Without Reservations_ The Travels of an Independent Woman - Alice Steinbach [110]
What advice would you give to someone who sets out to travel alone with more than just tourism in mind?
First of all, I would advise anyone who wants to experience something more than just the tourist’s view of a city to stay in one place—or each place visited—for as long as possible. Try to settle in for a while, even if it’s only for a week. There is a saying among mountain climbers that you can learn more from climbing one mountain one hundred times than one hundred mountains one time. It’s equally as true of travel, I think. Given a choice, I’d always opt to go to fewer rather than more destinations. And as I said, find a hotel or apartment in a neighborhood that feels like a real neighborhood. It’s very comforting to recognize the man at the newsstand or the clerk at the bookstore or the woman at the market. They may not become your friends, but they do become familiar faces. Second, I would say you should set out each day with an agenda. You don’t have to follow it, but you should have a plan in mind. It’s very easy to just wander around without setting some goals for yourself. Often I only headed in the direction of the museum or market on my list, then found something along the way that changed everything. Spontaneity is important but so is some planning.
What was the most important thing you learned about yourself on the trip described in Without Reservations?
So many things, it’s hard to pin down the most important. Probably, though—in addition to learning to listen more and talk less—I learned that to be a truly independent person, you must first allow yourself to be dependent. If you’re going to travel alone, you have to allow other people to help you. This has always been hard for me. I like to think of myself as an “independent” woman, someone who can get the job done without help. But when you don’t speak the language or if you get sick while traveling, you don’t have your usual fail-safe system to fall back on. You have to trust that other people will want to help you. And they usually do! When I was ill in London, my new friends took care of me in a way that I would never have allowed at home. But I had no choice. It was a very important lesson—and a very belated one—in my development. And, I am happy to say, it has lasted beyond this trip.
Now that you’re home, how have you incorporated the lessons you learned into your daily life?
At first it was very hard to readjust to the rigidity of “normal” life. Not so much with my family; my grown sons were both living away from home, pursuing graduate degrees, one in law, the other in physics. Still, having said that, I do believe that my “sabbatical” did change the way in which my sons and I related. I could be imagining this, but it seemed as though we all respected each other even more than we had before. Our lives had separated a little bit during that year, and it was as though we had each learned how to see one another standing whole, as individuals. The real adjustment upon returning was learning to meet again the responsibilities of a demanding job.
At the time, I was writing a twice-a-week column for the Baltimore Sun, along with the occasional long feature article. I found it difficult to be confined, more or less, to sitting at a desk and to meeting deadlines that loomed over and over again. I felt like the sorcerer’s apprentice: As soon as I finished one column, another was due. Instead of getting used to the work that had seemed so “normal” before my trip, I grew more and more frustrated. Finally, after four months of serious thought about what to do, I went to the editor of the paper and proposed a job change. How would he feel about my giving up the column and returning to the road to write feature stories, I asked him. To my great relief, he agreed to my idea. It was one