Wasn’t the Trip of a Lifetime

(taking you back to The Holidays 2021)

By the time of The Great Dumpster Fire of 2020, I resigned that I would never have the chance to travel abroad. But then I met CheeseTed, the CheeseHead, and after dating for only a couple months he bought us plane tickets for Switzerland, and thereby made a big investment in the relationship with delightful me, NatureNikki.

I think he began to wonder how this squirrel he met online would do traveling (he being stuck with said squirrel for the duration). They say that travel has the power to claim a relationship.

We started with a simple overnight camper trip to some local mountains. Then a five-day camper trip to the next state. But these had no real stress on the line. No (timed) reservations means no (mental) reservations. From these two successful road trips, we grew comfortable in the fact that we could stand each other’s company. Which, as jaded Gen Xers approaching 50, that is saying something.

An international trip, on the other hand–that was big girl pants. Being just a year after the world came to a screeching halt, there were some hoops to jump through along with bookings and paperwork and passports and COVID vaccines. And then, the most exciting part of the whole trip: Planning The Itinerary. The trip of a lifetime only comes along, let’s say, once in a lifetime.

 
During these tense days of jumping through hoops in Travel in the Times of COVID, we fantasized about what we would do in CH once we got there.

“Pick three things you want to do,” CheeseTed said, after all, he had just had back surgery 6 weeks before and we had to take it easy.
 
… (Deer in the headlights) …

“Don’t worry. We will go to Europe again. This won’t be our only trip.”

I just met this guy online, of all places! Which is the strangest thing to say because online is the absence of “places.” How would we do going to “real” places? What if “our” (like the many who came before) never materialized?
 
“The Trip of a Lifetime,” he opined (which you do in these situations, opine), “has to be perfect. Whereas one of many trips in a lifetime … there’s no pressure to get all the best in one trip. We’ll go back again.”

If COVID taught me one thing (alas, it taught many more), it was that there was life after COVID. I vowed to embrace the mindset of “trips” in my lifetime. Resulting in this overthinker making a much longer list of places to visit.

“We each pick three and leave the rest to chance.”
 
Eventually I whittled it down to: any castle in any alp, any arboretum, and the Lindt Chocolate Factory in Zurich. His were: a Christmas Market, an Old Town / City Center, and a French restaurant. Narrowing it down to these six adventures gave us the opportunity to be flexible with enough time to try again if we loved or hated any of those experiences. I snuck in an extra there, did you notice? With the any castle in any alp (that’s two things to see right there.)
 
As per where to stay, the picked adventures decided for us: Zurich (for the Lindt Chocolate World HQ and bonus Christmas Markets), Lausanne (for the French restaurant and bonus Old Town), and an array of castles and alps in between.

Left on the cutting room floor was the Matterhorn (of my Disneyland-filled youth) and the Jungfrau Alps that Rick Steve’s said was a MUST SEE and I FOMO! OMG! Trusting this “trips” mentality was a leap of faith as much as having a new relationship is.

I posed myself a provocation a while back, paragraphs ago: Travel has the power to claim a relationship. Claim, coloquially, as in “be the death of”. Or… by the dictionary’s more positive spin: “an assertion of fact”…

We are Out This Door.