Its All About the Stories

...and the experiences and the photos and the friendships and the ...

But today its about the stories.  All great trips, as witnessed in the best travel narratives by Paul Theroux or A.A. Gill or Robyn Davidson, are about things that go wrong or at least not according to plan.  I had the pleasure this week of being a panelist at the Meet-Plan-Go event in Seattle and of discussing travel in Japan at an event here on Bainbridge Island.  And what really got my juices going were sharing the stories of travel.

Asked of my most harrowing experience on a lengthy trip to Europe, I told the story of being on a TAP Air Portugal flight departing the Atlantic island of Madeira and, half way down the short runway having an engine blow (due to a bird strike).  When the 737 came to a shuttering G-force stop and turned off the runway, there was at most 100 feet left before the runway ended and the Atlantic Ocean began (after a several hundred foot drop!).  The truly scary moment was 4 hours later when we reboarded that same aircraft with the same flight crew and blasted down the runway for the second time knowing what could have happened.  Clearly all went fine the second time since I'm still alive to tell about it.   And tell I do!

The stories of travel don't often come out of what was planned but rather out of what actually happened that could not be predicted in advance.  Some stories are scary (see above) and some reflect our willingness to expand our personal boundaries (eating sashimi for the first time in a Japanese Roakan) and some are about bonding (the close bond created by four photographers on a life-altering journey to Guatemala).

Journey On!