DeAnna Woolston

Jim gave Izzy and I money to take a trip last Christmas. It was a surprise gift buried in the yard like a true treasure. He told us to go where wanted–but I knew we’d have to be careful, because travel takes more money than you think if you don’t speak hostel. We had to wait until summer to travel so Izzy wouldn’t miss too much school and our trip depended on Jim’s schedule so we could only plan a couple of weeks ahead of the trip. I may have spent more days trying to plan this trip and to bend Alaska Airline miles to our will, than actually on the trip itself. Izzy’s request was she wanted to have a horse riding component and to see her friend in Barcelona. I wanted to see friends in the South of France. In the end, we got the horses and my friends, but missed out on Barcelona. Finding airlines, times, factoring money and days, and places to stay was probably as involved as a flow chart for trying to solve a murder–months later scraps of paper with flight numbers and times on them are still cropping up.

Our travel involved using more miles than grains of sand on earth, supplemented with money. Even with infinity miles and too much cash, we were booked on economy airlines with folding chairs that almost slid forward and back with the plane as we landed and took off. And we had multiple long layovers in airports where things weren’t as self-explanatory as you would maybe want with a sleepless-creased face, crooked neck and dramamine haze. In Frankfurt, we waited forever only to realize when we made our way to our gate an hour before, we had to go out of security and find where to check in for our flight to Madrid and then get back in line for security. It allowed us to get a sweaty, anxiety-fueled run back and forth across the airport frantically looking for our no-name airline before our next flight where helpful employees pointed us in different directions probably just to see where we’d end up next. We got to our next flight just in time to really appreciate that it tasted of farts and COVID and that we may or may not make our flight to Mallorca. In Madrid, the plane kept being delayed and for fun the airline kept changing gates. It would have been funny to see a herd of people from many different countries without a shepherd trying to find the next gate throughout the airport–if we weren’t following along, not entirely sure these people were actually going where we were. They changed the gate three times. There were a lot of stairs involved, a lot of small enclosed spaces with 300 of your (not) friends and a lot of standing and Oliver Twist staring down people behind the glass–eye pleading with them to let you in to the larger space by the next gate.

When we got to Mallorca, we had been traveling for 36 hours and we had to find the person taking us to the farm where our vacation would be. So with our creased faces, smelling of farts, COVID and anxiety-sweat, we went up to a million strangers with signs trying to find anything that looked like Son Menut or our names. It was not unlike the book where the baby bird is looking for its mother. We peered up at everyone there with the innocence of that baby bird and the desperation of a very old vulture that needs food, water and sleep. Forty-five minutes later we found our guy outside chatting with folks smoking a cigarette completely unbothered (I think his sign was hanging by his fingertips backwards). Then we spent just as much money on the car ride from the airport to Son Menut (our horse destination) as we did on the flight from Madrid. All this sounds complainy–but you know what? It’s not. It’s just the price of admission for travel when you are not rich and organized and had more than two weeks to plan. We didn’t even care, because we were on an adventure. Every spontaneous conversation, every time we unlocked the mystery of where a no-name airline was hidden, every harried sprint through an airport punctuated by luggage wheels going over seems, every head-bobbing micro dose of sleep–felt uncomfortably and perfectly like an adventure.