The Trip We Didn’t Take

A string of small interruptions, and what showed up in their place.

Completely unaware of the storm ahead, we stopped for a selfie outside Williams-Brice Stadium, wearing the shirts our daughter bought for us to cheer on the home team.

In last Sunday’s post Seven Months Off, I wrote about the almost Taoist-flow I experienced, with no plan and that almost being the point. I would think of a friend, and the friend would call. I would think I needed to try something new, and an opportunity would appear. It has never happened to me in quite the same way since. This month, I experienced a flow that ran in completely the opposite direction.

A weird Labor Day

I’m not sure who came up with the saying that “bad luck comes in threes.” Labor Day was one of those, with each little piece of bad luck being pretty small. That day, I had a scheduled brunch with a friend. Right as our food arrived, his phone rang with a call from his daughter’s care provider reporting a dead car battery on their outing to a local museum. He had to leave early to pick them up. On my way home, our neighbor cancelled the dinner and movie we had planned. He had just learned his brother was in the ICU back in Xinjiang and needed to be available for his brother. After returning home, we heard from my cousin that her husband had come down with COVID. This is the same couple we were supposed to meet in Europe for our vacation the following week.

Of course, nothing about the day was serious. My friend and I still got to catch up over food for an abbreviated time. Marsha and I still had a nice dinner in the neighborhood (Farmhouse Kitchen!), and we enjoyed the movie (The Odyssey) on our own. And my cousin still had a good five days to recover. (He eventually tested negative on the day everyone would have to get on a plane to Europe.)

Two days later

The Wednesday after Labor Day, we flew out to Columbia, South Carolina to see our older daughter. I’d never been there before, so I was eager to visit her new home and workplace. Somewhere between checking our bags and landing in Columbia, I lost my passport card. I remember having it in my pocket after showing it to the gate agent at the bag check, and I did not have it when I landed. United searched the plane in Columbia, I called the Chicago Police at O’Hare in case I lost it during the trek from Terminal 1 to Terminal 2. United’s lost and found also followed up via email. Nobody found it.

In the middle of all that, while filing the lost and found report on my phone, I tugged on my iPhone cross-body strap too hard and broke the strap free from the case. Again, this wasn’t that serious either. The good news is that I still had my Oregon Driver License as a travel ID to get home, I still had my passport book at home ready for our planned European trip the following week, and the iPhone case is still good protection for the phone body itself even if it no longer works with the cool cross-body strap.

A fun visit to South Carolina

The visit itself was a good one. I think our daughter has a really cool office, a nice unit in a duplex, a great duplex neighbor, and a growing community of friends. And interestingly enough, her community started with a former Yale classmate who is from Columbia, South Carolina and whose parents have returned to the area. We also took a day trip to Charleston on Friday, browsing the shops along King Street and the Market, walking through Waterfront Park, and making it out to Mt. Pleasant as well.

I didn’t expect to like the food so much. I am a huge fan of the pulled pork with a mustard barbecue sauce and the hash over rice (War Mouth). It was also fun to try the sausage gravy and biscuit (Church and Union), as well as the fried green tomatoes, collard greens and fried fish (Saltwater Cowboys) in Charleston. The place even had good versions of the stuff we like at home, like good coffee (Godspeed, Azalea, Knowledge Perk), high-end cocktails (Bourbon, The Hollow), craft beer taprooms (Craft & Draft), and even a cool street market (Soda City). Even her local neighborhood Lebanese place (Arabesque) was quite good!

Our daughter has also picked up disc golf since moving to Columbia, and we went out with her to play a round at Finlay Park. It’s a beginner course, and we needed just the middle range and putter discs. I’m not sure if we would have been ready for a driver!

We saw our first football game down South, too. Many women showed up in decorated cowboy boots and dresses. The fanfare is quite a sight, and we got to wave white rally rags in a stadium chant called the “Sandstorm.” South Carolina has a huge band with many tubas, and three sideline squads of cheer athletes. Marsha, who marched in the University of Washington band, was impressed by the whole scene!

Unfortunately, right before halftime, a rain and lightning storm came in fast and soaked everyone both at the game, and while waiting during the mayhem at the shuttle stop to get us back into town. I stayed mostly dry myself, since I had packed a rain poncho from Marsha’s stash, a leftover from one of our younger daughter’s Carnegie Mellon events of all things. And I happened to be wearing shoes that can survive a washing machine while Marsha and our older daughter were not so fortunate. Still, the game itself was delayed by 74 minutes because of the storm.

Interrupted travel plans

At the time we left for South Carolina, we still had the official plans to go to Europe the next day after that trip. Of course, prior to leaving South Carolina, Marsha had already expressed a preference to cancel the trip, first when learning my cousin’s husband got COVID. However, because the booking.com cancellation policy for our hotel in Germany had us owing 90% of the room after September 1^st, we decided to wait to see how he was doing. Then, when he was still testing positive on the day that our Switzerland hotel payment was due, Marsha expressed a preference to cancel again. Still, we ended up paying the Switzerland hotel fee, and proceeded with the trip. In retrospect, I’m not sure why I advocated trying to continue the trip. The whole point of the trip was to go with them. Going anyway just to honor the cancellation policy was a little bit like the tail wagging the dog.

What finally changed my mind was a rare mishap at Columbia (CAE) airport, forcing us to miss our Icelandair flight out of Portland the following day. Our Bombardier CRJ550 had a mechanical issue on the ground in Columbia, initially forcing a delay in our outbound flight to Chicago. Of course, this delay would cause a missed connection on the last flight from Chicago to Portland for the night. The United agent graciously booked us the first flight from Chicago back to Portland the following morning, getting us back into Portland in time to return home, pick up our passports, repack our suitcases, and catch our flight out. Courtesy of United, we even had a hotel booked in Chicago for that connection. Then, our flight to Chicago that night got cancelled too, so we never made it out of Columbia. I had to cancel the Chicago hotel, get United to send me a new booking link, and book us into a hotel in Columbia instead. We ended up getting into Portland closer to 4:30pm the next day, missing our Icelandair flight at 3:30pm. So what finally changed my mind was that Icelandair flies out of Portland only every other day, and we would have missed two days of the trip and likely paid a lot more to rebook. On top of that, I still had the background worry about the lost passport form.

Marsha believed intuitively that something kept getting in the way of this trip for a reason. I was mostly pushing to go. However, it was only after a stack of small, ordinary problems that even I did not want to push through anymore.

I’m not quite sure I ever had this kind of experience before retirement, and I have been pondering what changed. Looking back, I do not think retirement gave us permission to cancel so much as it gave us permission to say yes to three separate trips inside the same three weeks in the first place. We had been planning the visit to our daughter’s new place, the Europe trip with my cousin and her husband, and my trip to Bend with old friends from my Latitude days for quite some time. They just all happened to land in the same short window. The tight scheduling was not the result of having a limited window of vacation days we needed to protect. My view is that we had the flexibility to work well within other people’s schedules, and I think this is a good problem to have.

So that first day back, we stayed home instead, still in our pajamas at midday, with a plan to make Mabo Tofu out of a spice packet, tofu that Marsha had fortuitously purchased before leaving, and ground beef we had in the freezer. The aim was to allow us both to not have to leave the condo. I had queued up posts here on Substack in advance so I would not have to write anything for three weeks on the road. The road trip was gone, and I was writing anyway, back to life as usual. We talked about taking a photo of the scene for this post, and then decided we looked too much like two people who had spent the entire day in pajamas to put it on the internet.

A few months ago I wrote here about building a small gratitude journal app so that we could all use it freely without being constantly upsold (“enshittification”). We have actually kept using it, and it memorialized our feelings at the time. Right before any of the flights fell apart, Marsha wrote an entry from Columbia that ended with hoping for a smooth flight home and on to Zurich the next day. That flight never happened. Once we got home, my cousin texted asking when we would finally make it to Switzerland. That text gave me a better way to think about all of this. The trip wasn’t necessarily one that went up in flames, but it could be one we are still going to take.

So, this time the flow did not bring us friends calling or opportunities showing up on their own. It brought us a string of small interruptions instead. It also brought us something neither of us expected, a quiet day at home we enjoyed more than we thought we would. And we still have the possibility of a trip that might be waiting just a little further down the road.