Posted by Elizabeth

As you are reading this, I should be relaxing at a Slovenian family farmstay, munching on fresh fruits and house-cured meats dried by the harsh Karst winds.  If everything went according to plan, we flew an extraordinarily long distance from Albuquerque to Rome, where we were unceremoniously transported from the airport to the Rome Termini train station.  From there we easily translated the mind-numbingly complicated simple train schedule and bumbled our way breezed through buying our tickets for a train to Trieste that just happened to be boarding in three hours 10 minutes.  What luck!  After a stress-free, six-hour ride, where we enjoyed subpar world-class service in the dining car, we checked into our one-star charming hotel, feeling like zombies completely refreshed.  After a fitful peaceful slumber, plagued unfettered by jet lag, we rose the next morning to stale white bread fresh croissants and checked out our beleaguered hassle-free rental car, where the desk staff gave us shit zero flack about taking the vehicle across two borders.  From there we slogged sailed through the Slovenian border crossing, following the indecipherable clear directions provided by the farmstay, which quickly deposited us in the middle of nowhere at our destination.  Total nightmare Complete Success!

Obviously, I’ve traveled enough to know what can go wrong.

It’s important for me to get out of the country at least once a year; the reasons are many.  It’s important for me to expose myself to the larger world beyond my front door.  It’s important for me to learn new things about other cultures and, in the process, myself.   It’s important for me to see how other people live and approach life.  But most important, there is nothing like travel – particularly international travel – to remind me that nothing goes according to plan.

Most of the time I live my life in a vacuum, blissfully aware-yet-unaware that any semblance of control I think I have over my life is a complete sham.  We all know intellectually that none of us can control the future, that at the end of the day nothing is within the bounds of our power.  And yet, living in the US, most of us can arrange our lives in such a way that we think we have control.  After visiting 22 countries, I have never experienced a place where it is so easy to will things into existence by sheer grit and determination.  Of course, this isn’t all bad.  It’s a wonderful thing to be able to change one’s circumstances through personal effort.  But I fear that, as a culture, we’ve lost our ability to live in accordance with reality:  whether we choose to believe it or not, life is lived in pencil.

I have a few goals for my trip, aside from having fun and eating fabulous local food (go ahead, be jealous):

1.  I will not be a backseat driver. Maikael and I have a long and checkered past when it comes to driving together on foreign thoroughfares.  It mainly involves me nagging at him or dramatically covering my eyes.  We try to avoid these situations (hello, compartmentalization!) by taking public transportation as much as possible, but due to a series of complicated circumstances which I will not bore you with, we are renting a car in Italy and taking it across two international borders for eight days of our trip.  Recipe for disaster?  Hopefully not.  Since I can’t drive a stick, Maikael is the Designated Driver, which means he has to shoulder the stress of driving and I need to keep my mouth shut and my co-pilot skills sharp.  This will keep the overall stress level down for both of us.

2.  I will not panic when things don’t go according to plan. I love travel, but I don’t tend to be a great traveler.  Sure I can fall asleep anywhere, but I tend to experience minor freak-outs when things go awry.  I am making a promise to myself to keep a cool head when the inevitable occurs, and remind myself that there is always a Plan B.

3.  I will keep my expectations in check. I tend to suffer from an acute case of letting my expectations run amok.  I try to cram too much into a day.  I predetermine how great something will be from afar.  I overinflate the importance of a meal.  The result is that I’m often disappointed, which ruins experiences.  Above all, I want to enjoy this final trip as a family of two, which will probably mean ratcheting down my expectations a few notches.

4.  I will open myself to unexpected opportunities. Because of those pesky expectations, I have a tendency to become hyperfocused on The Plan, often missing better opportunities.  Some of my fondest travel memories involve embracing the unexpected, so I promise to treat my plans as sketched (lightly) in pencil.

5.  I will not try to maintain my life at home. I will let emails remain unanswered.  I won’t compulsively update my Facebook status.  I will not think of the bills and mail piling up.  I will not think of the million things I need to do when I walk in the door after two and a half weeks in Europe.  Instead, I will trust that all of that will be waiting for me when I get home.

When I return from my trip, I hope to reconnect with what it feels like to live my life in pencil, as terrifying as it always is.  I hope to return refreshed and invigorated, with bright ideas for the new horizon of our blog.  I hope to eat a lot of great food.  But until then, I’ll be digging deep into The Files (you didn’t know there were Files, did you?), bringing you topics that I’ve been archiving for such an occasion.  Enjoy the eclectic ride!  I’ll return “live” the 28^th with, I’m sure, lots of stories from my travels through Italy, Slovenia, and Croatia, and many more lessons for living life in pencil.

Do you live under an illusion of control?  What helps to shake you back to reality?