Last night I baked granola bars, and this can only mean one thing: I’m going on an adventure. For months I’ve been looking for June 28th, and now that it’s in sight I am all nervous and fluttery, counting down the mass of my three-day pack in cubic inches, and making list after list after list of to-dos and to-brings which, if history repeats itself, will devolve from a series of note cards and bullet points to a mad “mash all objects in reach into the bag with five minutes to catch the bus” kind of affair.
This is the plan. On Friday at 4:45 I meet the Boys and Girls club for a weekend camping trip. They needed a female leader, and I am both female and a lover of camping, so I got the job because absolutely no one else volunteered. Then on Monday I leave the kiddos and catch a train to London where I meet my friend William, and so begins the expedition. I’m just going to go ahead and admit the purpose of this blog entry right now. First, I want people to know why for the next few weeks while I’m not at home I will probably be even worse at responding to emails than my usual lack-luster standard. Second, I plan to use as many Hobbit quotes and chapter titles as possible in this entry and possibly the next for my own entertainment and the delightful challenge of integrating Tolkien into my vacation tales. They’ll be in italics or quotation marks.
William and I are taking an overnight bus from London to Paris where we will breakfast on crepes and espresso and then somehow maybe try to kind of manage to hitchhike to northeastern Italy or something. Neither of us have experience with this sort of thing, and the lesson planning, backup anticipating, what-if preparing part of me that already has insect repellant and two three kinds of sunscreen packed is like – should I bring a poster and Sharpies so we can write “Take us to Venice, please”?
On one hand, adventures are “Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner!” And it is a distinct possibility that my friend and I may spend several frustrating days subsisting on McDonald’s and granola bars in rest stops before we (I) decide to shell out for train tickets. Being that I am me, I looked up the inside information on car shares, which I think is a pretty satisfactory middle ground between standard transport and full hitchhiking. Maybe I already downloaded the app and made a profile and scouted possible rides. My name is Abby, and I have problems with self-perceived irresponsibility and the possibility of sleeping in fast food booths. What I like about hitchhiking is that it is entirely unpredictable. That abandon to the unknown shoots stomach-drop thrill through me that I crave and hate at the same time. My biggest fear is that we won’t find a ride. My second biggest fear is that we’ll be abducted Liam Neeson style. And my maybe-realistic expectation is that I’ll probably spend the beginning of next week attempting to review my dissertation sources while contorted to a barely human shape in the back seat of a tiny Citron and cramped between luggage and a large, panting poodle listening to Bob Marley and conspiracy theories while I slowly asphyxiate on second hand smoke and dog hair. All of which makes me want to bathe in hand sanitizer and reminds me that I should pack antihistamine just in case. I’m not allergic to dogs, but I kind of am.
The end game is that William and I meet up with other friends from the rock climbing society in a little town north of Verona/Venice where we use the home of one of our friends as the base. And then we climb, climb, climb and “mountaineer” over hill and under hill and maybe camp and eat Italian food with our friend’s family and traverse glaciers. I’ve never traversed a glacier before, but I’m not opposed to it at all. Next week’s blog post will probably be a little late and basically just a thousand pictures. Though I insinuate a weekly schedule, we all know this to be a loosely identified “week” consisting of anywhere between four and fourteen days.
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