I LOVED this book! This is a keeper. The Desire Map is a perfect book for goal setting, one that I will use when I do my planning at the New Year. What I like so much about Danielle LaPorte's book is her twist on the usual visioning process. How do we want to feel when we've reached this goal? The Desire Map is divided into two sections: The Theory and The Workbook. The theory section is all about the difference between external and internal goals and how to make more empowered choices. Anyone who has trouble figuring out such questions as "what do I actually want?" or "what is my purpose?" or "do I even have any goals?" can find some clarity here. The question of desire itself is addressed. LaPorte goes so far as to write a letter to a Tibetan Buddhist lama, asking, "What is the "right" energy of desiring enlightenment?" Can we desire anything without attachment or clinging? Should we try? Basically, are we allowed to want things? It's a nuanced, thought-provoking discussion. The section on feelings and emotions is also intriguing and clarifying. What I've learned from coaching is that many people are very poor at making wishes or allowing themselves to want things. Even wishing for something like restful sleep, more energy, or better communication feels like too much. It's impossible to have a better life without feeling like such a thing is possible. It's impossible to reach a goal if you have none. If you don't know what you want, how would you recognize it when you had it? LaPorte's insight about aiming for particular emotional states rather than specific achievements is a powerful one. One person might want contentment, another might want vigor, and these will turn into different approaches toward life. The Desire Map includes lists of random answers from various workshop participants, which include a dazzling array of possibilities. At least some of them may trigger a desire for the same for ourselves. "Free spiders"? "Get just the right font spacing"? Why not? "You can make your life better. Daily. Practically." This is a slogan I can get behind. I'm working through the workbook section of The Desire Map meticulously. It feels significant. I'm enjoying the process; it makes me feel like I'm getting an extra New Year! I can't get enough out of this book right now. We spent almost none of our discretionary income in the month of September. This is a simple matter for a single person, but it's not so straightforward for a married couple. Negotiations commence about what is a necessity and what is a luxury. If we're doing this at all, why this month? If you're counting my special personal expenditure, do I get to count yours? Money is a minefield for a lot of couples. Even arching your eyebrow like you're thinking about talking about it can come across as confrontational. The only way you can gain any ground with your finances is if you can both agree to have strategic, no-fault discussions. We've decided to work toward financial independence. This is a goal that we both find exciting. Neither of us needs convincing that it's a good idea. Most people default to "I can't deprive myself," which is why most people have issues with the trifecta of debt, clutter, and body fat. It only feels like deprivation if you let it. We think of our future selves and we don't want to deprive ourselves then. Poor Future Me, tiny, frail, and too old to work. I want her to have plenty of money so she won't be afraid of what will happen to her. As for the two of us, we both want to be free to enjoy ourselves while we're young enough to do it. None of our small, ordinary splurges can really compete with our knowledge of how much we love travel. We're pretty frugal in daily life. We live in a 728-square-foot house. You know your house is small when your friends in their 20s come over and tell you it's smaller than their apartments. We don't have cable, we don't drink alcohol, and both of us hate shopping. Our money mostly goes to travel, foo-foo groceries, and spoiling our pets. Where were we going to cut back? Well, obviously we're never going to quit spoiling our pets. What's left? We had fallen into the habit of going to the movie theater every weekend, sometimes twice, and on rare occasions, even three times. Tickets are expensive there, but the real issue was popcorn. Not for the cost as much as for the calories. The main reason we cut back on restaurants several years ago was that we couldn't maintain our weight if we went out more than two meals a week. Popcorn falls into that category. Sometimes we would go out for cocoa the same night, and that was an anchor our waistlines couldn't afford. We decided that for our low-spend month, we would skip the movies, go to the gym more often, and do an online course together. The other area where we were spending more than we wanted was specifically at Starbucks. We both like doing work there, and we'd monopolize a table for two or three hours. This was the area that took a bit of negotiating back in August. We decided to look at the low-spend month as an experiment. The plan was to test out "better than Starbucks" recipes for our preferred beverages and see if we could find any we liked. We stopped at the first iteration. I got a little battery-powered frother for my birthday, and it's been fun making our own foam. The other thing we did was to make fancy breakfasts on the weekends, which we like about 3x more than the oatmeal we were getting at SB. Upshot: we saved money having a nicer breakfast at home, not looking for parking, not waiting for a table, not wiping up someone else's spills, and not accidentally touching the used gum someone else stuck under the table. I prefer the image of myself as a Starbucks investor rather than a Starbucks customer, although if everyone thought that way, my stock wouldn't be worth that much. I was a little nervous in August, thinking that 30 days seemed like an eternity. I was worried that our pent-up desire to spend on something like a new parrot toy or an enticing new release movie would drive us crazy within two weeks. The truth is that there was no drama whatsoever. We just did our class, made our breakfasts, listened to a bunch of financial independence podcasts, and cleaned out the garage. My husband lost five pounds. At our age, a month really isn't a very long time. Pitfalls abound. Most people remain confused and spacey about their finances. Some flip out the minute there's any talk of budgeting (which we did not do; budgets aren't really necessary) and feel like they're suffocating, so they run out and want to spend more right away. Anyone who watches TV commercials or flips through checkstand magazines is constantly exposed to advertisements that make us want a lifestyle an order of magnitude more expensive than what we can afford. Pinterest is another time suck that exposes us to aspirational lifestyles. The easiest way to do it is to focus on gratitude for what you have right now. None of the best stuff costs money at all. What's fun to do that doesn't cost money? Napping. Going to bed early. Snuggling your pets. Learning new things. Building muscle. Reading. Sitting around talking. Planning for the future. Experimenting on recipes. Walking around the neighborhood. Feeling like you're in a better place this month than you were last month. People are always looking for something new to read. Millions of people have published a book, or several, and lived to tell the tale. It creates jobs for publishers, editors, graphic designers, marketers, bookstore clerks, printers, warehouse stockers, truck drivers, and on and on. Who are you to deprive the world of your work? The worst case scenario is that nobody will read it, and that's HAPPENING NOW. Another negative scenario is that someone will criticize it, but you can be criticized anywhere on the Internet or walking down the street for no reason. If it happens, at least it happened because you did something. Is your unfinished manuscript really what you want to be thinking about on your deathbed? Aren't you curious what happens in the last chapter? You can always write it and then choose not to publish it. You can always write another draft. You can always publish it under a pen name. The writing process makes you smarter and improves your writing skills. Publishing a book is an opportunity to meet new people, people who like books. Publishing a book is also a great excuse to lock yourself up like a hermit. Compare it to training for a marathon. If you want an impressive achievement under your belt, which one is easier? Writing is a much more interesting default behavior than most of the alternatives, such as watching TV or wandering around a shopping mall. Get it out of the way so you can move forward. Maybe you choose never to write another book, or maybe you love it and you start another one right away. At least you're not stuck in the doorway wondering anymore. You wouldn't even be thinking about writing a book if you didn't have a story somewhere inside you. Your story deserves to be told. Your words want to be free. You are not entitled to be the judge and jury of whether your story should be available to people. It belongs to the world. How dare you lock it away and leave your audience with nothing better to do than to watch reality television? You are killing literature! You selfish non-writer, you. Where is it? Give it to me! Start typing because we're out here waiting to find out what you have to say. This is not just a World Domination Summit question, although we'll get to that. A question that came up during our academy today has really gotten to me, and I'm sure I'll be processing it for a while. There was a thinking exercise during the Be a Money Boss academy: "Imagine that your doctor shocks you with the news that you only have 24 hours to live. Notice what feelings arise as you confront your very real mortality. Ask yourself: What did you miss? Who did you not get to be? What did you not get to do?" This about knocked me down. What did I miss? I missed having any kind of real career. I never got to make any kind of mark on the world. I have nothing to show for my time on this earth. I mean, I have strong relationships with my husband, family, and a few close friends, but I have no legacy. There are no projects that will outlast me. I felt like a tidal wave of potential rose up inside me, and that it would die with me, and that I never worked hard enough to let any of it out. I was surprised, and also very pleased, when my husband said that he hadn't really missed anything. The difference between us is probably that he's a father and that he's always been fulfilled by his chosen career. It was interesting that the same question affected each of us in profoundly different ways. For him, it was a validation, a good place to be for a man of 48. For me, it was a devastating blow, feeling like I had been lazy and sloppy with the time I have been given. The real question is whether I'll have anything close to enough time to get out all of the projects that are currently locked away inside of me. Back to the event itself. WDS is a choose-your-own-adventure kind of a deal. It's only possible to attend everything if you can bilocate, which is not currently on my list of skills. We went on a hike from 9 to noon, rode the funicular from OHSU, stopped for a food cart lunch, went downtown for our academy from 1:30 to 4:30, officially registered for the event, and then spent an hour at HugFest. After that, everyone went to the unofficial opening party, but we cut out early because they didn't have any vegan food. There is a superabundance of plant-based cuisine in Portland, though, so we were fine. The first thing about WDS is that you can immediately turn to anyone standing near you, strike up a conversation, and within a couple of minutes someone will say, THAT'S AWESOME. This is like the rallying cry of positivity. It also turns out that everyone has something in common with everyone else. I think I talked to five marathon runners today. We also met a guy who had an abiding interest in Viking culture, and we were like, "Oh, you have no idea who you're dealing with." This event would be great even if it were nothing more than a series of video lectures, but the attendees are the real attraction. I've felt like I could stay up talking all night with every person I've met. Our academy was presented by Mr. Money Mustache (his birth name, clearly) and J.D. Roth of Get Rich Slowly, two financially independent bloggers with thriving communities. They had a funny mock-tension regarding their differing philosophies, which mostly boiled down to whether you should try to save half your income, or 64% of your income. They were hilarious, extremely engaging, and very generous about answering audience questions. We came out effervescent with ideas and plans about our own savings, and happily, we both agreed. The questions are a big part of why attending a live event can be so powerful. The audience questions reflected a range of mindsets and positions on the ladder of personal finance. Some people were clearly farther on the path to financial freedom than others. A few of the questions reflected a deeply held scarcity mindset, and this is the best place to start. Start by learning and asking questions from people who demonstrate more about abundance. Feeling poor and helpless can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. It blocks creative ideas that might help solve the problem(s) at hand. One of the questions had to do with having zero idea of how to track spending, or what percentage of income went where. Bless that questioner, because beginners can so often feel ashamed to ask the question that is doubtless burning in the minds of many others. Another question had to do with whether someone making a six-figure salary (I am not making this up) could really afford to save money if they have children. Skeptical, I hear where you're coming from, and there's only one way to find out, which is to make a good-faith effort and try it for yourself. Another had to do with how to save enough money in case one partner had a catastrophic illness. Apparently that couple had spent a lot of time thinking and talking about that problem. My question would be, well, what if you both live long, uneventful lives and you stay strong and healthy? Did you spend much time thinking of that at all? (I hope so). HugFest has been my favorite part of the event so far. I wore the custom FREE HUGS t-shirt my husband got me for my birthday last year. Everyone kept asking me if I organized the event. (No, but I wish I had!). This was a beautiful thing. You would basically make eye contact with someone and just hug. Good, long hugs, too. There is really something about women (about 2/3 female attendance) meeting, looking at one another, and hugging. I think we have this culturally ingrained tendency to size one another up and worry, Does she like me? And then to think, Hmm, probably not. Instead we can think, You're beautiful and you have a friendly smile. Let's hug. Mmm, your hair smells nice! I also love hugging men and feeling safe and platonic. Men have more to overcome in our culture in terms of initiating no-strings physical affection with one another. It's fun to watch them let their guards down. Something happened. As soon as I start giving details, I'm sure you're going to know exactly where this is going. I set my bag down at the edge of the gathering, which was in a public park. It's my favorite airplane bag. I had put my phone in it, even though I usually have it in my pants pocket. It had my iPad and my Apple Pencil in it, as well as my brand-new event t-shirt. It had my wallet with my ID and all my debit and credit cards. It had my house keys. It had my bus pass. I mean, my life was in that bag. Here's the punchline. Exactly what you would expect happened when I left my bag unattended for an hour in the middle of downtown. It was still there, and nobody laid a finger on it. I picked it up and we left. The whole point of something like a Free Hugs event is to build social trust. It's like trick-or-treating at Halloween, only much more so. A Dutch woman asked me why I gave free hugs, and I said, Well, first of all, I like hugging. Second, I feel that it's really important for us to be more trusting and to demonstrate that we are generally surrounded by nice people at all times. So much fear and paranoia. I opened my heart to a group of complete strangers. Nobody assaulted me and nobody stole from me. Did it make the nightly news? I somehow doubt it, but that doesn't mean it isn't true. The party was held in a really cool event space. It has ping-pong and dartboards and shuffle boards and bowling and karaoke and who knows what else. The place was packed. People who obviously recognized each other kept crying out and running up and hugging each other. Probably half the people we talked to today had been to the event several years running, and some people said the main reason they keep coming back is to catch up with their WDS friends. I can definitely, definitely feel where that's coming from. We are absolutely LIT UP with enthusiasm right now. Personally, I feel like this trip would have been worth it even if it was only one day. WE STILL HAVE FOUR DAYS LEFT! At the time this posts, my husband and I will be at our first World Domination Summit meet-up. This is our first year attending the event, which is now in its sixth year. I heard about it in time to go last year, but it was already sold out and all I could do was put our names on the waiting list. EXCITED! Naturally, we've flown up on tickets we covered with reward points. The whole trip is costing us $22.40 in airfare, and that's only because we have to pay the tax. The good news is, we get to combine this trip with a family visit. The bad news is, our schedule is so packed we'll barely have time to see everyone. I should see if I can convince everyone to register next year, so we can attend a few academies together. We're going to two meet-ups and an academy today. I'll write them up afterward. Over the next few days, I'll share my experience for anyone who is curious what it's like. Out of ten days, I spent eight traveling and backpacking. Apparently this is a thing I do now. I just got back on Sunday. It is still really weird to me that I have gone from needing help to get out of bed in the morning, to hiking into mountain goat zone with a backpack. Both felt natural at the time. When did I turn into this bushwhacking, rock-clambering person? On the first trip, I was the eldest of six in our group. This is both strange and not-strange. Almost every single one of the dozens of people we saw on the trail was under 30. Usually, though, backpackers tend to skew a bit older. On weekdays you get retirees. Most endurance sports include more older than younger people due to the cash flow issues. Mature people can afford the equipment, the gas, and the permit fees. We also tend to be better organized, mostly because we have more control over our schedules. Getting a group of half a dozen people to arrive at the same place at the same time can be pretty complicated, especially if most or all of them work unpredictable shifts. We were fortunate enough to win the permit lottery and hike into the Enchantments, the same route that we did back in September. This proved to be an interesting experiment. We were able to add mileage and camp at a higher elevation, and then do a day hike yet further up the mountain. 5500 feet! It made me want to repeat the Portland Marathon (knowing I would be virtually guaranteed to run a PR). All told, we hiked fourteen miles round-trip, and ten of that while wearing packs. I’m not sure exactly how much my pack weighed, because I crammed more stuff into it after the “official” weigh-in, not wanting my husband to know just how much I was planning to carry. It was at least 40 pounds though. Why would a 122-pound, small-framed person such as myself want to carry a 40-pound backpack 5000 feet up a mountain? This is the crossroads of minimalism and endurance training. On the one hand, I want to carry as little as possible just to prove to myself that I can do it. On the other hand, I want to carry as much as possible just to prove to myself that I can do it. Here lies a real conundrum. The truth is that I don’t really feel the weight, and I feel like I will wind up carrying more than that if/when I graduate to longer trips. I’d really like to hike the Triple Crown one day, and it seems like being able to carry seven days’ worth of supplies would make that more likely. Minimalism can often involve quite a lot of stuff. For a backpacker, I’m on the middling-to-absurd end. For a suburbanite, I’m on the extreme end. What have I got in there? I don’t tolerate cold at all well, so most of the heavy gear consists of bedding and clothing. There’s the sleeping bag, air mattress, space blanket, and inflatable pillow. There are the three jackets, the base layer, the hat and gloves and buff and package of hand warmers. I put them on at night and I still sit there shivering; I go to bed at 9 PM more because I’m cold than because I’m tired. There’s the water and the first aid kit, because really. There’s the inflatable solar lantern and the folding chair for luxury. Then there’s the cookpot, the stove, the fuel, and the food. Here is where I can cut weight easily: I tend to bring boil-in-a-bag meals rather than dehydrated food. I’m perfectly capable of dehydrating my own backpacking meals, and I have done so, but it’s so much more work that it seems worth it to just haul a heavy pack. If I cut five pounds of food or gear, I’d almost certainly add back five pounds of gear I don’t usually carry, such as a machete or another base layer. If only I had a 3D printer that could make things out of squashed mosquitos. The second trip was less physically taxing, but I’ll include it for comedic purposes. A raccoon tore my tent. I got some mosquito bites, and I finally had my beloved Therapik with me, but as soon as I pushed the button I found that the 9V battery had died. The batteries in my head lamp had also gone flat. I packed for cold weather again, only to find that it was over 80 degrees every day, and I hadn’t brought any shorts, swimsuit, or sunblock. I still have never used the sunhat I bought at Goodwill years ago for this purpose, and I have the sunburned ears to prove it. I didn’t bring quarters for the shower. We went to this park specifically in hope of seeing a condor, hiked five miles to the preferred viewing area, and saw nary a one. Just as I was taking down the tent on the way home, a fire ant crawled up my pants and bit my knee. Like it couldn’t wait ten more minutes for me to leave. It turns out that the outdoor life has toughened me up considerably. I can now state that stinging nettle and fire ant bites rate about the same, as the pain is worse from the fire ant but it only lasts about half as long. I’m (almost) grateful that these things happened, because I was able to endure without setting off a migraine or a fibromyalgia flare-up. I used to be a frail little flower indeed. Now, I’m tougher than just about anyone. Maybe one day I’ll feel that I’ve proved my point and I can convince myself to pack a lighter bag. I’ve been to four continents now. I can swagger around and say, “Yup, I’ve been to Africa.” It’s true, I really have. But we did it the entry-level way. We didn’t have to apply for visas, we didn’t have to get any extra vaccinations, we didn’t have to learn any new languages, and we didn’t go anywhere unescorted. We were able to get our feet wet with virtually no risk. We simply signed up for a cultural day trip and the tour company took care of all the complicated parts. It was enough for us to understand that committing to extended travel in North Africa on our own would be a more serious undertaking. The wing-it method had the paradoxical effect of motivating me to do much more advance prep. We woke up early and checked out of the Algeciras Marriott. That hotel was an insane bargain. As far as we could tell, we might well have been the only guests! We took a cab to the Port to meet the shuttle that would take us to the ferry that would carry us over the 88 miles of sea to Morocco. It was rainy and still dark. There was an important errand we needed to fit in between the arrival of the shuttle bus and the departure of the ferry. We had inquired about a place where we could lock up our massive backpacks for the day, and the only enterprise that would do it was a travel agency about a quarter mile up the road from the ferry terminal. It was a very brisk walk uphill, and a faster jog back. We barely made it. We were herded into line and given identifying stickers, much as I would do if I were supervising a kindergarten field trip. The ferry was a fascinating experience on its own. Even the icon on the women’s restroom was dressed modestly. There were plenty of women in Western dress, and I didn’t get any funny looks, but I definitely looked foreign in this context. Especially considering that I had to get out my sewing kit and try to stitch down the strap on our little day pack before it ripped loose. One of the many things travel will do is to teach you the precise meaning of the phrase You Get What You Pay For. We’re turning into gear snobs. We disembarked and walked down the gangplank, on high alert that we were about to set foot on a new continent for the first time. “Ready? One, two, three:” and we both jumped down together, then jumped up and did a double high-five, to the amusement of a German man in our group. Our guide appeared and we did a double take. Is it just me, or does he look oddly familiar? He asked us each to say what language we spoke. We were Spanish, English, and German. He then ran the tour in each language, one after the other, telling the same mother-in-law jokes for each group. It was funny to hear each group laughing at the appropriate spot. Perhaps that’s the only type of humor that translates into every culture? It was a very rainy day, but our cheerfully chattering guide kept us smiling as he laughed at his own jokes. It turned out that he spoke NINE languages. The van took us past the palaces (rather: compounds) of various kings and princes from across North Africa and the Middle East. Clearly these were places of great wealth, but you’d never know it from outside. Each of them was less architecturally distinctive than the last, really just concrete blocks less Brutalist than Costco-esque. All we could do was to imagine how many lush carpets and chandeliers might be inside. Part of the tour included areas of Tangier that had been settled by various colonizing nations. There were mosques, churches, and synagogues. We passed a café that had a mixed-gender section and a men-only section across the street. We saw veiled women on the backs of mopeds. Our guide told us that a veil on a woman did not necessarily indicate religion; many women wore them out of convenience, to keep their hair from blowing around. Can I say this? I’m a little envious and fascinated by the hijab. My hair has been the great annoyance of my life. I could easily see myself wearing a head scarf of some kind, complete with a bodycon dress just to confuse people. Strange how a piece of fabric can be so saturated with cultural resonance, perhaps more so than a national flag, such as that of, I dunno, let’s say: Fiji. We stopped at a lighthouse that marked the division between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. There was a camel opportunity. You could go up and take your picture with the camels, touch them if you dared, and pay a tip to ride one down the parking lot and back. The one on the right seemed receptive to light stroking; she lifted her chin and closed her eyes. The one on the left jerked his head away and vocalized his dissent. I’ll do an impression for you if you ask nicely. There was a pretty cool cave that was supposedly where Hercules rested after he completed his labors. The interior had been visibly carved out by human hands. People had been coming here to cut their millstones for who knows how many centuries. You could see these biscuit-shaped gouges of consistent size up the walls and ceiling. How big was the cave when they started? Was it even a cave, or did we turn it into one? We passed a beach with a large mixed group of adults in street clothes, playing soccer in the sand. It looked like maybe a family party, with some older aunties joining in. We had spent most of the tour sitting in the van, which was great because it rained pretty hard all morning. The medina was our chance to get out and really walk around. What a maze. Most of the spaces between buildings were so narrow that you could stretch out your arms and touch both sides. There were signs, but we couldn’t read them; English is not an official language in Morocco, so if you can’t read Arabic or French, good luck. Almost everything for sale was food, mostly fresh produce. Someone was selling baggies of cooked chickpeas. Tangier would be an extremely inexpensive place to pick up groceries, even in this tourist-inflected area. The tour included lunch. When we came in, we were greeted by a live band, and by that I mean that the musicians said hello to each of us while they played. I wasn’t sure what to expect, so I had brought snacks. The menu is really only for drinks; everyone gets served the same courses. First there was a fragrant soup that clearly had egg in it. Then, for the first time since 1994, I had a plate of meat plopped in front of me. I blinked at it in the same way I would if someone had presented me with a bowling ball. Huh? Me? My husband has enjoyed some large lunches on this trip, most particularly when we take trains. “Have some more bread,” offered the kindly Brits at our table. Then something funny happened. Funny from my perspective, anyway, because I am usually guest non grata at home. The waiter leaned over me and said in concern, “You did not eat!” “Vegetarian,” my husband said, and the waiter hurried off. He brought me a double helping of the next dish, couscous with stewed vegetables. I was touched. It really seemed that he cared and wanted me to have a good meal. We finished with the famous Moroccan mint tea, which is even better than its reputation, and there was baklava for those who partook. After lunch, we were set loose in the souk. Part of the experience is that various merchants rush the group, doing their best to sell trinkets and leather goods. I bought a hamsa charm, and the same vendor kept following us around trying to sell us more iterations of the same one. Anyone who works in sales or marketing would probably get a kick out of this place. You haven’t seen motivation until you’ve seen someone trying to take advantage of a 20-minute window of opportunity to make some deals. My husband took me into a jewelry shop, partly to escape the barrage for a while, and helped me pick out a pair of earrings. These were the only souvenirs we bought. It’s a question of backpack space, and it’s also a question of space in our house. We’re probably the worst-case scenario tourists for this reason; if we can’t eat it, we’re probably not buying it. Earrings are portable. The significance of this particular pair will be made clear [FORESHADOWING] in tomorrow’s post. I had a moment, a personal moment with a Moroccan man. He bumped into me and our eyes met. “Sorry,” he said. I had no idea whether he was Berber, Muslim, Christian, Jewish, atheist, or “other.” I could hear that he was not a native English speaker, that’s all. He could do what I couldn’t, which was to apologize that we had jostled each other. In that brief exchange, I felt an electric connection. I felt it. I felt that when our eyes met, he made the effort to communicate, not just a routine politeness formula, but genuine concern. Spaniards are exceptionally nice people, but my impression of Moroccans goes just that little bit further. Their hearts are open in a way that is rare in my part of the world. We all got back on the van and went back to the ferry terminal. Success. We had gone to Morocco, we had learned a couple of words of Arabic, we had seen some sights and eaten some food, and we hadn’t even gotten deported. We helped a tiny granny lady lift a suitcase as big as she was onto the conveyor belt at security, which was hilarious because it was unattended by personnel. Note: the guidebook claimed that everyone who goes to Morocco has to… putting this delicately… adjust… in a GI kind of way. We had no such problems. Just saying. But I accidentally drank tap water in Cancun and I was fine then, too. Robust gut flora FTW. We got back to Tarifa, double checked the time on the shuttle, and ran up the hill to get our packs. I had my first and only success at making a Spaniard laugh. As we tried to get our burgeoning bags out the door, I said, “Elefantes,” and the clerk tittered. We ran back down the hill, this time with our packs on. Also a moment of FORESHADOWING. We made the shuttle. What were we going to do tonight? We had no firm plans, though we figured we could check in at the Marriott again and eat at the same falafel place. As we looked at the bus schedule, we suddenly realized that we might be able to make it to La Línea that night! Nah. Could we? We could! We caught a cab at the Port and got to the bus station just in time. UNBELIEVABLE LUCK. The wing-it method had given us a scoop of serendipity.
La Línea had us in the place of uncertainty again. We leaned against a fence, trying to get wi-fi and figure out where we could eat. This was when I found out we had used all the data on our passport, and I couldn’t reload for some reason (debit card expiration, as I learned two weeks later). We needed stove fuel (thanks, Madrid train station) and we needed to figure out how to get to the camping. I was spacy from my light lunch and starting to bonk. The ten minutes after we left the bus station were ten very aggravating minutes. Then it turned out that we were mere yards from a fantastic Chinese restaurant that had vegan food! I ate an appetizer, two entrees, a bowl of rice, and lychees. We caught a cab to the camping, the famous Rock of Gibraltar visible to our right. It was the nicest camping we’d ever seen, immaculate and orderly in every way. We pitched camp and watched the sun set over the Mediterranean, taking the opportunity to dip our hands in and taste the salty sea. Four beds in four nights. Well, technically it’s going to be two beds in 3+ locations in four nights, since one of them is a continually moving seat in an airplane and another is a sleeping bag. None of them are in the same country. I woke up in my own bed, spent a weirdly short night in a tin can next to the doppelgänger of Simon Cowell, physically closer than I would be to my own husband the next night in twin German hotel beds, and now I’m going to be an inch off the sandy Spanish soil on an airbed. Somewhere. But where? We’ve spent the entire day on the move. We woke up early. I snapped awake at 2:30 AM Hamburg time, despite the fact that I had slept so little the past two days. There was nothing for it but to decamp to the bathroom, where I could turn on a light and get some work done for a couple of hours. My husband had had a few days to adjust to jet lag, and he slept soundly all night. I managed to drift off again in the lovely soft bed, just enough to be terribly groggy when the alarm went off. Now I’m trying to keep alert. Every single thing we do for the next several hours is important. Any object we leave behind will cause either logistical problems, financial outlay, or security concerns. Any wrong turn we take could lead to missing a transportation connection, plus the fact that we don’t speak the language and we wouldn’t know where we were. We have a lot of ground to cover. We eat protein bars for breakfast, check out of the hotel, and cram our huge packs into a cab to the airport. My husband’s business suitcase and laptop bag are artfully packed together and shipped home. He won’t be needing any suits or ties where we’re going. Airport business takes focus. It’s in short supply for me right now. My boots set off the scanner and I go through secondary search. I have no idea what to expect. The uniforms and the stern language are giving me fantods. All that happens is that I sit down, take off my boots, they go through the scanner, and a distracted guard hands them back to me and wanders off. We keep having to hand over passports and tickets and answer very basic questions, like where we’re from. This takes much more concentration on my part than it should. I say “Huh?” a lot. Being on a plane where every announcement and sign is in another language makes this whole enterprise feel both real and unreal at the same time. I think I’m going to get away with “Wasser, bitte” but the questions keep coming and I have to revert to Anglisch. German women have the most devastatingly translucent complexions. It’s like a dream in which beautiful people fade in and out of your awareness, asking incomprehensible questions, and suddenly you’re in a totally different country with totally different weather. We’re in Barcelona! Now what? Check it out. We’re standing in an airport with 75 pounds of backpack between us. We have: No place to stay No friends, family, acquaintances, colleagues, or social networking referrals No transportation No dinner Weaker language skills than a parrot who sits near a TV that plays telenovelas all day This is what middle-aged suburbanites do for fun. Pull the carpet of comfort out from under yourself and test your powers of resilience. Start by squabbling over who has to walk up to the Tourist Information booth, and resort to the internet instead. It really only takes about ten minutes of focused effort to figure out what to do next. This is because we’ve done a certain amount of advance research and we believe we can travel through Spain the same way we did through Iceland four years ago. We’re going to a camping. We find one on the map but we can’t immediately figure out how to get there by bus. We look for campings on a map app, but one campsite symbol turns out to refer to an outdoor store in a huge mall. Good thing we didn’t head straight there! We search to see if there are other campings, read reviews for the three in the vicinity, and see that the blog we’ve found includes bus directions. Hallelujah! We have to get downtown to catch that bus, even though it’s the opposite direction and we’re only three miles from the camping right now. There’s a bus directly outside that only goes to the city center. We board it, figuring that we can solve our next most immediate problems before setting up camp. Those are groceries, a propane canister for our backpacking stove, and a replacement bottle of melatonin, since everything I brought was saturated by my leaking deodorant bottle. We’ve spent ten minutes in the place of uncertainty and emerged with a plan. This is one of the sacred mysteries of the nomad. It’s what makes experienced travelers so charismatic. We build an emotional tolerance to having absolutely no idea what to do next. Just a few minutes ago, we were exhausted, stressed out, and annoying each other. Now we’re still exhausted, but we have a sense of purpose, and we’re outside the airport drinking in our surroundings. Hello, lovely nice Spaniards! Hello, bold Spanish architecture! Hello, sign in Catalan that I can’t read! Riding a bus through a famously beautiful city never loses its novelty. Every single thing we see is fascinating. There are familiar elements: young people interacting with their cracked phone screens, people riding bikes and pushing strollers and walking dogs. This is what sharpens the eye. So much is familiar but so many small details are unfamiliar and surprising. For instance, we notice right away that one of the most common breeds of dog in Spain either is, or is closely related to, a rat terrier like our own Spike. Almost nobody uses a leash. Also, there seems to be a trend of wearing shirts with motivational sayings in English. The first thing we do when we reach the Plaça de Catalunya is to find a Starbucks. You either love them or hate them. We love that they have soy milk, wi-fi, and reliably clean bathrooms. Soy milk turns out to be pervasive throughout Spain, available in even the tiniest convenience store in the smallest town. Wi-fi is easy enough to find, although you have to ask for a password with your purchase, and the restrooms have a combination lock. We sit at a table, drink tea, and start mapping destinations. It turns out that we’re only a short walk from a grocery store and an outdoor store, where we can get everything we need. We pass a pharmacy on the way. The melatonin is a huge relief to me, because 20 years ago, apparently its sale was restricted in at least parts of Europe. I had read some rumors that were stressing me out. It’s about 4x as expensive as the stuff I buy at Costco, but I’m not going without it. We have to leave our packs at the front of the grocery store, where there are lockers and chains for packs like ours. We have no idea what to expect of the grocery situation; there were two occasions in Iceland when I bought the only can of beans in an entire store. We wander around for a while, looking at what’s on the shelves, confused by the lack of proper food, until we realize the produce and canned goods are on a basement level. We’re eating breakfasts and dinners in camp and looking for lunches near our activities in town during the day. We get breakfast cereal, cooking oil, curry powder, lentils, an onion, and the absolutely biggest chard we’ve ever seen. Then we get our packs back on and walk another quarter mile or so to the outdoor store. I spot a Fodor’s map on the sidewalk, marked with a partial boot print; it’s getting hit with a few light raindrops, and I don’t see anyone looking for it, so I snag it. We dub it “la mapa de basura.” This is a moment of complacency. We’ve found everything we needed, immediately, centrally located, with convenient hours. Wow, this is so easy! Spain is made for backpackers! Let’s just take our loot and bus on out to our camping like champions! We will be reevaluating all of this a week down the road. It starts to rain really hard. We’re chugging along the cobblestones, not really used to the weight of our hefty packs yet, and we’re carrying shopping bags. Fortunately, it’s at that moment that I realize we forgot to buy a lighter or matches for the camp stove. We really want to catch the next bus, because they don’t run all that often, and just in time I spot a newsstand and figure they’ll have lighters. This is another fortuitous moment that comes much too easily. Serendipity brightens a lot of moments for every traveler, but again, it can lull one into a false sense of security and dull the blade of cognition. We’re on the bus again. It’s heading toward evening. We’ve spent the entire day on logistical concerns, and we’re not done yet, but we have a sense of optimism. We’ve succeeded! We’ve made it from plush order in Hamburg to reckless disorder on the streets of La Rambla. We have everything we need from now until our first official sightseeing venture. The “wing-it method” is working out perfectly. We get off the bus at the proper stop, which unfortunately is about a ten-minute walk in the mud along a busy highway, but it’s stopped raining. This is important. We’ve counted on the fact that it may well rain on us every single day for the next two weeks, and we’re determined to have fun either way. We sign in at the camping, get the wi-fi password, and wander around, since we’re allowed to choose from any open spot. We find a grassy spot with electrical outlets, and we locate the restrooms. It takes about 20 minutes to pitch the tent, blow up our air mattresses and pillows, lay out our sleeping bags, assemble our folding chairs, and pull out the cooking gear. I wash the chard in the kitchen sink area, then tear half of it up by hand because it’s too outsized for our tiny backpacking cutting board. We eat our nice curry, feeling very pleased with ourselves, and check into the Hotel Denham, where I finally sleep a full night. When I wake up, we’ll be on Barcelona Time. When we left for Spain, we had two things: an arrival ticket for Barcelona, and a departure ticket from Sevilla two weeks later. We had no hotel reservations, no rental car, no pending Couchsurfing requests, no train tickets. No schedule. No plans. No friends, family, or acquaintances. We didn’t even have language fluency. What we brought was a guidebook and a tent. This is what we call “the wing-it method.” It comes with its own gesture: flapping elbows. Four years ago, we went off on our three-week trip around Iceland. I spent months planning every last conceivable detail. I had a two-page spreadsheet listing bus departure times for each city and what sights we would see there. I emailed backup copies of it and carried a printout with my passport. This was “the spreadsheet method.” For the most part, it worked fairly well, considering that I had been a skinflint and bought a four-year-old guidebook in order to save $12. The main problems we ran into were finding plant-based food, museums and tours that were closed the day we were in town, and random seabird attacks. The spreadsheet method is effective, but highly labor-intensive, and it can induce a false sense of security. Certainty is the enemy because it’s so often misplaced. I had vague plans to put together a spreadsheet for the Spain trip. The problem was twofold. First, I decided to “upgrade” by coming up with some gorgeous design template that would look good on Pinterest. Then I could offer the template to my readers! Great idea, but perhaps not immediately before a long and complicated trip? Also, I have no design expertise whatsoever. Second, I was trying to preload three weeks’ worth of material on the blog while still being available to my clients and working on my novel. I was working through a stack of guidebooks and saving things to TripAdvisor, but the official fancy-dancy itinerary never got made. My husband was okay with this; we would be in Spain no matter how much or how little advance planning we did. The point was to see the country, meet people, learn about their culture, try the food, and see some birds (hopefully without being attacked by them this time). The wing-it method [are you flapping your elbows?] has little middle ground. At its best, it allows for fabulous moments of serendipity. At its worst, it can be a real killjoy. Not every problem can be solved with money. If you don’t have money or feasible plans, a wing-it fail can get you into trouble. Each of the following factors is a force multiplier. Any of them can spoil an otherwise nice day. Each additional factor can make it feel exponentially worse. An ATM eating your card. Being stranded. Being hungry when all the surrounding stores and restaurants are closed for at least three hours. Having even a minor injury, or mosquito bites. Carrying 35 or more pounds of luggage. Being jet-lagged and sleep deprived. Having a headache. Getting a stern lecture in a language you can barely understand. Finding out that your journal got wet in the rain because your daypack isn’t waterproof. What worked on this trip? We made every single one of our transportation connections. We were charged fairly on all our transactions. We slept pretty well. We only got caught in the rain on three different days, when we were prepared for more. The recommendations we picked up from TripAdvisor and the guidebooks were reliably accurate. We had fun and took a couple thousand photos. What didn’t work? We had to make three separate stops and spend $50 on the first day because I forgot a charger cable, and my entire bottle of deodorant leaked into my entire container of melatonin pills. We used up our data allowance on the phone plan only halfway through the trip, couldn’t upgrade, and then figured out only after we got home that the expiration date on the payment card needed to be updated. An ATM ate our debit card and the error message was in Catalan. I was cold almost every day. Twenty mosquitos got into our tent one night. Both my pens ran dry at inopportune times. Part of my toenail came off. I spent four hours of the trip trying to read bus schedules in Spanish and figure out amended itineraries. We lost an hour at one of the sites we liked best because the location dot on TripAdvisor was 10 kilometers off. We almost wound up going to Gibraltar on a Sunday, when everything would have been closed. We had a few not-fun “NOW what do we do?” moments. We learned. We learned that what’s true in one country or city may not be true elsewhere. We learned to cross-check site locations through independent sources. We learned to take screen shots. We learned that for us, the most important research to do in advance is how to find a grocery store and how to get to the camping. We learned that guidebooks don’t always include the types of sites that interest us the most. We did a status meeting on the flight home and wrote a two-page “lessons learned” report in preparation for our next trip. We learned to rely on each other more and to be more open about our moods and qualitative experience. We’ve been lucky in our travels. We’ve never been involved in a riot or a transit strike. We’ve never been mugged. We’ve never had food poisoning. We’ve never left behind anything important. I haven’t even been street-harassed, something that happens to me at home on a near-daily basis even though I’m 40. Generally speaking, we feel safer on the road than we do at home. That’s why we go. Other parts of the world are much cleaner, nicer, and more civilized (whatever that means, exactly) than where we live. The wing-it method involves trust, and a lot of it. Trust in the goodness and altruism of ordinary people. Trust in commerce. Trust in government. Trust in animal behavior. Trust in our equipment. Trust in each other. Trust in our own powers of situational awareness, grit, stamina, and flexibility. Trust in our ability to turn any event into at least an interesting story. We just got back from Europe. Technically, at least one of us was gone for over three weeks. I’ll be writing about our trip over the next couple of weeks, sharing photos, and talking about our continuing quest toward more experiences and less gear. Part of this quest includes language learning.
Where did we go? Germany: Hamburg Spain: Barcelona, Valencia, Madrid train station, Ronda, Algeciras, Tarifa, La Linea, Sevilla Gibraltar (England? Spain? You decide) Morocco: Tangier France: Paris Airports: LAX, LHR, HAM, BCN, MUC, CDG, ORD, LAX again Modes of transport: plane, train, bus, subway, light trail, taxi, walking, SO MANY STAIRS How many languages did we try? Technically 5: German, Spanish, French, a few phrases of Arabic, and some sign-reading in Catalan. How many different places did we sleep? Ten in 18 days. Will there be monkeys? Yes. How much did we walk? 141.35 miles, averaging 8.31 per day. How many flights of stairs did we climb? 327, averaging 19.24 flights per day. About those monkeys…? You’re just going to have to wait. |
AuthorI've been working with chronic disorganization, squalor, and hoarding for over 20 years. I'm also a marathon runner who was diagnosed with fibromyalgia and thyroid disease 17 years ago. This website uses marketing and tracking technologies. Opting out of this will opt you out of all cookies, except for those needed to run the website. Note that some products may not work as well without tracking cookies. Opt Out of CookiesArchives
January 2022
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