ON THE WINGS OF WHIMSY
Sometimes travel itineraries are for the birds
(posted 6/25/02)

Lisa and I left Berlin in the early morning darkness to the upbeat sounds of The Stranglers. We had prepared well for our journey by car through Poland to the newly-opened Baltic countries of Lithuania and Latvia. We were in control.

Arriving in Vilnius two days later, we checked our maps and guidebooks but we still couldn't find our hotel, or any hotel.

We circled and circled but still nothing. Recognizing that we were both in that tired and cranky zone familiar to travelers, we simply pulled up to a bus stop, rolled down the window and shouted out the name of our hotel.

The ten or twelve Vilnians stood there in silence. Suddenly a tall woman with a Dorothy Hamill haircut stepped out from the throng and approached us.

She didn't say anything that we could understand. She would just shake her index figure at her temple, affect a pensive facial expression and nod positively. She seemed to know what we were talking about.

She marched to the back door and motioned for us to let her in. She would take us there.

Her name was Aurelia and she had no idea where our hotel was. Instead, she directed us to her apartment building on the outskirts of town.

As soon as we stepped into her frenzied abode, she pulled out a pile of dictionaries. Most of them offered extremely useful agricultural expressions for meeting tourists, like "How many bushels of wheat does your farm produce annually?"

It didn't take us too long to realize that our new friend wanted us to stay with her. She mimed that she would go and we could have the run of her flat. She insisted. Of course, we were not comfortable with this arrangement but it was getting late. In any case, she gave us the keys and left. We stayed two nights.

From that moment on, it seemed that our neatly planned trip was slipping through our fingers and becoming an odyssey through the lives of strange and stranger.

There was Lucia, the Rainman-like autistic savant of tourism who couldn't stop rattling off names and insignificant facts about hundreds of Vilnian buildings, alleys and fountains.

When chance brought Lucia and Aurelia together, there was a Baltic war. Aurelia won and Lucia left in tears. We had to scold Aurelia. She smiled and carried on. Such is life.

And then there was Emma in Riga who gladly gave us a place to sleep and shower. She also threw in a menagerie of flying pets which would swoop down on us throughout our Hitchcockian breakfast.

Or how about the young artist Feliks and his wife Asia. We slept right next to them in their very cozy living/bedroom. At least, we tried to sleep as they snuggled, giggled and chatted well past our traveler's bedtime.

We were not having the trip that we had expected. Not even close. But we were having this magnificent adventure into an unreality which was very real.

Throughout our ten days, we seemed to be in some sort of vortex where fate and the curious meet. By the end, we were thoroughly enjoying our peculiar hosts and evolving set of circumstances. We accepted anything that happened to us and laughed. We laughed a lot.

We were experiencing the bizarreness of places which had been through hell and back. We were witnessing the residue of failed systems and endless struggling. We were very much a part of what we had come to see.

As travelers, we leave with preset visions of how things are going to go. We may not intend to do this but we do it nonetheless. The miraculous thing about our travels is that the Great Travel Overseer has other plans and she surprises us.

Isn't that the part we most enjoy? Or, rather, isn't that the tale we tell our friends about? The unknown, the unforeseen, the unexpected?

Next time you're out there and you enter a similarly strange and perplexing world, don't fight it. Cherish its potential. Put your hands up in the air like you do on a rollercoaster and feel the thrill of its loops and curves. Believe me, it will make a mind-boggling ride and an even better story.

Would we have done it otherwise? Nope. Of course, we didn't seem to have a choice then, did we?

Steve Zikman is the author of The Power of Travel: A Passport to Adventure, Discovery & Growth and coauthor of Chicken Soup for the Traveler’s Soul. To learn more about Steve’s books, visit his website at: www.GOscape.com Click here to read a sample of The Power of Travel. To correspond with Steve, email him at: soulfultraveler@GOscape.com For information about Steve's speaking programs or to book Steve for your organization's next event, please call Cindy Bertram at 219-322-9186.