A small and friendly place

A long, long time ago, I got on a plane with a newly-issued passport and a partially-disassembled Trek road bike and went to Europe for the first time. I had signed up for a six-week, six-country bike tour with a dozen people I had never met and haven’t seen since except on Facebook. I’ll never forget the dozen of us in the Heathrow baggage claim, bleary-eyed and wobbly after the flight, trying to put our bikes together. We tightened wheels and handlebars with our allen wrenches and glanced warily at the dozen strangers doing the same thing and thought, well, shit. What have I gotten myself into here?

Six weeks later I got on a plane in Amsterdam to fly home and cried myself to sleep, missing those people so much that my heart literally hurt.

My stories of that summer are identical to the billions of stories of young people from all over the world who converge on Europe for our version of the Grand Tour. Museums and churches. Mountains and rivers. Bread and cheese and trains and cheap hotels and cheap bars and questionable choices, so many questionable choices in so many beautiful, ancient, thrumming cities and picturesque villages across Europe. I wouldn’t trade those memories for anything.

More than thirty years later, those memories are what I have left of that trip, along with a bunch of truly hilarious pictures in an album that I showed to my kids not too long ago. They were moderately amused by photos of their goofy old mom at about the age they are right now, smiling with her arms around people they’ll never meet in front of landmarks they’ve only read about (or really, seen TikToks about). They were mostly amazed by the fact that, because this was eons before cell phones and Google maps, we relied on handwritten directions when we biked from place to place. “Butbutbut…how did that work?” they stuttered. “What if you got lost?” I told them that we got lost all the time and it was fine, we figured it out, that the world is a small and friendly place, actually, once you’re out in it.

Later today, I’ll get on a plane with those kids and my husband, and the four of us will fly to Europe on a long-delayed, two-week, three-country trip. We were supposed to take this trip when I turned fifty—a momentous occasion that we instead celebrated in semi-quarantine in the fall of 2020. But now, today, we’re finally going. It’s been months and months of planning, during which I have thought well, shit, what have I gotten myself into here? more than once.

Because I am in my fifties and not my twenties, my thoughts about this trip are very different than they were when I was trying to put my bike together in the Heathrow baggage claim. I’m thinking about international cell phone plans and where we’ll do laundry and double-checking Airbnb reservations and whether my picky eater will starve in Iceland (he’ll be fine in England and Scotland, even if he has to live on greasy pub food).

But mostly I’m thinking about the world, and how different it feels from when I was a starry-eyed twenty-year-old going to Europe for the first time. This trip will obviously be different for my kids than my first trip was; they will have many, many fewer chances for questionable decisions with their goofy old parents around. But I’m hoping against hope that they will at least get a few glimpses of what travel inevitably shows you: the magnificent world opening itself up in front of your eyes. That despite it all—war and hate and COVID and a looming feeling of global despair—we’ll be fine. That even if we get lost, we’ll figure it out, that the world is a small and friendly place, actually, once you’re out in it.