My daughter, Clementine, spent this last Christmas and New Year’s traveling Ireland and the U.K. To her great credit she only had one breakdown. This, I think, is pretty much average: everyone has that one moment when they are traveling when everything just falls apart. When despite all of your hotel reservations, All-City Passes, and money pouches that force you to duck inside the bathroom every time you need to get out change for the bus, you still absolutely lose it. Mine was in a cafe in Glasgow, when my request for a latte was met with so much swearing and hostility that I ran outside and had a breakdown on the sidewalk. A girl I remember from college had hers when the giant lollipop she had carried all the way back from Disneyland fell and shattered on the airport floor. And Clementine’s came when she had to push an overladen luggage cart with a wonky wheel through a rainy parking lot in Shannon.
Clementine will kill me when she finds out I am telling this story, just like the aforementioned college friend (her name was Rachel, by the way) would kill me if she ever discovered I was sharing her lollipop story. Because our first instinct is to feel intense embarrassment when these moments happen. I mean, it’s just a cup of coffee, right? It’s just a luggage cart. It’s just a stupid lollipop, for crying out loud. It’s not like getting caught smuggling hash over the Turkish border. It’s not like showing up in Russia without the proper visas, because—ahem!—you thought you didn’t need Visa since you already have a MasterCard (truly one of my favorite travel faux pas stories of all time). It’s not that big of a deal. And it certainly isn’t worth standing on a sidewalk, or in an airport, or in a parking lot crying your eyes out over.
Except for the fact that, actually, it kind of is.
Look, there’s something about travel that just absolutely breaks you. And that’s good. That’s why you do it. Or at least it’s one of the reasons why you do it—although that might not be so obvious when you’re the one stuck with the wonky luggage cart. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.
I once read a great piece of advice about creating fictional characters that also applies to real people. “Characters,” it said, “are like geodes. You have to break them to see what they’re made of.” Of course, characters in books are lucky (or, if we were honest, unlucky) enough to have all of their breaking take place during Very Important Events. They break on the way to Mordor, or in the middle of the Tri-Wizard Tournament, or when their boyfriend’s cancer comes back again.
In real life it doesn’t always happen that way. We break in line at the grocery store when someone calls us out on having too many items for the express line. We break when we miss our exit on the freeway. And we break, a lot, when we are trying to do normal things in abnormal places. (Or at least in places that are not normal to us.)
But that’s okay. Because after the breaking comes the good part. The part when you get up, spare a few choice words for rain, luggage carts, and wonky wheels, and keep going. When you walk away from the broken mess that was your (in all likelihood truly disgusting) lollipop. When you decide that, actually, a beer sounds way better than a coffee anyway.
When Clementine was traveling she learned where to find the Rosetta Stone in the British Museum, Eamon de Valera’s jail cell in Kilmainham Gaol, and Platform 9 ¾ in Kings Cross Station. But perhaps most importantly, she learned to find her fortitude in an airport parking lot in Shannon.