I used to schedule my travel as tightly as possible so as to avoid being away from home one extra minute or, if I'm going to be honest, to avoid having to absorb one single piece of information or stimuli that wasn't relevant to my life. In a word, I freaking hated it and went unbelievably out of my way to make sure I saw nothing but my own inverted unclean navel.
I spent a good amount of time traversing the lower 48 without so much as looking out my hotel window. When I had to leave for the client or the airport I averted my eyes and rushed in and out and back home again to my perfect world in my perfect house or apartment with my perfect room and my perfect cat and my perfect books and my maybe not so perfect current significant other. I saw my kids too. As much as humanly possible.
There was a point in time when I flew out of Phoenix on Fridays on the 1 PM, arrived late into LaGuardia, drove 80 miles home and went to sleep. I would get up in the morning, take my suitcase to the cleaners, dump it out in one rectangular brick, remove the shoes, cosmetics, travel iron, travel coffee maker, hair brush and toiletries and pack the entire contents of last week's drop off, re-including shoes et al, back into the carry on. I figured out that dry cleaning under pants and panty hose was a serious waste of money and just started disposing of them. I'm pretty sure I went a couple years dispensing with under pants all together. It was just too much work. When I lived alone in an apartment I kept my laundry in the oven. It's amazing I never lit it on fire.
On Sundays I would leave for the airport a little after 2 and be on the 6 PM back to Phoenix. Or where ever. It sucked.
So I stopped looking. One time I woke up in the middle of the night and had no bloody idea where I was. All Marriots look like Sheratons and Hyatts and Westons and Ws and Hiltons. It's a matter of fact. I looked outside. Parking lot. Pine trees. Cars. Gentleman's Club a quarter mile down the way. Other hotels. Crap. I could be anywhere. I got out my itinerary. Charlotte, NC. Oh Good! I like Charlotte! Been there lots of times, never seen it. I went back to bed peacefully and slept unencumbered.
Here's another bizarre tidbit which is still the same to this day. If I am alone in a hotel bed I do not move. I do not roll over, I do not pull the covers, I sleep on either my right or left side depending on the layout of the room and when I get up the bed is still mostly made. I just have to straighten the edge and the pillow.
I also never turn on the television. I eat my meals in my room and read and read and read. I never called home. Home is at home and hotel is at hotel. I lived in a bubble and the bubble was me. That is all.
I lived and traveled like that quite happily right up until Malta.
Just about five years ago my boss told me I was going to the EMEA Services Conference in Malta in January. Oh goody, I thought, another opportunity to accumulate massive frequent flier points I refuse to recycle and use anyway. Apparently we were all going to Malta, en masse, the entire senior management group and a handful of trainers.
I booked my trip and forgot about it. At the last minute I put my presentation together. I suffered through Christmas and New Years. NoMan's mother died (this was before NoMans and I were anything other than very good friends and peers). Things continued to disintegrate in my department and tensions were stratospheric. NoMans and I were flying together. I don't know at which point we discovered we had the dates wrong. We were flying in the day of our presentations instead of the day before and we were therefore flying out one day later than anticipated.
I made it, lost luggage and all, to my presentation, road weary and jet lagged and said something about custom training and process documentation to a group of EMEA trainers and writers and then staggered off to bed. I made it to dinner, got drunk on two glasses of wine and then went shopping with my entire department. In the morning when I woke up and looked at what I'd purchased to replace my lost luggage I nearly peed myself and crawled under the bed. Note to self and others: Do not get drunk and go shopping for replacement business wear with your colleagues. Nothing good can come of it. I wish I had a picture. I'm glad I don't.
Due to our gross mismanagement of personal and business time, NoMans and I were left with one extra day at the end of the trip. Lots of people do this, by the way. Just not me. I get back on the freaking plane and go home. As fast as possible. But I had a day. Had it been any other day I would have spent the day barricaded in my hotel room with a book. I would not have come out except maybe for some food, and it wouldn't even have been good food. It just would have kept me from falling down. Maybe.
It was not any other day. I was with NoMans and I was deeply, terribly, passionately, and horribly in love with this man. It was awful. It was unacceptable. It was not going to happen. We decided to go to Sicily.
Who does that? Who decides to get up at 4:30 AM after staying up all night (don't ask, it was out of character) and go to Sicily for the day? Apparently he does and therefore so did I. We went with a tour group full of old people because that was easiest. Or the only way, or something. We were picked up by a shuttle at 5 AM. We were driven all over Malta picking up other passengers from every other hotel on the island. We were driven to the ferry launch where we boarded a high speed ferry (who knew?) Sicily bound.
NoMans cried on the way over. He cried about his mother and his father and his family and our jobs and everything that was awful and strange and unsettling. I put on my compassion hat. We slept. When we woke, we were in another country and it shocked the shit out of us.
We were buffered by the bus and its multi-national passengers and it's tour guide who said wing-ed instead of winged but that didn't change much. We stopped for pastries and coffee and didn't speak a word of any common language. I think we might have had some money that worked. Malta still had Lira. I think Sicily had Euros. We bought sticky buns and espresso. We ate in the damp, noisy cold that was the cafe. We got back on the bus.
We stopped in a town with many churches, all of them Catholic and most of them rather pagan looking. There were a lot of statues and tiles and glass. In the churches the confessionals were right out in the open. In villages this size everybody knows your business anyway, you might as well get it over with and apologize publicly. And then I suppose they can decide whether to stone you or let you go. Just like that, back to your seat or out to the square. I don't mean to sound flip, I think that might have been the truth at one time. Or maybe even now. We were standing on the steps of one church with many statues and he, the New Jersey Jew said, lets kiss, we're in a church. And we did. In public and everything. I liked it.
The tour guide talked a lot. Mostly I could tell what she said. We went to the top of Mt Etna. I understood the words 'we will leave without you if you are not back on time'. We got off the bus and started walking. Etna is and was active. Etna rumbled. I was scared and I picked up rocks and put them in my backpack. Maybe I meant to throw them at the rushing lava if it came at me. I don't know. We ate in the cafeteria where money was exchanged and it felt like a ski lodge. I think I had some kind of pasta with red sauce and a glass of wine. Wine was everywhere. It was ubiquitous. You just drank it because it was. I didn't feel funny or drunk or anything.
In the end we stopped at one last town. I think it was Messina. It was an old town, thousands of years old. Stop. Stop. I wrote Thousands. I did not write Hundreds. I wrote Thousands. In the streets they sold designer things (what do I know about these European labels?) and the village was built into the side of the hills, mountains, rocky crags, and you walked up these stone steps that were thousands of years old and had the foot prints of much smaller people worn into them and looked inside the uncurtained homes with the multitudes of crystal chandeliers juxtaposed against the remnants of empty apartments, abandoned living spaces, built into the stone and falling down unlived in since before electricity came to the hills.
I bought a pair of pants for my daughter that would never fit her.
We got on the bus and went back to the boat which took us back to the shuttle which took us back to the hotel and had dinner in the same hotel restaurant I got drunk in the first night. Only this time it was just he and I eating sushi that came out of the sea hours before consumption (not what we eat here today), dirty, wind blown, minds opened up by the giant can opener called culture clash married to sleep deprivation and I was hooked. I was hooked on him and I was hooked on travel for the sole purpose of travel. Because I want to see. I want to know. I want to understand at a molecular level that we are not alone.
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