This Is How We Did It
Note: I wrote this earlier in the week, before the bombings in the airport and train stations in Belgium. Our daughter still flew to London last night (and landed safely this morning,) with her parents’ blessing. Given that my husband and I met while getting grad degrees in international business, we will always, always hold to the notion that travel builds bridges between people, and provides life experience of immeasurable value. We will also both breathe easier when she’s home again next Saturday…
On Thursday, our eldest daughter got to claim her high school graduation gift a couple months early, in the form of a flight to London to go visit her best friend who is a year older and studies at the University of the Arts London.
It may seem like an extravagant gift, but if you compare the cost of the ticket to the therapy that would have been required after our daughter basically had a limb removed – such is the close-knit nature of their friendship – we feel like we got off easy. The ticket has worked all year as a carrot for good grades and getting her college applications done in time. Besides, she had to earn all her own spending money and she has to bring me home some fresh McVities Digestive biscuits (milk chocolate please) so it evens out.
The girls have been in a state of high excitement for months, using Snapchat, FaceTime, and an ever-morphing Google Doc to collaborate on their plans for the week, which could also be titled: How To Fit 14 Days of Sightseeing Into 9, and Still See Two Ballets. They are triangulating non-stop.
Which really throws into relief the way that my friends and I made plans to meet up in Europe in the ‘80s when we were studying abroad, pre cell phone and pre Internet. It was a miracle we ever found each other on that continent, using snail mail only, since none of us could afford to call each other on land lines even if we’d ever figured out how to dial country codes properly.
Kitty and I, for instance. She was studying in London while I was in Vienna and somehow, through a series of handwritten letters, we hatched a plan to meet in Italy and travel around together during Spring Break. I hopped on a train to Florence with some friends on my Vienna program, who dropped me off and continued on their way while I waited for Kitty to show up.
She never did. Turns out, she had gone first to Greece, and was stuck on a Greek island because all the boat operators had gone on strike, and she couldn’t get to Italy but would plan, instead, to go straight on to our next destination and I could meet her there. How did she convey this last minute change in logistics to me? She somehow reached a person I knew from college who happened to be in Florence, and when I happened to call that person, she relayed Kitty’s message to me. How did she know to call Bonnie, whom I swear she never met? How did I know to call Bonnie? How did any of us ever know anything before the Internet? We actually met up eventually, which seems the biggest miracle of they story.
(But first, I had to take the train back to Vienna alone and this happened.)
Much more believable is the story my friend Lisa tells. She was also in London that junior year semester. (Was anyone left in college in America in the spring of ’87?) She says that she and I wrote one another agreed to meet on a certain street corner in Vienna, which sounds very The Third Man to me. Lisa and her friend Carin arrived in Vienna by train and at the appointed time and day, went to the corner. Where I never showed up because apparently I don’t just not remember it now, I didn’t remember it then either.
After waiting for a long time, Carin and Lisa started the long walk back to the youth hostel. En route, they passed a group of Viennese guys, one of whom reached out and said hello in a way that, having spent a semester in Vienna, surprises me not at all: he punched Lisa in the face. Suffice it to say Lisa and Carin were out of Austria the next morning. Where was I? Who knows? Maybe in Greece, stuck in a boat strike? All I know is Lisa tells the hell out of that story, and rightfully so.
So while I’m glad my daughter and her friend have it easier connecting this time around, I hope there’s still room for the serendipitous (Ed. Note: added 3/24/16 “happy, safe”) surprises that become the travel stories they regale each other with thirty years later.
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