When I started this newsletter, I planned to write about travel and books, but I find myself continuing to reflect on our trip to Spain, so it’s skewing more towards travel. Thoughts on books will come, but today I am going to reflect on how earlier travels I went on surfaced during our trip.
Our first night in Spain, after an overnight flight from NYC to Madrid, a bus from the Barajas airport to the Atocha train station, then a train from Madrid to Sevilla, we were in our hotel and I had a deep sense of déjà vu. This was not the first time Oscar and I had done an overnight flight to Madrid and then taken a train to a regional city. But it was our first time to do it with two large bags, two backpacks and two computers while embarking on a 10-week journey. Taking multiple forms of transport was easy when we were on a two-week trip with carry-on sized bags and no technology. But there was a weight, both literal and figurative, to our arrival in Sevilla. We had more to lose in our bags than we had on other trips, and the vulnerability I felt reminded me of my first trip overseas.
When I was 14, my mother took a sabbatical from her job as a foreign student advisor at the University of Iowa. For the fall, she enjoyed life as a stay-at-home mom, baking cookies and watching daytime TV. I’m sure she did more than that, but that’s how I think about that first semester. She lived the life of a mom who didn’t have to work. But she wanted an adventure, so in the spring, she moved us to Dublin, Ireland where we would spend a month or two before visiting friends in other parts of Europe. She had a good friend Vicki who lived there and since it was an English-speaking country, it seemed like an easy place for an extended trip. We had an apartment lined up in Dublin, and my mom would volunteer while my sister and I attended a school that would enroll us for our short stay.
Packing for that trip, we took the maximum luggage allowance, which at the time was two checked bags (for free) and one carry on. We arrived in Dublin with nine bags and spent the first night at Vicki’s house. I quickly noted that although they spoke English in Ireland there was a lot that was different than living in Iowa—most notably Vicki’s kitchen, which she called “outside,” because it was literally outside, and the lack of central heat. We arrived in February, so it was warmer in Dublin than the Midwest, but not warm enough in my mind to be cooking and preparing food in an outdoor space. And her house was cold. I kept my winter coat on indoors.
Our first morning in Dublin we woke up to discover that the woman we were going to rent an apartment from, in an area that was close to a school we would attend, had died. She had been hit by a car. Her sons shared that they no longer wanted to rent the flat to us. And with that all of my mother’s well-thought-out plans for our time in Dublin fell apart. We no longer had a temporary home to move into, instead we had nine bags to move around and six weeks to fill.
The week after the death of the Irish landlord and loss of the apartment was hard. We moved into a hotel and my mom and my sister got colds. We had no kitchen, not even an outdoor one, so we had to negotiate eating in our hotel room on a budget. I had brought homework with me from my junior high, but there was no structure to my days and I remember sitting in the smoke-filled lobby of the hotel watching football and rugby on the TV with a lot of Irish men and wondering if we would ever find a place to live, wondering why we were here and what else we might lose on this trip. My mom found us a new place to live, but it was far from the school we had planned to attend, so our time in Dublin was very different than what we thought it was going to be when we packed our nine bags and headed to the Cedar Rapids airport.
At the time I didn’t totally understand why my mother wanted to take a sabbatical and go to Europe for three months, but when I was in Spain, I saw her desires in a new way. She was younger at the time of our Irish trip, than I am now, but she, like me, had been working for many years and she wanted a break from the routine of everyday living. I get it. We could all use a sustained break, and a chance to pursue a project or learn something new, every seven, ten or even 15 years.
And despite the initial challenges, the trip to Ireland did not turn me off travel, instead it showed me all that there is a lot to be learned in another culture, even after challenging situations. The house we rented in Dublin did not have central heating, so I learned how to build a cold fire, prepare hot tea and make do with limited hot water. The local buses in our area never fully stopped, so we learned how to jump on to a moving bus. We ate green ice cream on Saint Patrick’s Day and learned that thousands of Americans participate in the Dublin St. Patrick’s Day parade. We saw the Book of Kells and visited museums and castles. We went to the Dingle Peninsula. I didn’t get to go to an Irish school or meet many Irish kids, but we met friends of Vicki’s and found our way. Then we went to Oslo and I will never forget visiting the Kon-Tiki Museum and marveling about what it would feel like to cross the Pacific Ocean in a small boat. My next international trip would not be for another six years, but if we had not taken that trip I believe my life would have unfolded differently.
During the months planning for the Spain trip, I never felt a connection to my time in Ireland. It was only after a day of lugging bags and having vulnerable moments when I worried that I had misplaced my passport or that our bags were not secure on the train or bus, that the memories came back, as if they were buried in my physical body, not my mind.
I’m not sure how my mom, sister and I managed with all our nine bags. It feels like too many to fit into a taxi. And my sister and I, at 11 and 14, likely weighed about half the size of our suitcases, unable to lug, load or carry large bags. But somehow, we got them to four different cities, on trains, planes, boats, buses and into taxis.
Our time in Spain had very few hitches. Oscar got a cold during the second week and needed to sleep more than usual. While we were in Zaragoza, I thought I lost a pair of earrings, but after a day of searching our AirBnB, Oscar found they had fallen between the bed frame and the mattress. Oscar later got terrible food poisoning, potentially a form of e-coli, from a bad oyster in Santander and we had to visit two doctors before we got him the meds he needed so he could eat again. We had a couple delayed buses and trains and some meals that were better than others, but we had no major let down like the one I faced with my mom and sister when I first travelled as a teen.
Travel brings adventure, but there is an inherent vulnerability to it. Each day of a trip is a step into the unknown and we tolerate the vulnerability so that we can enjoy and discover new people, places and experiences. I felt this déjà vu, then I found us a restaurant for dinner, we locked up our valuables in the hotel safe and headed out for a walk before our first sit down Spanish meal of the trip.
How about you? Have there been moments when you have wondered if travel was worth it? When a trip was harder than you expected? I would love to hear if my déjà vu speaks to you and any of your travels.
Thanks for reading!
Loved hearing this story! And it rings so true that “they were buried in my physical body, not my mind.” xoxo
Loved this piece!