The Itinerary for Today

David from authorblog asks: Are you a nervous traveller?

I am not a nervous traveller... but I should be.
In my eagerness to see the world, I have done some pretty stupid things. Like travel to Italy. alone. with no reservations, maps or idea of how to get where I'm going.
but I get ahead myself....

When we lived in the Azores, we had the opportunity to hop (hop a military flight) to almost any destination. There was paperwork involved and a need to be very flexible and not easily disappointed (one could wait for hours only to be told that there wasn't room) and not be in too much of a hurry to return, because the flights coming back could be full-- but that kind of "fly by the seat of your pants" traveling really appealed to me.
However, I was very pregnant (are you catching a kind of theme running through my blog? I either have an elephant's gestation period or I have too many children) so hopping wasn't an option for me right away.

When baby #3 was nearly 3 months old, I thought it would be the perfect time to hop to Germany.

My husband saw baby and I off (I was nursing, he couldn't stay behind with the others) and I landed excitedly in Germany. Visions of sausages, castles and full-cheeked fraus holding frothy mugs of beer danced in my head--did you hear the screech of a turntable needle dragging across your favourite vinyl?
Well I should have.

I was packing a baby and luggage for an undetermined length of stay. I carried it all into the base's hotel registration office where I learned that their family rooms were full and would be until the second coming.
I explained that I didn't really need a family room, just "one bed with a toilet nearby will suffice", but I was told I couldn't have a baby in those rooms.

So, I did what I normally do in those situations.
I cried.
Not there of course, I said, "thank you" and wandered aimlessly out on the road trying to determine my best crying place. Baggage, baby and I walked for a while until we found the BX. I ordered a sausage, sat down and ate it while contemplating my next move.

To spare you the long story (you're welcome), the Reader's Digest version is: we had a place to stay for three of the 6 days we were in Germany. One night in the hotel lobby (I wasn't loitering, they told me to come back and hang out in case there was a cancellation), one night in the air terminal, one night in a room at another base a few miles away (a base that had no food nearby), one night in a room out in the German community--with a lovely mural of an orgy on the wall and one night, my tenacity to get a cancellation paid off.
By then, the hotel staff and I were great friends. They held my luggage in the day and visited with me in the evening. One front desk clerk drove me to Taco Bell when they did their chow run. Another actually looked sad to be going on her days off, not knowing what would become of us.
I flew home exhausted, determined never to do that again. I had seen nothing but the base while waiting around to try to score a room for the baby and I.

My next trip was Italy.
It was just as spectacular, but I did it alone (no baby this time) so I was able to be careless and walk dark highways alone in the pouring rain and sleep outside a terminal in cold, wet clothes all night before my flight was then cancelled.

But that story is for another day...