Traveling is an act of faith, start to finish. If you have no faith, you stay home.
You pay an unseen force an unseemly amount of money to take you and your bags to a place you’ve never been. You hand your suitcases to someone who puts a tag on them but makes no promises about actually sending them where you want to go. You get into a metal tube over which you have no control, watch wings you didn’t build flex alarmingly in the turbulence, believe the screen that shows your progress along a flight path, and assume no one is intent on blowing up the plane.
Faith rewarded, we landed in Budapest after two flights during which we were comfortable and well-fed. But suddenly it felt a bit disconcerting, or maybe exhilarating, to not have a plan. We knew there would be taxis, of course, but would there be a cheaper alternative?
Sometimes when you don’t know the next steps, it’s best to just stand still for a bit and consider. Other times it’s best to just keep moving in a plausible direction. We collected our baggage, and with nothing else to do, we moved in the direction of any sign that said “Exit” in English. It didn’t much matter what the other signs said, because we couldn’t read them.
As we walked, a sign appeared over the heads of two young women behind a counter. “Airport Shuttle” sounded promising. We asked, they answered, and the cost was half of taxi fare. A minivan would fill with passengers heading in more or less the same direction as us. Round trip: $70.00. By faith, we paid. I hoped we’d remember to notify them when we were ready to return.
“Turn left down there, wait for this receipt number to show up on the screen, get the van number it shows, go outside, and wait.” By faith, we turned left down there, waited 5 minutes until the screen showed us our number, went outside with a Dutch woman who acted as inexperienced as us, waited until the van arrived, and by faith got in. We were following each other. Cliché: Blind leading the blind.
The Dutch woman has a PhD in psychiatry and was coming to make a presentation on the positive aspects of ADHD at a conference. Delightful. I invited her to teach a course for Lifelong Learners with no offer of help with transportation, nor compensation. “Sounds very inviting,” she said in a tone that definitely meant she wouldn’t even consider it. Laughs.
We dropped off everyone else, then us in front of a building that looked vaguely like where we wanted to be, but with no obvious entrance. Fortunately we stood uncertainly for a bit while contemplating our next move. Fortunately because in those moments Nora realized she’d left her huge black bag on the paused van. She ran, rapped on the window, recovered the bag.
Faith rewarded. We had arrived. Now what?