Learning to Roll Like a Ball, Not a Square
26 bags of vitamins and no hairbrush. The unravel of travel.
I left home with 26 individual vitamin bags. One for each day.
I am just at the beginning of a multi-continent adventure. This first stop is Ireland.
What I didn’t have was the rest of my luggage. It was en route to Paris. Ironically, my favorite city in the world. One of the best places to run in the early morning, the smell of bread baking city-wide.
I digress.
It took 36 hours. Whether it was standard procedure, my bulldog persistence with Delta, or the customer service rep who seemed to place 911-level alerts throughout their system, our bags finally arrived. The AirTags earned their spot on my Travel Essentials list. We could tell Delta exactly where to find the bags.
Fortunately for me, my husband is as patient as a saint and sees the bright side of everything. Our attention never landed on what we didn’t have. Only on what we did.
I am learning to roll more like a ball and less like a square.
Oddly enough, Dave is more organized than me. I truly found my unicorn, but where we differ is he rolls while I fumble. Sometimes I get so caught up in perfecting that I lose sight of what is most important.
My late husband and I traveled the world together. I’m still wound tight, but his itineraries had itineraries. Looking back, I wonder how much I lost in that.
I’ve seen it show up everywhere since. An unwillingness to let go. Gripping something so tight that other things slip by.
You know the grip. We all have one.
Hello, sword of blame and judgment. I’m grateful I set those down years ago. The heaviest, the one of righteousness, that one still lives in the arsenal. It’s dusty. It’s also what keeps the edges of my square sharp. That sword though is slowly dulling as are my edges.
The last couple of years have been filled with loss. I lost my late husband and my best friend both unexpectedly, and then my daughter to college, followed by a whole litany of change. Some planned, some spontaneous, some out of left field. All of it has taught me more lessons than I asked for. More than I care to count. Many of which I am still trying to piece together as I piece myself back together.
While this 26 day adventure could read as an Eat, Pray, Love like midlife reconciliation, it’s not. It’s just pure fun.
Ireland first. Then onto parts of the world I only dreamed of discovering.
So here’s where it began.
From the Dublin airport, we were driven straight to Adare Manor, in a small, quaint village in County Limerick. This pivot from our original plan arrived last week. We couldn’t return from Ireland without a glimpse of what we’d only seen in movies. But the immediacy of the drive meant picking up the basics at the Manor pro shop, which Dave didn’t mind, and the manor boutique, which I relished. The local wool and cashmere artisan designed her brand around creativity and sustainability (Cayo). How could I not want to support her… on Delta’s dime.
We both found exactly what we needed for the day ahead.
That first night, in what we arrived with, we wandered into the village for a pint and a prosecco. Then the local grocery store. For a hairbrush. Seriously, I arrived with no toiletries but somehow with a camera I still don’t know how to use and my favorite handbags, the ones that made the travel list.
The woman who packed 26 vitamin bags. Buying a hairbrush in a village shop in Ireland while staying at a Manor so precisely manicured that each blade of grass on this Central Park-like property (one acre less, in fact) seems as curated as each of my packing cubes. The irony.
I grew up with twins for close friends each with beautiful wavy red hair. A far cry from my stick-straight blonde. They could wash and go on the fly. The perfectionist and future banker in me (yes, I started my career as one) needed all the product and all the tools.
My hair has never been my friend. Shower and go looks profoundly different on me.
I had someone once tell me my hair was too straight. What does that even mean anyway? I am still untangling that one.
So thank you, Adare Grocery.
The next morning we met Keiran, our driver, from the town of Adare. He knows the region like the back of his hand. Every winding road. Every little village. He took us first to Bunratty, a 15th-century castle, exactly the medieval winding staircase you’d imagine. We climbed to the top and got the most epic photo. Irish luck. Two people kissing with an Irish flag blowing behind them.
From there, through the hills, to the shores of Lahinch where we spotted a few Irish surfers, then onto the Cliffs of Moher.
What do I say about the Cliffs of Moher.
Dramatic. Epically green from continuous days of rain. And windy. I mean blow-me-over kind of wind.
It didn’t matter that I didn’t have a hairbrush. There was no controlling my hair anyway.
Nor did it matter that the only thing I’d arrived in Ireland with was a pair of tennis shoes. The ones I wore on the plane.
Because that’s exactly what the day needed.
On the way back we stopped at an old Irish pub, Fitz’s, in Doolin, for seafood chowder, brown bread, and a pint of Guinness, of course. Then back to Adare, where we were finally reunited with our luggage.
A shower awaits. One where I can wash my hair and brush it with a brush of my own and all the product to hold down my locks.
But standing at the edge of those cliffs today, with none of it. No plan. No luggage. No hairbrush. No control over a single strand of hair in that wind.
I didn’t miss any of it.
Turns out, I am after all these years, finally learning to roll.
Always EDITing,
Leslie
P.S. My writing usually comes from reflection. Experiencing something, then letting it land. The next few weeks look different. Less reflected. More lived. Sent from the road, through the lens of a camera I’m still learning. The cadence will wobble. Stay with me. I’ll be here, just in motion.
Lost anything along the way? I am curious what other travel snafus you’ve encountered. I am certain I am not alone here.
As you say, at least your luggage went to Paris.
Good for you—learning to more comfortably roll!
My take on the trip debacles is—they make a good story, so relish them all! ☘️
This is timing me perfectly. We've got a multi-stop trip coming up in about a month — Switzerland, then a river cruise, then a few days in the Netherlands — and I've been trying to plan tight enough to fit it all in a carry-on, partly because losing a bag with three different climates' worth of clothes in it feels like exactly the kind of thing that would happen to me.
Reading this, I'm wondering if the carry-on obsession is really about packing light, or about trying to control the one thing that's actually uncontrollable.