Humor

Oh for the Days When I Could Just Get Up and Go Wherever I Wanted

It’s my wife’s fault that now I’m just an old stick in the mud!

Nowadays, when I’m preparing to travel the first thing I do is to make sure all my arrangements are in place before I start out. Plane tickets, hotel rooms, rental cars. It wouldn’t occur to me to set out on a trip to a far off city or another country without knowing those things are in order.

But it hasn’t always been that way. Thirty years ago, when I was single, carefree, and footloose, I handled things a little differently.

It was the summer before I started my graduate studies. A friend and I decided to tour Europe and North Africa together. So, what kinds of arrangements did we make?

We bought Eurailpass train tickets here in the U. S., which allowed us to board most trains in Europe at no additional cost. And we bought round-trip air tickets to get to London and back. That was it.

No hotel reservations — we deliberately arranged our travels so we could do most of our sleeping on trains during overnight trips. When we would be several days in one place, we’d find a youth hostel in which to put up for the night.

And of course, no car rentals, except for once in Madrid, where after getting caught doing a flagrantly illegal U-turn, I managed to get out of a traffic ticket by pretending I couldn’t speak Spanish. A backpack and good walking shoes were all we needed.

Now, things have changed. It’s not that I’m any less adventuresome, or so I tell myself. At heart I’m still the same bold and fearless travel adventurer I was three decades ago. It’s just that now I’m an old (that is, mature) married man, and footloose no more. I simply can’t imagine my wife letting me drag her from youth hostel to youth hostel with a pack on her back.

But, you know — that backpack is probably still down in the basement somewhere. I wonder what my wife would say if I pulled it out and said, “let’s go hop on a plane for some place we’ve never been”?

Yeah, I really wonder about that.