Day 44 ~ Six Weeks of Saturdays

Saturdays are sacred in our household. For a long time, no matter what is going on, on Saturdays, Daniel and I get out for an adventure. Sometimes it’s small and local and not really all that adventurous. Sometimes it’s pretty big like a trip out of town. We try really hard not to run a bunch of errands on Saturday or catch up on laundry or do any of those mundane things that make Saturdays like any other day, that make one year bleed into another and you realize you haven’t done much more than watch Netflix with your partner for months or even years, when they could be – Saturdays! We’d do something special, and we’d do it together. And when we’d catch each other’s eye in a really great moment on a really fun Saturday, we might turn to each other and murmur, “Happy Saturday.”

This whole trip was one Saturday after another. It was 43 Saturdays, nearly every one bigger in scope and grandeur than anything we could remember in recent memory. Day after day after day of the greatest adventures we could imagine. Any one of these days would have made the Saturdays Book of Records. And there were 43 of them. What a way to spend six weeks. 

The biggest surprise for me has been what a revelation our relationship has been on this trip. We’ve heard horror stories about couples on vacation that ended up staying in separate hotels because they couldn’t stand the sight of each other halfway through their trip. And six weeks of joined-at-the-hip togetherness is a long time. Add in that it’s a time of endless decisions, lots of stresses, messed-up plans, zero routine, and endless opportunities for friction, and it’s kind of crazy we ever thought this was a good idea.

Instead, I’ve never laughed so much in my life. When I needed my spirits lifted, Daniel was ready with some serious wisdom that also cracked me up. When I was losing my mind with stress and disappointment, which I am embarrassed to admit happened a lot, he completely reassured me it would be okay (and he was always right). And I tell you, decades of following maps in video games has paid off in spades watching this guy navigate his way through these medieval streets that are not in the grid plan; it’s a wonder to behold his skill, total superpower. This trip punctuates kind of all the things we pretty much never celebrate. Something like a honeymoon, a 10 year sober anniversary, and a 20-year anniversary all in one. We do have a lot to celebrate. I have never loved Daniel more.

During every big transition, like from one country to another, I’d ask Daniel, “What was your favorite part?” He’d laugh like I’d asked him to define his ultimate spirituality or some other impossibly large question. Then he’d think for a bit and name like 3 things he’d enjoyed. My favorite part depended on the day, was strongly subject to recency bias, and could never be narrowed to just one either. But I think what I’ll remember most are the train rides. I loved the independence and feeling of accomplishment getting from country to country without cars. But the very best thing was putting on this favorite mix, which I’m only allowed to listen to when I travel. Daniel points out that it’s a kind of programming, and yep, that’s exactly what it is. I’ve been programming myself with music for years, and can immediately induce an intended emotional state with the right choice of song. I would put in my earbuds, and the unfolding scenery became my own private music video for every song. For decades to come, when I put on my travel mix, it will conjure the memory of endless hours of blissful train rides, going from one glorious city where I’d had the time of my life to another country I’d never been to before, but where I suspected a real good time awaited. And the train ride soundtrack worked for every song, too. For the fast songs, I’d focus my eyes on the close-in trees and graffitied overpasses and nearby features that whizzed by so fast. The landscape would merge with the rhythm, the phone poles snapping by with the high hat, the close hills and trees going at the impossible speed of the hip hop rapid fire. Or the lovely reflective folk songs, where I’d focus my eyes far away and the hills would gently roll, and the music would rise and fall with the pastoral farms and distant forests. Whatever the song was doing, the train ride suited it perfectly, depending on how close or far I looked. It occurs to me that life rolls by like that too. There are times when your focus is tightly nearby and the bass is thumping and everything is energetic and exciting and moving very fast. There are times that are reflective and you see the distance and it moves by at a pace you can wrap your brain around. You can even move between them by shifting your attention from the close up day to day and the far away big picture. They are both beautiful. When you’re really getting into Zen master territory, you can take them both in simultaneously. This whole trip was like that for me. It was action packed and one of the most exciting things I’ve ever done in my life, breathtaking and dizzying. It was also a time when the landscape slowed down, when 2,000 years of civilization rolled by and patted me on the head and said, “Whether you love it, grasshopper, or whether you hate it, whether it is beautiful or terrible, all of this shall pass.” It was literally both of those things at once, although I lack the capacity of consciousness to hold them at the same time.  At least today. The best I can do is focus close when that feels right, and focus far away when that seems right. Attention is amazing like that, it can take your breath away with the speed of life or bring you moments of spaciousness and perspective. 

So now we are back. I couldn’t part without telling you a little bit about our trip home. Everything went great at first. Then our flight from Paris to London was delayed 20 minutes when we only had an hour and change to make our connection. London had way more layers of everything than we expected – more security, more passport control, more trams to distant gates – then, in a move that I will never forgive myself for, I forgot to take my laptop out of  my bag as we went through security. I ended up sixth in line for additional screening, as we watched a giant digital clock tick away minute after minute for 15 of our precious minutes. Completely morose, I glumly predicted over and over to Daniel that we would not make this flight. Ever chipper, and never punishing me for the laptop error that caused him all this misery too, he never lost his optimism, and tried to lift me up. We were caught in a murderous stampede of people trying to cram into a tram (we did make the tram, but at a cost of a good deal of our humanity). It was like a football riot, we have never seen anything like it. Brutal. To our astonishment, we arrived at the gate to hear the words, “Final boarding call for Portland,” the staff hurried us in with appropriate urgency, and we boarded the plane, two of the very last people before the doors closed. Neither of us had cut it even remotely that close ever before. But we made it!!! Also, Daniel was 100% right. Footnote: The plane also fishtailed wildly and most alarmingly upon landing (!), and they lost our luggage, but we are still glad we made it. 

And what a trip it was. We watched 43 days of careful planning play out, realized with sometimes more, or sometimes less, but usually very good fidelity to the plan, and with some very happy surprises too. I’d had a lot of fears. We didn’t lose our passports. We didn’t drop our cell phones taking pictures from the Eiffel Tower. Our credit cards didn’t get shut off. We didn’t get pickpocketed. We didn’t break a bone or have a dental emergency. We did get COVID, but with this one disruptive exception, we could hardly have asked for better. And now it’s Saturday, and we are back home.

If you like what you’ve been reading or just have a job so mind-numbing even our dumb blog is better than work, watch this space, since we might put up some essays as we try to process what this huge experience has meant for us, and what we see around us in the world. We’ll tell you, America sure seems weird to us now. Anyway, we might have more to say. Stay tuned! And thanks so much for reading with us for all this time.