True Story Tuesday: Cheeky England

Present day me is very much a quick planner when it comes to travel. Given a couple of hours I can plan a vacation. Given a credit card I can have it booked and ready to go within the day. I also have a knack for taking people further than they’d originally intended to travel. Aunt River never intended to go to the Netherlands but we ended up there for three days. Forest wanted to visit me in England and ended up visiting Germany as well. It’s gotten to the point that Forest has said “If Lost wants to go somewhere, she’ll let me know the cost. If I want to go somewhere, I tell her where. She’ll plan it.” Honestly, I should just get TICO certified and become a travel agent already.

I didn’t start out that way, though.

Once upon a time I was a very passive traveler. Much like any child I was a tag along to wherever Mom and Dad wanted to go and didn’t have much say in the matter. That would all change with one ironically flippant question.

Spring was starting to bloom in the north, and my second university graduation had just been confirmed. Having been in school for seven years, my family and I hadn’t travel significantly during that time. I was making plans to live abroad, and though I didn’t have a definitive location chosen by then I think Mom and Dad both knew I was serious about it. With that in mind, Mom decided that after my graduation would be the perfect time to have one last family vacation. Her suggestion? St. John’s, Newfoundland.

I thought it was an awesome idea. She’d shown me pictures of Gros Morne national park, Iceburg Alley, and L’Anse-aux-meadows, all of which were things that I immediately wanted to see for myself. I would be able to explore something completely new to me, having never been to the Maritimes, and Mom and Dad could return to a place they loved, all the while exploring a few places they’d missed the first time they went. It was perfect!

At least, I thought it was, until we began to plan it.

Due to work, graduation, and other time constraints, we realised that we would have to go sooner rather than later, and if we wanted to maximise our time in St. John’s, then we would have to leave on a set date. That set date? Two weeks from the moment we decided we wanted to go.

Mom and I sat down at the computer and began to plan.

We assumed that because St. John’s was within Canadian borders it would be an easy trip to plan and book. We were so very, very wrong.

To make the trip work we would have needed an excessive amount of money, a rental vehicle and a charter plane, not to mention a tent because there were so few places available to stay it was nonsensical. The more we looked at it the more we began to realise it couldn’t be done. I told Mom I needed a break and headed to the TV room.

I had every intention of turning on the tv and watching something vaguely funny or numbing for a moment. I just wanted to get away from the feeling that this trip wasn’t going to happen. Somehow I ended up on my laptop and with a feeling of nostalgia taking hold, I began looking at pictures of London. I had visited England with my high school’s theater group (I wasn’t part of the group I just begged them to let me join them for the trip) and loved it. I wondered, briefly, what a vacation there would cost us as opposed to St. John’s.

The prices were nearly identical. A little bit of irreverence sprang up inside of me, and I shouted to the next room.

“Hey Mom, do you want to go to England?”

“Sure,” she said, “But you plan it. I’m going to make dinner.”

I hadn’t expected her to agree, much less tell me to plan the entire trip! I had barely been a driving force behind this most recent venture, and had no hand at all in planning the previous ones! Mom planned trips months in advance, there was paperwork, insurance, flights to book! I didn’t know how to do any of that!

“Wait!” I called, as Mom appeared in the hallway. She was, as she stated, about to make dinner and leave me in the wilderness of possibilities.

“Yes?” She stopped in the doorway, looking at me expectantly.

“Can we go to Scotland, too?” The little internal voice suggesting that I might be idiot was swiftly delegated to the darkest recesses of my mind. “I’ve already been to England, I want to see something new, too.”

“Plan it out. I’m making dinner.”

I realised then that we had, collectively, thrown me to the wolves.

It took me a solid week to figure things out, which left only a week to make all the arrangements at home and pack, but despite the tight schedule I found that it wasn’t all that difficult. I made sure that Mom and Dad liked the places I was planning to visit, made sure that the reviews were good for each location and provider, and was eventually given the go-ahead to book everything.

The surprising part, at least for me, was that the trip actually went well!

I had rented a small flat on the outskirts of London with a tube station close by. It had a kitchenette, and effectively both myself and my parents had our own bedrooms and bathrooms. It was all for the same price if not lower than a small hotel room in the heart of London, or St. John’s for that matter. We’d never stayed in anything quite like it before in the past, but since that trip Mom has tried to rent flats when we travel internationally. It’s something that I’m quite proud of!

I think, overall, that trip gave us all a bit of confidence in me. Mom and Dad began to realise that I was not only a pretty good planner, but also a good navigator, a skill that wasn’t hindered by a lack of of foreknowledge. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t been to certain areas of London before, or that the whole of Scotland was foreign and new to me, I could find my way around with ease. I could make my way around the world. I had the skills, knowledge, and will to do it.

It was a very validating experience, and it made me realise that if I had the funds, I could go almost anywhere I pleased. If that doesn’t give one a terrific feeling of independence and power, then I don’t know what does.