Lessons from the Road: It’s All About Attitude

 


This article was published first in Travel Awaits on Oct. 13, 2019. It was republished in this blog on March 26, 2021. I have updated it today. 

 
Franklin D. Roosevelt once said: “I think we consider too much the good luck of the early bird and not enough the bad luck of the early worm.” Yes, unfortunately, luck has two sides to it. For travelers who put themselves in foreign or new lands and in the middle of many unfamiliar activities, luck comes into play many more times than normal. Sometimes a travel day turns out good. Sometimes it turns out bad. How do we navigate such differing situations?

You Can’t Control Everything

One of the worst days of our life happened in 2018. My husband and I were at Washington Dulles International Airport in Washington DC to board a flight bound for London where we were to catch a connecting flight to Ljubljana, Slovenia. Our tickets had been bought at the unbelievably discounted price of US$250 per person but we ended up paying more than ten times that, even after the refund.

While we were en route from Phoenix, our airline Primera declared bankruptcy. All its flights were immediately canceled. Understandably, I was terribly upset. And you don’t want to be near me when I am! But my husband said, “It’s just money.” When we arrived in London, he immediately looked for an English pub at the airport. The Scottish/Irish fellow delighted in a classic English breakfast he had been missing. Clearly, he had already put everything behind him.

Don’t Be Stymied. Go Ahead with Your Travel Plans

Without hesitation, we went ahead with our travel plans because the Slovenia trip could not be postponed. It was dependent on the schedule of our two hosts whom we met on the road in the Philippines a few years earlier. In fact, we hosted them in the US two years later.

The apartments they had reserved for us were fully booked before and after our visit. Our room at her B&B was at the foot of the Ljubljana Castle, in front of the huge daily farmer’s market in Old Ljubljana. In Bled, his apartment was right on the famous lake with postcard scenes from the balcony. We couldn’t have asked for more. And it was a reunion of great friends. Our week in Slovenia was priceless, even if it cost us $3,000.

Be Easy on Yourself: You Are Allowed to Make Mistakes

From our base in Innsbruck the following week, we wanted to explore more of Austria. We decided to take the four-hour train ride to Vienna, stay overnight, then stop at Salzburg, midway on the way back, the next day. At the Hauptbahnhof, I got a brochure from the ticket counters while Bill bought a bottle of water at the store. Mixed signals gave us almost zero time left when we finally found each other again. That’s how we got on the wrong train, the one going in the other direction. Instead of Vienna, we found ourselves in Munich.

In short, we got to Vienna mid-afternoon instead of before lunch as we had planned.  I was so stressed. And you don’t want to be near me when I am! Dear husband said, “Charge it to experience; we’re allowed to make mistakes.” We made it to St. Stephen’s Cathedral, the Mozart House, the Opera House, Karlskirche, the Hofburg Palace, and the Museum Quartier, missing only Schonbrunn Palace from our Vienna bucket list.

But we had to “run” from place to place. It was great that they were so close to each other. We even ended the day with dinner complete with sacher torte at a Viennese Coffee House. We preferred to go to the Hotel Sacher for the original but, as luck would have it, they have an outlet in Innsbruck, Café Sacher. 

There Are Many Good People on the Road

Our next base was Oberstaufen, Germany. This is where bad luck started to turn into good luck. After one of our long day trips, we missed the shuttle bus back to our resort. Tired and hungry, I must have looked so desperate when I found out the next one was an hour away. And you should not be near me when my tummy grumbles!

Without being asked, a German couple, who were also waiting at the station, rounded each of the stops, reading each poster (all of them were in German), and looking for an available alternative for us. They didn’t find any, but it didn’t matter. With the gesture, I totally forgot I was hungry.

The following day, we decided to look at Hotel Ludwig with its two rows of unique windows in Steibus, a village close to Oberstaufen.  It turned out that the couple we met were staying at their vacation condo right in front of the RV campground we found next to the Hotel. They invited us in for drinks.

The interesting thing was the man spoke very little English and my husband spoke very little German, so the wives were gesticulating a lot. Before we parted, they extended us an invitation to visit them at their home in Uberlinger, Germany.

The day before we left for France, we found the chance. At their deck overlooking the legendary Bodensee Lake, we enjoyed a typical German lunch. Then we toured the resort city which was hardly touched during WWII because of treaties. An hour of hunger was such a small price to pay for this GOOD LUCK in capital letters.

Let the Good Times Roll

“When it rains, it pours” had turned into “Let the good times roll.”  Bad luck turns into good luck, sometimes as quickly as it comes. And when our hearts fill with gratitude for the good luck, more of it happens!

In Paris, France we were even gifted with a fabulous upgrade from a studio to a one-bedroom apartment. For one romantic week, this elegant Parisian home was the base for many of our day trips to the highlights of Paris. In Brussels the following week, we didn’t expect to add another level to our travel experiences. I was always just for sightseeing. But in this Belgian capital, I turned into a food tripper: beef carbonnade, moules frites, fondues, waffles, chocolates, and beer.

What matters most, and what we can control, is how we react to others, things, and situations.  When bad luck strikes, we should quickly pick up the lesson and move on. And when good luck happens, we should give free rein to express our gratitude. It also helps to travel with people who remain positive. As you can see, I am blessed to have the best traveling companion...and husband.

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5 Things I Lost and 5 I Gained When I Retired

 

The Best Gifts of Travel: Lessons Learned, Changes Made, and Insights Gained.

The original article was published in TravelAwaits on November 3, 2020. It has been updated here.

According to the UN, there are, as of today, a total of 195 sovereign states. I have been traveling a lot but have gone to barely a quarter of them. I haven’t even completed exploring the state of Arizona where I have lived for ten years. The pandemic did not make it any easier for any of us. But that is now over.

However, there is no need to go everywhere. I must say, zoos, aquariums, and theme parks increasingly look and feel alike. Instead, I have found the difference between outer and inner journeys. A lot more attention is given to the former. Sixty-two of my 74 articles in TravelAwaits are about them, about a destination or a mode of travel. The rest are inner journeys, the ones less obvious. They are what comes about as a result of all life journeys. Here are three kinds: lessons learned, changes made, and insights gained.

Lessons Learned

Here is how a lesson is defined: an amount of teaching given at one time. Sometimes it can be as simple as operating a different kind of coin-operated shower at a campground. In Chicken, Alaska on the road to the Arctic Circle. Had I learned the lesson faster, I would not have had to give up and use the sink for a bath in the cold of fall way up there in the north. Other times it can be as complex as learning to find your way when you are lost where the language is as foreign as the land. I got by with a smattering of words aided by a great deal of hand and body language in rural Mexico.  How I wished I had taken lessons in conversational Spanish.

In fact, RVing in North America gave us one valuable life lesson. The RV which we used as our home weighed all of ten tons. It was so expensive to carry that weight as we went around the continent in the process of discovering different neighborhoods. The cost of fuel is one of the largest expenses in a life on wheels so we learned to stock up only a week’s supply of anything from groceries to other pantry items, have only a service for four of everything from silverware to linens, and not buy anything unless it replaces something else, and other smaller teachings. Guess what was the great life lesson it taught us? Yes, we discovered that the only way to travel light is to live light.

Changes Made

Now there are many definitions to the word change. Technically, it is the instance of becoming different (and it is as certain as taxes and death) from before. We constantly change as we go through life. But my hypothesis is that we change more when we travel because we are exposed to a barrage of new things consistently and often. For me, there were several life-altering changes I went through during my RVing days.

One of those was to finally realize how to become a wife. Before I left to migrate to and retire in the US, my calling card had these words printed on it: “President/CEO.” Now it reads “Wanderer, Writer, Wife.” On my third try at marriage, one that was at the outset fraught with gender, cultural, and individual differences, especially in our advanced years, I succeeded. Travel gave me so many coping mechanisms and more things to pay attention to, during our extended honeymoon years. In the end, the throw pillow that read “We get along in our RV coz we don’t have room to disagree” became a treasure.

And I not only became a wife without losing my identity, but I also became an American without losing my roots. The RV Odyssey led me through three stages of an American discovery. In the West, I was moved by the beauty of the land and began humming “America, the Beautiful.” As we crossed the Midwest, a gradual conversion to the American way of life happened, including cooking burgers and dogs, wearing jeans and ball caps, and dancing two-step and rock and roll. The transformation became complete when we reached the East and found America’s historical roots. I began to hum the “Star-Spangled Banner.” At the swearing-in ceremony, I did not receive just a piece of paper. I felt I deserved to be an American. But, I could not forget my home country, my fellow Filipinos, and my best friends and family. So I became a dual citizen!

Insights Gained

Finally, travel gives us the gift of insight, a deeper understanding of a person or thing. We have so far traveled to 38 countries. In the process, I have developed better perspectives of qualities that travelers must have in new and strange lands: flexibility, curiosity, and courage. Here's an article I wrote about it. I have also been able to deal with different kinds of travel mishaps including falling ill while on the go. A good attitude is essential during such times (this is my next post). 

I have also better understood that there is time and reason for traveling with either BFFs or your spouse, for going to brand new or old favorite destinations, or when is the best season to travel and how long to stay in a place.  Because of travel, I have also repeatedly discovered that there are so many beautiful people out there and that food is always best at its place or origin. Finally, I have come to really stick to my routine for keeping fit even while on the go.   

Now that I am no longer able to travel like before, I have discovered how to focus on inner journeys. My husband and I have this luxury at home where we stay most of the year. We were enriched by outer journeys but now we relish the inner journeys that were born out of them. Whatever age you start traveling, you must take note of ongoing inner journeys, too. They are the best gifts of travel and become more precious over time.

All these three gifts are told in my second travel book, Cruising Past Seventy. (Subtitle: It’s Not Only About Outer Journeys. It’s Also About Inner Ones).

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An Unavoidable Turning Point: Turning Elderly

 

An Unavoidable Turning Point: Turning "Elderly"

in Hawaii, August this year

 

Just like that, I am turning 75 this month and now have the dubious right to join that group of people called “elderly" (my husband has been in it for five years). Having passed the life expectancy of females in the Philippines  (71.5), I am now on the way to reaching the life expectancy of a 75-year-old American woman (87). I thought the next turning point in my life would be when I turned 80. But I have found that life after 60 goes at a faster pace.

Five years ago, we shifted gears. My husband and I changed the way we traveled, opting for comfort above all else and slowing down in the process. I also began to write travel essays. In fact, I published a second travel book, Cruising Past 70. It’s Not Only About Outer Journeys…It’s Also About Inner Ones, featuring my favorite pieces at the time.

This new turning point comes with a more major set of changes. First, we will now hardly travel at all! Our annual winter stay in Mexico, from Dec. 9, 2023, to March 9, 2024, will be our last. We said goodbye to Mazatlán in 2022; we will bid Cancun goodbye in 2024. In fact, we are selling our car, and when we return in April there will be no more road trips. Life will be a far cry from RVing around the continent as we did from 2008 to 2016.

Travel will consist of flying to join special family events. We will celebrate Bill’s 80^th birthday in March at his daughter’s place in Denver, Colorado. We will also be in Honolulu in May 2024 when Bill’s first grandson marries his fiancée. It has become more normal for the family to visit us; the new sunroom/guest room we built has been put to good use.  

We also want to keep our tradition of celebrating each wedding anniversary at a treasured place. For our 16^th celebration, we will be in Leavenworth, Washington not only to visit a beloved granddaughter but also to relive the beginning of our love story with mutual friends from our time in Seattle. 

Next, since there will not be travel for travel’s sake, my writing will change. I will no longer contribute to TravelAwaits regularly. It has been bought by new owners and is changing its direction to publishing more travel news.  I will still be on their roster, and I may write when I have something to contribute.  

More importantly, my blog will transition to “Cruising Past Seventy: The Inner Journeys.” I will focus my thought pieces along the lines of my favorite themes: love and friendship, retirement and renewal, longevity and health, governance and management, and of course, travel and leisure.

In my second book, I wrote more travel essays, not travel diaries or travel guides as in my first, Carolina: Cruising to an American Dream. In this second book, I introduced “inner journeys, those that are not obvious.” But my new pieces will not only come from thoughts gathered from travels. This time I will write personal essays even from everyday experiences at home.

There was something about turning 70 that heightened my introspection then. But at 75 I am deeply drawn to even more, especially since changes are coming from conditions we can no longer ignore. These conditions were what prompted us to seize the opportunity to have our renewal of vows and second honeymoon on our 15^th wedding anniversary, instead of the usual 25th.  If we reach our 20^th, we’ll do it again. And, if still blessed, on the 25^th too!

I already have a lot to write about. It's been a charmed life of three quarters. But I am also in the midst of some of the hardest life lessons, those that I so fiercely resisted learning before because I thought I could totally escape them. Still, I can't help but think that learning them earlier might have drastically improved how I lived my life. Pardon me, but they may increasingly become the focus of my writings. I hope you will benefit from what I choose to share.

But we will begin slowly. For each of the next 12 weeks, I will feature an article from those travel essays (from a total of 74) that TravelAwaits published in the past four years. After I run through them, exciting new ones will come with titles like “How to Die Young as Late as Possible,” “Where, When, and How to Find Your Lifetime Partner,” or “Which Is More Important: Governance or Management?” 

Come along on these inner journeys with me. Let us continue this friendship we have just begun.

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My 8 Favorite Chinatowns in the World