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Traveling Stories

Our family’s adventure to Mexico actually began 24 years ago on a bench in the UW-Madison student union.  I was a horny undergrad majoring in late adolescent angst who spied this incredibly cute guy sitting on the second floor bench scribbling hard on a notepad. 

He was wearing an exotic neck scarf (which I now refer to as “that dirty rag”) and a long blonde ponytail.  I sauntered up in my cowboy boots and tried to get his attention using various tried and true flirting techniques.  He ignored me until I mentioned that I’d recently returned from a year-long stint in Europe.  He said that he’d just gotten back from Italy and…we were off.  

I believe that it was sometime during this first conversation about traveling that we vowed to never let five years go by without taking a major trip somewhere.  Actually, this vow may have happened a few months later when we moved into together (remember, this was 20 years ago and that’s what college students did) but I have a great deal of affection for that marble bench and I like to assign it a great deal of significance.

Michael and I took our first major trip together about a year after we met.  He graduated and I put my angst on hold, and we headed to Europe to see what we could see.  We landed in London and immediately broke up.  We really did.  We had such a dramatically bad time together our first day traveling that we were certain the relationship was doomed.  Thankfully, despite our youth and energetic hatred for one another, we also realized that it might simply come down to the differences in how we traveled.  We agreed that we still were interested in being traveling companions for the next few months (all bets were off by that point for how long our actual relationship might endure) but that we needed to pinpoint our major traveling differences to make it work.

We agreed that the major differences came down to three things:

1) How we arrived in a new place
2) The basic necessities once we arrived
3) Issues of safety

Twenty years later, these differences are still true.  Michael likes to arrive in a new place, stash his backpack (wheeled luggage, duffel bag) in a train station (bus station, airport) locker, step outside, and then wander off in whatever direction looks good to him at that particular moment.  He likes to spend the day getting to know the new place based largely on intuition and happenstance.

He meets the local folks and other travelers, gets some sense of the good places to eat and sleep, and when it starts to get dark, he heads back to gather his luggage and then finds a place to sleep based on the information he’s gathered throughout the day.

He’s not especially particular about hotel conditions or its location.  He rolls with the punches and is willing to lay his head almost anywhere when he’s tired.

I, on the other hand, am much less flexible.  I feel disoriented when I arrive in a new place and I like to go immediately to the place we’ll be staying that night, stash my luggage and take a shower.  I want the place to have hot water (at least some of the time), be reasonably clean (but not immaculate) and be located in a neighborhood where I won’t feel uncomfortable wandering down the street alone during the day.

Once these basic necessities are met, I’m perfectly content to spend the day wandering around just as Michael does.  We were able to continue traveling (and living) together because overall, our general traveling style is the same.  We’re not guidebook or tour bus people.  We’re lounge in a café, read books in our hotel room, and kick around the market people. 

Not that we don’t read and love guidebooks.  We do.  And we certainly don’t avoid famous museums, castles and ruins.  If we find ourselves near a place that we’ve read about, we go in.  Or we make a definite plan to see something we’ve read about and head towards it.  But if, on our way there, we meet someone who invites us somewhere else, we can easily abandon our initial plans and welcome the chance for a different kind of adventure.  There’s always tomorrow or the next day to see that amazing museum, castle or ruin.

What does all this have to do with our family’s trip to Mexico?  Everything.   Traveling style is hugely important, and it’s wise to have a good sense of your own before you set off together.  Or, at the very least, be prepared to make some adjustments once your trip is underway.