No matter how much you plan, something will go wrong. That’s if you’re lucky. Usually, many things go wrong.
From getting lost, to being pickpocketed, to delayed flights and missing more trains than I ever thought possible, I have not had a single weekend of travel where everything ran smoothly. It’s been stressful for sure—not to mention exhausting and expensive—to solve all the problems that have been thrown my way. At times, it’s discouraging. It has made planning my travels feel like a daunting and useless task.
But as I sit here writing this, recovering from yet another weekend where nothing went according to plan, I’m reflecting on the moments of good fortune I’ve had this semester that have stemmed from these mishaps.
My friends and I got lost trying to find Abbey Road in London. We ended up spending hours on the Tube trying to find our destination, and we almost gave up out of frustration. However, we finally made it after a kind Underground worker pointed us in the right direction. When we made it to Abbey Road, we met a fellow American man there who was traveling the world and making a documentary promoting world peace. If things had gone right and we hadn’t gotten lost, we never would have experienced the kindness of that Tube worker or met that friendly American man.My phone got stolen in Barcelona. After recovering from the initial shock of it, I texted my parents from my friend’s phone to tell them what happened, and I decided I would deal with the rest later. I lost all my photos from the trip, and of course, the incident kept me and my friends on edge during the rest of our stay in Spain, but it could have been much worse. I chose to simply be grateful that it wasn’t my wallet or passport and move on. As bad of a situation as it was, I got to experience the rest of that trip without a phone in front of my face and without the pressure to capture every single moment on camera just for the sake of my Instagram feed. I got to experience Barcelona as it truly was—a city with pickpockets, gorgeous architecture, and beautiful beaches.
My sister and I were kicked off our overnight train from Prague to Krakow. After the Czech train conductor got mad at us for having the wrong papers, we were not allowed to board our train. As we slunk back to the train station in the pouring rain and bitter wind, it sunk in just how terrible our fortune was. Not only was it an overnight train, meaning that our inability to board meant that we didn’t have a place to sleep that night, but our flights back to London were from Poland. If we wanted to get back to London without wasting hundreds more dollars, we had to get to Krakow somehow. Reality setting in, we sucked it up, went to the ticket office, and bought train tickets for first thing the next morning. After just a few hours’ sleep in a hotel my sister had miraculously booked on her phone, we boarded a train at six in the morning and eventually got to our hotel in Krakow by four in the afternoon. We were too late to visit Auschwitz as we had originally planned, and we were too exhausted to do anything else. It was a stressful, frightening, and discouraging trip to say the least. It’s still a little difficult for me to find the silver lining from this trip after so many things had gone wrong, but I know my sister and I learned the skill of adaptability through it all. We learned that even if it feels like the end of the world, we could handle what was thrown at us.
The same goes for all of my misadventure-filled trips. Even if things don’t go as planned, they work out as they’re supposed to, whether that means meeting cool new people, gaining a new perspective, or simply lying on your hotel bed being thankful that things hadn’t gone worse.
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