Failure (and More Failure)
8/29/23
Tuesday — again.
On the train — again. Finally.
I missed two today. Two trains. Two.
This morning, I woke up at 10:30 for my 1:00 train and… no. It didn’t leave at one. It was arriving back in Amsterdam at one. Nice.
I bought another ticket for a few hours later. Fine. Okay. But then! The metro was delayed. After a full sprint through Berlin’s enormous central station…
I missed that one, too.
To be fair, Mercury is in retrograde. So it’s not entirely my fault.
I’m usually a pretty responsible traveler. I like to be early and shit. But the fact is: these sorts of days happen to everyone.
Allow me now to take this opportunity to share some of my ongoing list of travel failures. For educational purposes.
Be where your feet are.
Anything visa related? Take care of it in a small city to avoid outrageous wait times. (I spent 7 hours at the Immigration Office in Chiang Mai. No air conditioning.)
Do not assume you can just hop on a bus or train the same day. Always book one day in advance.
I don’t care how spontaneous you’d like to be: sometimes booking transport tickets in advance will save you hundreds of dollars.
It takes leaving a place to see how much you’ll miss it, how comfortable you’ve gotten. But you knew this already.
Never bring anything on a trip you’d be sad to lose. Save yourself the sadness.
Follow the music.
Spend time in small cities.
Make friends with locals. (They might even let you stay at their flats.)
The rain? Sometimes it just doesn’t stop.
Karma always balances out. (Stamp your bus tickets. For the love of God.)
Choose your expectations wisely. This applies to life too.
It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been away. Home feels like yesterday.
Check if your destination requires proof of onward travel. They may not ask, but they also might. You don’t want to be buying a random ticket while the gate is boarding. (onwardticket.com — FYI.)
Don’t drink a lot before getting on a long haul bus. You’ll have to ask the driver to stop alongside the road and find yourself peeing in pitch darkness on the side of a highway in rural Colombia.
There is something to be said for picking a neighborhood and making it your base for a week. You find your spots. You stick with the same friends. Routine comes quicker. It starts to resemble “normal” life, and feels like home. It’s very nice.
There is such a thing as too much nothing.
“The only way out is through.” — Random guy at Envision who gave me a Toroflux and also the meaning of life
Leaving home is always sad. It’s the reason why that changes.
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Failure is funny. It goes without saying that it is also necessary. Otherwise, how would we learn? I feel grateful to have reached a point where completely out of breath, watching my second missed train pull away in front of my eyes, I began to laugh.
I caught a different one 15 minutes later.
The other lesson? There is always a solution. Plus, there’s the story.
There’s the story of the time I took an overnight ferry from Dublin and found myself stranded at 6 AM in the middle of nowhere Wales due to a rail strike. I hitchhiked and took local commuter buses cross country and saw some insane scenery in the meantime.
And the time I sat on a ledge in Amsterdam and fell over backwards into the canal — with my entire backpack on. I broke my computer. Genuinely hilarious.
The time I had bedbugs in Rijeka and looked diseased for a week straight.
The time I spent a full weekend in a beautiful little Tuscan town too sad to get out of bed. I marathoned seven of my favorite movies and ate cheese.
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It all goes to say: life is one big, ridiculous story. Conflict is mandatory. But the frustration and the pain passes. And you’re left all the wiser because of it.
ONWARDS,
Mag