Waiting is my superpower

Boredom is the price you pay for marvels.

Tim Cahill

When you think of elsewhere, or at least when I think of elsewhere, it’s always about the highlights. What you’ll see, what you’ll eat, and who you might meet. Plus amazement! Adventure! But that’s such a tiny percentage of the travel experience. The bright spots are punctuated by scrambling for transportation and then lots and lots of boring bits. Or at least the kind of travel we do is. You can move fast and efficiently from highlight to highlight. Bam! Bam! Bam! For a couple of weeks that works. Then you go home to recover. But when home is largely away, you have to run a different calculation. Mark calls it our mobilus operandi.

We try to ride that fine line between staying in a place long enough not to feel disoriented by moving too quickly (if this is Tuesday, it must be Belgium) and being bored to tears. This kind of travel is really about learning to wait because you’ll never get it right. Not only will you be waiting to move on when you’re done with a place but it’s not time to leave, but you’ll come to know all kinds of waiting. The bus that doesn’t come, the short train ride that turns into a long one, the it’s-not-time-for-dinner-yet stall. It’s the price you pay for keeping a sane, healthy, living like a local pace, with home made meals and energy to work out, not to mention not having to reinvent the wheel every couple of days.

I could stay home and always have something to do, friends to see, stuff to work on. Hobbies and chores. But I wouldn’t have novelty, new sights, smells, tastes. No learning curve. It’s more even keel, a medium life. Eliminate the lows means you also eliminate the highs.

This week’s waiting practice: we’re done with Oviedo. Not that it’s not been nice. It’s a beautiful city. Our day trips and overnight excursions (Avilés, Gijón, Cangas de Onís) have been superb. No complaints. But we’re done being here and it’s still not time to go. We’ve even had to move apartments (long story involving an eclipse that I’ll tell if we get to see it!)

We left off our morning waiting in apartment number one to dive right in to waiting at the park until afternoon check in time at apartment two. We had a picnic and a bench in the shade. Through the wonders of technology I have in the palm of my hand more books than the library of Alexandria. Not too shabby. I can wait like this all day.

I figure all this boredom balances the cosmic scales of wonder. May those cosmic scales tip in our favor this week as we move on to Valladolid to increase our odds of seeing that eclipse!

Cheers,

Maer