a hard memory, but surrounded by good ones.
Agree with this for sure. One of my mantras has become, “either it’s good or makes a good story!” It always helps to change my mindset 😊
I love this. Immediately brought me back to my days as a Peace Corps volunteer. SO much waiting around, learning how to be patient - but I was also just constantly in places where something might go wrong, or something completely unexpected might happen.
One thing I deeply miss is having experiences that I never even dreamed might be possible. Many of them weren't even all that remarkable or exciting, it just never crossed my mind that I would experience them. Skydiving is crazy and amazing, but you know it exists. Living by Lake Victoria and seeing huge clouds of lake flies blow in and cover every surface was just something I never considered being part of my reality.
Chris this is so liberating. I’m in the process of making a massive pivot in my life and I’m stressing, like STRESSING over the things I don’t have control over. I relate to my best stories often being the ones when things did not go as planned and am going to remind myself when I go down the next stress hole that it’s THIS or something better. Thanks brother! 🙌🏼💗
Reminds me of the time my first, and only, hot air balloon ride crash landed. On my birthday.(Everyone was fine.)
That’s definitely a birthday for the books! 💗
I still think about the time I landed in Bruges instead of Amsterdam (no place to stay) and was riding bikes with two friends on our way to the North Sea…
Just follow the canal and you’ll be there in 30 mins..
…except it never arrived and then we learned we’d been riding a canal that ran parallel to it all day and were suddenly in rural Netherlands with no indication we’d left Belgium.
When we turned a hard left to finally cross the 1km to get to the sea, my friend tacoed his back wheel and we had to walk our bikes to the shore as the Sun was setting and take a train back to the town we started in….
At the time i was so sad our day hadn’t worked out, and now it’s one of the few I not only remember, but laugh about. And retell…
This is one of my favorite things about travel, aside from the new place and people.
Flights get delayed, luggage gets lost, reservations wonky up, you buy the wrong pass for where you are trying to go, you spend a whole day fighting with the Metro only to arrive at your destination so late that it's closed. You know, stuff.
But the great part is that you learn how to get go, just that little bit more each time, of your plans and expectations. You develop an instinct for who and where the kind people are, the ones you can ask for help when you're stuck, and you learn to actually *ask for help*.
You slow down and everything because valuable in its own right even if it's a twelve hour bus ride. You learn that if you keep moving in the direction you're trying to go, you will eventually get there. No one is trapped in an airport forever, only for longer than they planned.
You learn to calculate risk but not be unnecessarily afraid of the world.
All valuable lessons for life, not just travel.
Makes me think of the quote James Clear shared this week from his newsletter:
Singer and songwriter Bob Dylan on the advice his father gave him:
"Even if you don't have all the things you want, be grateful for the things you don't have that you don't want."
Things might not always go according to plan, or we get what we want, but let's make the most of what we have or how things went to begin with.
I definitely had quite a few misadventures 😅 and yes they're not very fun in the moment but they do make you stronger and more resilient in the long run
I wonder if this could be the effect the expectations we have. The good things that go good rarely make the best memories. The bad things that go bad? Same.
But the experiences that end up beyond what our imagination can handle, whether great, terrifying or in-between, end up being the brightest memories because they take us beyond ourselves.
It's as if we discover the big wide world all over again, and ourselves in it.
This was such a great essay and reminder (and OF COURSE there was an online debate about 'whether or not it counted" -sigh) .and while not a travel story--my ex-husband (note, ex) are STILL-20 years post-divorce-- laughing about the dinner party we threw where the meal I made was so bad, the guests arrived to the whirring sound of the garbage disposal. We ordered pizza and had a blast.
This is absolutely the truth.
Chris, a year ago I house-sat with my girlfriend in southern Portugal. The stay was supposed to be for a month, taking care of two dogs and a semi-feral pregnant cat. By the time we arrived, counting two litters of kittens, there were 16 semi- and fully feral cats. The dogs were wonderful—until the full-time gardeners began working for 9 hours every day to transform the giant yard, and one of the dogs barked incessantly—and I mean incessantly—at them from inside and outside the house, with a tone that sharply triggered my tinnitus with every bark. I was going mad. When the second dog caught one of the kittens and I had to pry its dying body from the dog's mouth, we had to leave. Too many other complications to describe, but we did go to other lovely places in Portugal. The house-sit remains a hard memory, but surrounded by good ones.