Plucky Survivors See Europe: Epilogue
I’m finally home but getting here was more of a challenge than it should have been.
I got up at the equivalent of 10:30pm Eastern time to make it to the airport for my 9am flight from Amsterdam to Atlanta. That little jaunt took nine hours, a long sleepless journey since I couldn’t get comfortable enough to get any sleep. The lie-flat beds in Delta One are nice, but I kind of don’t fit in them and there is just too much going on for me to be able to relax. So, I watched some movies – “Devil Wears Prada 2” (fine) and “Project Hail Mary” (loved it) and got into Atlanta around 1pm, a little late because of a late departure.
This only gave me an hour for passport control and customs before my flight to Savannah started boarding, but it went very smoothly and I got on the plane for the quick hour-long flight home with plenty of time to spare. I was exhausted but had gotten a second wind because I was so close to my own bed. We pushed back from the gate and… sat there. And sat. And sat some more.
Thunderstorms were the culprit, although other planes were taking off so I’m not sure why we weren’t. Regardless of the reason, we sat on the plane on the tarmac for over two hours. It was hot on the plane and there was a screaming baby in the row behind me, so it was my version of hell.
Apparently, we burned through so much fuel just sitting there that we had to return to the gate to get more, where we sat for another hour before being told that they couldn’t refuel because of the lightning, so they told everyone to get off the plane since it was “more comfortable” in the terminal. Sure. We’ll go with that. At least the A/C was working, and I was able to sit far away from the screaming baby.
Nearly two hours later, they put us back on the plane and we pushed back from the gate… and then sat in line to take off for another 90 minutes. By the time it was all said and done, the flight from Atlanta to Savannah took almost as long as the flight from Amsterdam to Atlanta.
But I made it back to Savannah and walked out of the terminal to see a Tesla Cybertruck pulling up at the curb. Tell me you’re in America without saying you’re in America.
And so, Plucky Survivors See Europe has come to an end, but let’s take a look at the trip by the numbers, shall we?
Miles driven: 6,838
Miles walked: 300.64
Countries visited: 13
Cities visited: 30-35 depending on how you count (30 with a hotel stay, five more where I explored a city and saw sights or did something)
Museums visited: 60 (from the Guggenheim in Bilbao to the Disgusting Food Museum in Berlin and everything in between)
Sights seen: 94 (from the Trevi Fountain in Rome to the Castelo de Sao Jorge in Lisbon)
Attractions: 12 (from earthquakes to Barbie)
Shows: 22 (from cabaret in Berlin to the West End in London)
Markets: 23
Pride celebrations: 5
Those numbers contain some truly special experiences. I walked in a pride march in the shadow of the Colosseum in Rome. I was in Barcelona when Spain won the World Cup. I was in Nice when they marked the 10-year anniversary of a terrorist attack with light and beauty. I saw people’s passionate collections of everything from carnival rides to phonographs to pianolas to pigs. I saw and did and ate and met and walked in places I had been wanting to go my entire life.
It certainly was not without its challenges. If I ever suggest doing something like this again, slap me. Hard. This was a once-in-a-lifetime experience and I intend to keep it that way.
But there are places I do want to go back to. I fell in love with Seville and Prague abd Amsterdam and Barcelona and Florence and Salzburg. I feel like I didn’t have enough time in Paris and London and Rome and Lake Como because of timing, health issues, and/or the heat. I would love to someday explore the smaller towns and cities that I didn’t have a chance to see because I was too busy getting to wherever it was that I was going.
In just a couple of weeks it’ll be twenty years since Mary and I started the Plucky Survivors road trips. It began as a lark; a silly way of celebrating my fortieth birthday, our friendship, and the weird and wacky part of Americana that we were both obsessed with. Biggest ball of twine?! Sign me up!
Each time we wandered the highways and byways, we looked for themes that would tie the whole trip together other than geography.
The first trip in 2006 through the South was all about legacy – the things we leave behind for people to remember that we were here, both big and small, from Presidential libraries to giant balls of twine. The 2007 trip through the Midwest was about the journey to that legacy – the things you do, the places you see, and the people you meet along the way. Our 2008 trip through the Deep South was about preservation – enduring through the past until it becomes our present and our future. In 2009, we traveled the Eastern seaboard on the 20th anniversary of friendship and the theme that emerged was gratitude – how lucky we were to be able to do these trips and to have each other.
So, what is the theme for the Plucky Europe adventure? I’ve been thinking about that a lot and what I kept coming back to is time. This trip was about time.
Maybe it’s because I’m staring down the barrel of my 60th birthday, feeling my mortality in a different kind of way than I have felt it many times before because of things like cancer, but I’ve been seeing time in the shadows of everything lately.
I saw it at the museums I visited, not just in the preservation of the past but the amount of it that people have devoted to creating shrines to the things that mean something to them. I saw it in the buildings I went into that took 400 years to construct. I saw it in the shows I went to as I considered the time it took to master a dance step or an aerial act or a seemingly impossible magic trick. I saw in the Pride marches I participated with tens of thousands of people celebrating how far we’ve come and acknowledging how far we still need to go.
There never seems to be the right amount of time. There’s either too much of it or not enough, but I think what this trip highlighted for me is that instead of swimming against its ebb or flow, we should appreciate where it has taken us, where we’re at, and where we’re going with however much of it we have left.
I’ll paraphrase a line from a show that I saw in London… live more, think less, and explore as if all of it is ending.
See you on the road.
