Chance Encounters

One thing mostly lost in traveling during the Internet age is the chance encounter. That moment when the weather, the scene, and our mood all come together with something unexpected to create a moment of magic.

In the early days of the internet I once had a plan to meet a friend of a friend at such-and-such a time at a certain backpacker's hostel on the shores of Lake Malawi. On the appointed day I showed up at the place and inquired after a bed. 

"Oh no," the host said, "we're totally full!" 

"That can't be, I'm supposed to meet someone here tomorrow morning."

She thought for a moment, then said, helpfully, "Well, we have a spot on the beach, down by the water, you could pitch a tent down there."

"Ok. But I don't have a tent."

"That's no problem," she said. "I can rent you one, and the spot. How does two dollars sound?"

The friend-of-a-friend never did show up, but I spent two glorious days in a tent on the beach of the lake.

Magic! 

These days, we do so much preparation for travel. We use street-view photos to check out the neighborhood. We see photos of our lodging from every angle. We wouldn't dare show up in a town without a reservation for a bed. We let Google plan our route from Point A to Point B, and heaven forbid if something gets in our way to force a change of plan.

By doing this, we lose, mostly, the opportunity for those moments of magic when everything comes together and "it all works out." Every time we punch "Trevi Fountain" into Google Maps and follow the walking path exactly there, without any wrong turns, or we wait 45 minutes because Google tells us it's "as busy as it gets," we lose an opportunity to discover that bakery in the back alley that just dropped the latest tray of fresh bread, or experience the confused broken language and hand signals that go with asking for directions.

Instead, we mostly have surprises of the negative kind. The bus was late so we missed our train. The airbnb wifi didn't work. The hedge maze was closed for maintenance. It's Sunday at 5 and the restaurant we had carefully picked out in advance is closed. The ferry was overcrowded with coughers and we caught covid. (All of these happened, by the way.)

But once in a great while, if you are lucky and not looking too carefully, you can still have one of those chance encounters. On Tuesday we left Glasgow, headed for the highlands, and after hours of careful planning and debate we decided that the optimal path was to train to Edinburgh, put our bags in storage for four hours (with a storage site carefully selected in advance, of course), and then pick up a rental car at the airport. And all worked as we had planned. But in the middle, during those four hours, we walked out of the train station and ran into a juggler. And then a polka band. And then another juggler. And by the time we reached the castle, I had a fistful of flyers for a cappella groups performing that day. And there were a LOT of people. Finally I asked a guy, "Why are there so many a cappella groups?" He looked at me quizzically: "We're trying to make it!" I insisted, "But why today?" He looked at me like I was daft, "Uh, Fringe." We had stumbled onto the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, or, as he put it, "the largest performance arts festival in the world." We had no idea. So we picked the next show, walked over to the venue, bought some tickets and spent an hour watching 16 kids singing pop songs a cappella. His incredulity at our ignorance speaks to how rare it is for travelers to stumble onto something that is so well known and so well advertised.

Then, on Thursday, staying in our carefully selected airbnb apartment in a small town in the highlands, we noticed a very large number of motorcycles in town. Also, some of the businesses had newly hung Harley Davidson signs in their windows. And our favorite field in town for throwing frisbee had been fenced and turned into a tented campground. Well, it turns out that, somehow, we stumbled onto the site of "Thunder in the Glens," which is, apparently, Europe's largest motorcycle rally and is topped off with an hour-long parade of bikers on Saturday. We shall see what fun comes from this!

Long ago I clipped a column by Paul Theroux out of the International Herald-Tribune that argued that while travel was changing, there would still be opportunities out there to "get lost," by which he meant to experience the unknown, the uncertain, the unexpected. He was writing in 2000, when internet-based travel was still in its infancy, when travel often still consisted of squinting at an out-of-date guide book for hints on how to navigate a new city, but he was previewing travel as we experience it today: curated, planned, anticipated, connected. He argued that it would take more work to be surprised, but that the effort would be worth it, that those moments of unexpected magic that make travel exciting and fulfilling would be harder to find, that you might have to turn off your phone and wander, but that they still existed and were worth the effort.

To be honest, traveling with kids requires a lot of planning. We are five, so we can't fit in a regular hotel room or a compact car. We probably can't just show up in a town with no bed reservation and expect to get anything remotely workable. Our kids are picky eaters, so we can't just graze on whatever we find at the train station. But, when we can, when the chance encounter presents itself, we are still going to try to follow it, and we are going to try to put ourselves in situations where the chance encounter is more likely.