Giving Up and Letting Go

Never do I feel more like a control freak than when I plan a trip.  Phone numbers and addresses and tickets suddenly pile up in my head, and before I know it I have clicked on a word document, my fingers typing out an itinerary that begins with the first hour of the first date that I leave.  Every minute detail I could ever need is saved and printed, filed away in a folder that will accompany me on whatever journey it is I will be taking.  

My planning style, unfortunately, always consists of tension between concentration and procrastination.  While I can't survive without an itinerary, I hardly ever create it until two or three days before my departure.  I inevitably forget to print out reservations after I made them months earlier, resigned to call the airlines or hotel in order to reconfirm my original confirmation number.  I put off asking friends if I can stay with them until the last possible moment before I hit sheer panic.  I'm always late and hardly ever early.  I am a self-professed traveling contradiction.

Most, excuse me, I mean all of my solo trips have taken place stateside.  Since having declared a year and a half ago that I would be going to England sometime within the year after I graduated college, I've had several sleepless nights in which I try to convince myself to make reservations at L'Abri and order plane tickets and search for a railcard.  Reservations were made this past summer, tickets purchased in the fall, and I just finished that hunt for a railcard yesterday only to realize I can't get it until I land at Gatwick Aiport (grr).  I still need to complete my itinerary, discuss whether my mom or I will buy tickets for the London Eye and Vinopolis and the Roman baths/costume museum in Bath.  Dad and I still need to decide when he flies to London, when we fly to Italy, and how we'll be getting back.  All in a week, I keep telling myself, all in a week.

With my heart beating a little faster these days, my mind racing as if completing a 200 yard dash to the finish line, I'm trying to remember what it really means to travel.  That beyond itineraries and tickets and reservations are experiences that I could never really plan.  Getting lost and missing connections and learning new transportation systems are all part of the adventure, the stories I'll tell when I get back.  No one will care that I paid way too much money to go on a wine tour--they'll care that I got lost trying to find it, or dropped my wine goblet (like some people I know), or tried the best wine I've ever had.  

I'm nervous to travel alone in a foreign country, but I think I'll take to it just as I have flying alone and driving alone.  No one tells you that some of your best reflections take place behind the windows of a plane, a car, a train.  You just have to know that they do; you have to believe they will because they always have.  I'm trying give up my need for control (but never the itinerary), and let go of my fear and expectations.  I'm trying, I really am, and I think that when I get back my trip will feel more like a hundred experiences, like footprints that created new paths in snow rather than walking along a pre-existing plowed road.  At least, that's what I'm hoping for.