By Frederick Wolstenholme
My Dad, the Almost Pilot
My parents don’t vacation often. And when they do, they drive. The last time my father went to Europe was 10 years ago. The time before that was on his honeymoon in the early 70s.
We could never figure out why he preferred driving to flying. Then one day he told my sister and I that he was just three hours away from getting his pilot’s license when he was younger. But, on that last flight, he crash landed. The plane spun and hit the snowbank. I could see then why he didn’t travel by plane often. It was a traumatic experience.
As life changing as that experience must have been for him, it wasn’t the full picture. He confessed to me a few weeks ago that the crash wasn’t the reason why he quit. In fact, he had crash landed, his roommate had crash landed and someone else they knew crash landed; the only common denominator was their instructor. It took my mom saying something about it to convince my dad to stop flying.
A Surprise Bucket List
Out of the blue last year, we were all talking about travel and bucket lists, or maybe just ‘the next place’ we’re going to go to. My sister was there, too, and we started considering the possibility of European family vacations. In my mind, Clark Griswold was pictured. In my sister’s was probably Euro Disney. I’m not sure what my parents pictured, but not long after, my dad surprised us all when he said that Italy and Greece were on his bucket list.
This was astonishing. Always driving dad; 500,000 kms on his car dad; driving to my college grad instead of flying dad was now listing places that couldn’t possibly involve driving to. He had, in my opinion, done it to himself.
A Plan is Hatched
It has been over a year since our improvised strategy started to emerge: my wife, my sister, and I slowly started to drop hints to my parents about a possible family trip abroad, honing in on my dad’s dream of visiting Italy.
We poked and prodded and tried to convince them to come to Europe. It was excuse after excuse. First my dad said “we don’t have passports”. We tried to convince my mom and she said “we don’t have passports”. Soon, this idea turned into more of an obsession. Moving on to the next logical step, we printed out passport forms, and offered to fill them in and pay the fees. They demurred.
And so the hints continued over the months but the excuses changed. I like to think that their resistance, like water carving out its niche, slowly eroded with the convincing arguments we put forth, but it was more likely the annoyance of us asking them four times a week that did them in.
They Finally Cave
One day last spring, Dad responded to our question about Europe with, “I wouldn’t mind, but your mom doesn’t want to go.” We pushed to leave mom at home, suggesting that he could come alone. That didn’t work. Shortly after, we asked mom, and she came back with “I would love to, but your dad doesn’t want to go.”
Much like they’ve done their entire lives, they each left it up to others’ impression that the other one was the cause for stopping something, whether it was flying lessons or European travel. Once we got them in the same room and explained what each of them were saying, their excuses evaporated. After that, it was more of a mumbling without excuse.
These hints turned into near-begging on my behalf. Not because having a possible baby-sitter on the trip would be a bonus (it would!). Not because it would be bring ‘civilization’ to the uninitiated (it wouldn’t, and they aren’t). But because it would be a memorable trip, and would last a lifetime. What is the point of having a bucket list if there’s no attempt to tick items off?
And then I casually dropped in that there would be wine and soccer if we plan it right. “I’m in!” he said more enthusiastically than I have ever heard before. I had done it; I had dug myself a hole so deep that there would only be one way out of it.
The Visions of My Obedient Imagination
I researched and researched and got prices and bus schedules. I contacted soccer club facebook accounts and airbnbers. It has slowly come together. I took out travel books at the library and gave them to my parents; I started going over my old Italian courses and watching movies and listening to some Pavarotti and Bocelli. I was trying to immerse myself. And then I pulled out an old copy of “the Art of Travel” by de Botton.
Alain de Botton tells a story of the Duc de Esseintes, the protagonist of JK Huysman’s novel A Rebours. The character lives a voluntarily reclusive lifestyle on his property outside Paris, and gets the urge to go to London after reading a Charles Dickens novel. His servants pack his bags and he goes off to Gare St. Lazare where he waits for his train. In the meantime he has already dressed in his English tweed and bowler hat and is killing time in an English bookstore. When he gets hungry, he goes to the English pub next door and orders an English meal of ox-tail soup. Not long before the train is set to leave the station, the Duc decides it’s not quite worth it.
“What was the good of moving when a person could travel so wonderfully sitting in a chair? Wasn’t he already in London, whose smells, weather, citizens, food, and even cutlery were all about him? What could he expect to find over there except fresh disappointments?’ Still seated at his table, he reflected, ‘I must have been suffering from some mental aberration to have rejected the visions of my obedient imagination and to have believed like any old ninny that it was necessary, interesting and useful to travel abroad.’”
Was this me?
The Imprecise Science of Planning for Everyone
Each time I mentioned museums or art galleries, or asked my parents if they had ideas about what to do I always received a similar response. “I’m not planning anything.” “You said you would take care of it.” “I just want to drink wine, go on a wine tour and watch some soccer games.” Despite their non-committal comments, I gave my mom a travel book and asked her to take a look. Meanwhile, knowing we’d be there for 6 weeks, my intense study of how to spend our time and money continued.
My wife is thankfully not too picky about what to see and do. In her wisdom, she has reminded me that our daughter, 18 months old, might not be up for climbing to the top of the Duomo in Florence, or walking the 8 kms around the Vatican museums, so maybe I should gear some activities towards her. Bec, my wife, wants to take a cooking course, have some time to shop, and go to Murano if possible.
I started to plan some things for just me and my mom, who enjoys similar things, and would also be much more adventurous than what I thought my dad or Bec would be. That would prove to be another mistake when we booked the two of us into the necropolis tour beneath the Vatican. When we told my dad, he seemed quite disappointed. This forced us back to the Vatican cap in hand, begging for another spot in their odd process of obtaining another one of the 12 or 15 tickets a tour they give out.
Imagination Prepares to Meet Reality
We leave in less than two days, and I wonder if I’ve built this up like the Duc built up England. Am I forcing mental aberrations upon my family instead of letting them decide what Italy is?
How will they reconcile lush Tuscan countrysides and singing gondoliers with possible pickpockets and smog that settles into the city during winter like a duvet on a cold evening? Will my parents enjoy their time as I drag them from tourist trap to tourist trap and teach them about illegal immigrants trying to tie cheaply made bracelets on them in exchange for 20 Euros.
Is my anticipation of the trip too great? Have I painted a picture that can’t compete with the reality of traveling? The packing and repacking, the unknowingness and the foreignness, not to mention the foreign language. The never being at home feeling mixed with a longing to experience new things.
Giving My Parents Room to Surprise Me
Soon after giving my mom the Rome Rough Guide travel book, I came by and had asked her if she had anything that she might want to see. Yes! She did and she was quite excited about it. She got out the book and had her page dogeared and her pencil out. Out of all the things that the Eternal City has to offer, she wanted to see not the Colosseum or the Vatican or the Circus Maximus, she wanted to see Mt. Testaccio and Ignatius Loyola’s room.
It might have been at that moment that I knew this would be a good trip. My parents, whom my sister and I figured we had figured out, weren’t quite the squares that we thought they were. Things weren’t always what they seemed and that might just be the best thing to have learned and seen since this whole thing started.
Now, however, is the waiting game. The calm before the storm.