Early boarding calls …
~ this trip began long before we'll actually takeoff
Musings … my thoughts, every day since March 20, 2003 … now in my 24th year, haven’t missed a day; love the ‘likes’ - thanks to those who click the heart button, I’d love to see more comments and extensions of the conversation - so, please click the cloud-shaped balloon with your comments and/or suggestions - they make this writer better and are shared with all readers who get this publication.
First, the mind goes …
Then the body catches up
Before any planes are boarded, journeys begin … quite a while ago - plans, shopping, packing, making bookings, checking and re-checking … making sure everything is on board, doesn’t exceed weight or measurement restrictions …
Travel begins before takeoff, somewhere among confirmations, corrections, and the first unreasonable hope that reality may live up to imagination.
A destination matters. So does the person in the next seat when what’s over the horizon finally stops being theoretical.
Almost time …
To cast off from this shore - OK, by air from Montreal, and trust that another shore will appear when we land in Paris.
We leave late one day, fly overnight, and arrive before we left. Not exactly, but close enough to make time seem briefly untrustworthy.
My eyes are going a bit strange from looking, relooking, printing, checking, and checking again.
Planning a complex trip is not the opposite of travelling.
It’s the first stage of it.
Websites, reservation emails, hotel confirmations, car bookings, restaurant notes, city passes, and small administrative rituals become early boarding calls.
They pull the future closer.
Or perhaps they pull us forward …
Looking over the horizon is sensible, because surprises are not always charming. It’s also potentially risky, because anticipation can become its own weather system.
What will Cluny Abbey feel like, we’ll be standing in the twenty-first century, where the largest building in the twelfth century once stood? No, it’s still standing!
Awe will ensue … I hope. Or perhaps disappointment, if imagination has overbuilt the place before we arrive. That’s part of the bargain, isn’t it?
We travel first in our minds, then we go experience and validate reality…, but there’s much more to the experience. Everybody knows that. We want to experience that reality, to let it speak for itself.
Still, before departure, this trip has already begun in our imagination, we’re pre-enjoying an emotional, pre-visual, and pre-gastronomic feast too large to leave entirely to fiction.
And, as much as this is a first-time-across-the-pond thrill for me, it is not only the what or the where.
It is the with who, or is that the with whom?
My travel companion and I have successfully managed the short-trip dynamics. But, we’ve not done any longer trips yet, and this first one … and it’s a pretty big deal; it’s a third of the way across the world on the other side of an ocean.
So this will be a deeper exploration of each other, to be sure.
And geographical elements of time, distance/driving, sightseeing, wiggling toes in sand and stuffing decadent deserts on top of decadent meals will be the ‘decor and decoration’ for the 9-leg/3 act play.
Not 24/7.
It’s going to be 24/17… plus a few hours for timezone changes …
A journey begins when the expected trip becomes vivid enough to change the present, and deepens when someone worth knowing is beside us as it unfolds.