THE NAME OF THE GAME IS FLEXIBLE

 

One of the secrets of traveling well is to be flexible.  Actually, one of the secrets of living well is to be flexible (and it goes without saying that this is also one of the secrets of doing yoga well.)  When I started planning this grand adventure 14 months ago, I spread out a map of Europe and said, “OK, where would I like to go?”  Or, to be honest, I said, “where would I like to go if I could get a house exchange to go there?”  I had in mind London (which I got to begin our journey) and Greek islands (which didn’t end up in the final itinerary.  No house exchanges. I tried, believe me, I tried.)  I wanted a house exchange in Aix En Provence, I got a nice 2-bedroom apartment in downtown Rennes.  I wanted a flat in Venice or Sorento, I got an apartment near the ancient walled city of Alghero in Sardinia.  At one time I had a 3 bedroom house in Florence with a pool; that disappeared and was replaced by a flat in a small coastal village, overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, in Spain.  I tried for an apartment in Rome, I got a beach house outside of it.  I tried for Amsterdam and got it; queried Slovenia on a lark and ended up with a nice home in a tiny fishing village.  And to my unending surprise, wound up with Denmark, which was never on my “what if?” list but is now on my looking-forward-to-going-there list. 

Flexible.  The reason I queried Slovenia house exchanges was because I looked at a map to see what was close to Venice.  Ah, Slovenia.  I’d never even known where the damn country was, and certainly never had an inclination to travel there.  But once I threw out a baited hook and Nina (from Slovenia) swam to the surface and bit, I was hooked as much as she.  Who knew that Slovenia is the “new Prague?”  That it has its own Alps, coast, farms, and castles?  That it’s hip and beautiful and filled with nice people?  I’d never have known if I hadn’t had to expand my horizons past Venice.

 

So for a house exchanger to be successful, she must be flexible.  And for a trip to be successful, it must be flexible. Which brings me to today’s experience.  As I had planned our month in England, I had built almost all of our sightseeing around rail, bus or tube travel.  We’re urban people.  We like to travel by train; we aren’t fazed by subway systems; we enjoy a good city bus ride.  So movement around London, day trips out of it – all by mass transit. 
 

But then I decided we should rent a car to go to a pocket of lovely ancient culture in Southeast England:  the fabled medieval town of Rye, and its neighboring burgs whose lineage are so old that they hail all the way back to William the Conqueror – Battle (as in Battle of Hastings) and Hastings (as in Battle of.)  And the ruined, atmospheric wreck of Bodiam Castle, a scant 9 miles out of Battle.  To experience this wonderland of Norman Conquest history, I figured a car was the best bet. 
 

And so off Jeff and I went this morning to our local Portabello Road car rental outlet to hire a nice little 4-door Fiat manual to tootle down to the Land of 1066 (this is actually what some very savvy marketer has created as the new moniker, the new label, for SE England:  1066 Land.  In America we’d have “Sprawl Land” or “Downtowns Decimated by WalMart Land” or “The Same Damn Stores Everywhere Like We Need Another Au Ban Pain Land.”)  Off we trotted in the warm spring morn and arrived at the car rental shop, ready to roll.  Then we spent 15 minutes discussing ways to avoid leaving London in a rental car that didn’t involve actually motoring over any London city streets since they are crazy.  Then we got into the cute little 4-door Fiat with a stick shift and Jeff pulled out onto the street and . . . .  we started frantically jabbering, “which lane do you go into?  That lane?  No, that lane? Is there anyone coming?  Which way?  I don’t care, all ways!” Then we realized that the stick shift had to be shifted with the left hand, not the right, while guiding the car on the other side of the road than we’re accustomed to guiding a car down (I won’t say the “wrong” side of the road since that’s so judgmental but it’s no freak of fate that only UK drivers motor up and down the “other” side of the road .. . .  and being PC in describing the way they drive as being “otherwise oriented” rather than “wrong side of the bloody road” is nice but it’s not the truth . . . . )  It was a hideous experience.  I was clenched into an S-bend of pure tension, Jeff was trying to guide the car down a street with construction, detours, work lorries, pedestrians, morning traffic and God knows what else – a circus parade, stampeding mustangs, warring wolf packs, who knows?  It was no-holds-barred driving with caution signs and piles of asphalt rubble and the odd jaywalking pedestrian to liven it all up. 
 

After 5 blocks, a few near misses and a sideswiped side mirror incident, we looked at each other and said, “is this fun?  Is this what the words ‘relaxing vacation’ conjour?” No, we said, it is not.  And we did a U turn, drove the car back the 5 blocks, parked it in the rental car lot, walked back into the rental office and slapped the keys and contract onto the counter and said, “we’re TRAIN people” and left.  It was one of my proudest moments:  to not buy into the classic macho American born-to-drive shit, to realize that hours spent in white-knuckled motoring is no fun for anyone involved, and to act on it post haste – all an affirmation of sane traveling.  Yay for us. 
 

So I hit the web when we got back to the flat, found that there are train connections from London to Rye, Rye to Hastings, Hastings to Battle, and Battle to London and that these connections are every half hour or so and that they are fast, safe and enjoyable and  that they would cost less than renting the blasted death trap on wheels, and an hour later Jeff, Max and I are slipping through the turnstiles on the London underground on our way to St. Pancras Station to catch a train to Rye.  And in buying our train tickets, we find out that we can get a round-trip ticket for the 3 of us going to all the places we’d planned on going via car for 40 pounds less than renting a car.  So we picked up some beer, sandwiches and coffees, and slid into a comfortable seat by the floor to ceiling window, and let the fast train hit 130 MPH to ferry us from London to Rye in under 1 ½ hours.  No crazy London streets, no traffic jams, no arguments over which way to turn, which road to take, etc, etc, etc.  Chats, a card game or two, a beer and a snack, and relaxed travel. 
 

Along the way we were treated to vast fields of flowering mustard, swathes of brilliant yellow blossoms stretching for acres.  Interspersed with the huge squares of lemon yellow were brilliant, spring green meadows, that special aching green of spring. The first green, the rebirth-after-winter’s-sepia-tones green.  The shade of green that makes you feel a bit teary-eyed because it is such a vital color.  It shouldn’t even be called merely “green,” it should have its own word because the green of an April field, sprouting with buoyant new tufts of life, is unlike any other green.  It’s spring green – spreen.  Entirely its own shade of emerald.  A statement of continuation, of rebirth, of vitality.  Spreen. 
 

And dotting the spreen fields were the other ancient symbol of fertility and new life: lambs.  Adorable tremulous-legged, inquisitive-faced, scampering lambs, attached by invisible guy lines to their wooly mothers.  Spring lambs, scampering unsteadily away from the sound of the whooshing speed train, white zephyrs across the spreen fields beside the exploding golden swathes of mustardseed.  Spring was having its own parade that had nothing to do with Easter bonnets or the possible rebirth of any poor murdered demigod.  Spring filled the canvas across which the quiet, speeding train moved, a series of impressionistic dashes among the blindingly vivid colors of a warm English April day. 
 

Flexible.