Say, Does the Noon Bus to Montreal Continue on to Munich?
Flexibility is a virtue of the highest order when it comes to traveling in other countries.
The tourist is advised to stay open to new experiences, to embrace cultural differences, to recognize the commonality of the human drama, and to not try to over-direct the experience.
My goodness, the point of a big vacation isn’t to plan it out down to the last quarter hour! It is to introduce a little ‘give’ into our over-regulated and over-stretched lives.
So when you are seated in the lobby of a hotel a few minutes before the appointed time, waiting for your tour guide to come into view to announce the start of the excursion to Munich, and she instead strides into that very same lobby and announces that the tour bus will be leaving for Montreal in twenty minutes flat, try not to be thrown for too much of a loop.
This is one of those times when it is wise to take the broad view. The really broad view, measured, say, in light years.
Montreal, Munich...from the far reaches of the Andromeda neighborhood of the galaxy, I doubt that they are scarcely distinguishable from one another at all.
Cities Somewhere On That Blue Planet Over There would be as close as your average Andromedean could likely come.
It is above all not a time for alarm, or confusion, or moping. For Pete’s sake, go with the flow, my friend, get with the program! So you thought you were on your way to a Bavarian beer festival, big deal!
Bavarian beer festivals are not the only game in town. Isn’t that what travel is all about, the unexpected, the accidental, the tangential?
These are all good thoughts to keep in mind, and in any event is a better course of action than slumping into a fetal position on the marble floor of the lobby and crying like a third-grader.
This would draw attention in a way that you don’t want and undercuts this image you’ve been cultivating of a casually sophisticated traveler who knows how to roll with the punches.
I’d say too, do not sell Montreal short.
For all you know you know you have always had a secret hankering to visit Montreal. Secret even to yourself. Anything is possible.
It is a good time to consider that the fine Montrealers, as I believe these citizens are called, are likely wonderful people, noted for their hospitality and openness to strangers.
Further, it is possible, even likely, that they have fine beers in Montreal, danged fine beers, seeing as how that is the thing these days, what with craft brewing pouring out the ears of every city with so much as a single stoplight. In any event, their brews may be fully the equal of the beer in Munich.
So you thought you were on one continent, but instead you are on another. Again, what of it? These little changes of plans are what make a trip memorable, and will provide many a laugh for you and the little lady in upcoming years.
Speaking of, the little lady I mean, you wonder where she is. It occurs to you that you haven’t seen her for some length of time.
She is quite a bit more organized that you, and unlike you, doesn’t let her mind drift when instructions come in over the PA system in hotel lobbies, airports, train terminals, and seagoing vessels.
Your mind by contrast is not particularly receptive to new information even in the best of times. It can be best compared to the parched clay-like soil underfoot in your neck of the woods when that soil is packed into the pavement-like hardness typical of the end of the summer season. The rain, when it finally comes, simply drains off entirely, leaving the poor dirt no better off than it was before.Or brain, to complete the simile.
As to where she actually is, I'm back to the little lady now, and given these differences in temperament and outlook, and given her general resolved and determined nature, it seems likely that she is at this damned beer festival in Munich.
Bless her, she’ll have to tell you all about it, and once you reconnect you will have to tell her all about Montreal.
Well, it can’t be helped now, this Montreal business, as it seems entirely unlikely that a bus is going to pull up to the front door of the hotel any moment now with the telltale word “Munich” on its front, doesn't it? That would be asking a lot of any form of transportation.
You wonder idly, as you sit and wait for the Montreal expedition to commence, you wonder idly where exactly it was that you went wrong.
Most likely back there in the early days of this trip, somewhere in one of those first few airports, when tour groups sprung into action like startled geese prodded by their tour guides then collided and intermingled with one another like flocks of birds on flight paths that intersected at right angles.
It’s only natural that there would be some loss of efficiency in such a collision of forces.
These things happen, and between the brown shorts and the brown sandals and the brown hats and the brown shirts, there’s little to distinguish one group from the other, or to particularly know which one you're in.
Fine people! Perfectly fine people!
It’s just that at a certain age we all start to look a bit alike, or perhaps the seeing eye ceases to distinguish one person from another with complete clarity. You for instance, for efficiency’s sake, divide the world up into two simple categories, The Little Lady and Everybody Else.
It has always been your policy in these matters to drop any notion of self-direction or the sense of yourself as an autonomous human being, and simply do what you’re told by authority figures...such as tour guides.
A good guess at this point is that you came under the sway of a tour guide in one of these early airports, but not, as it turns out, your tour guide.
It is as though you are a moon to Planet A moving along an an orbit that came perilously close to Planet B and in fact was sucked into its gravitational pull.
Planet B as it turns out was on its way to Montreal while Planet A went on its merry way to Munich, to this damned beer festival that I keep talking about, and there you go.
To look at it another way than this Planet A and Planet B business, it seems likely now that you are of the same nature as one of those baby ducklings who, through some trick of fate or perhaps of scientific experiment, faithfully follows around a dog or a cat or an armadillo, all the while thinking that this dog or cat or armadillo is the mother duck.
You in this case are a yellow ducking dutifully lining up and following an aardvark, coyote, or tree frog, or in any event, not following the tour guide who will get you to this damnable beer dealeo in whatever that other city is, oh, yes, Munich.
It’s all good!
These things happen and the reasons they keep happening just keep occurring to you.
Take for instance the Curious Case of the Lookalike Tour Guides. They could all, in their tens of thousands, be from the same family, and if you had a mere dozen of them in one room you would still be hard put to pick yours out of the batch.
They all have the same air of cool command and steady confidence, along with a certain briskness of style, and in manner and dress remind you of either your fifth grade civics teacher or your eighth grade track coach. There just isn't a lot to distinguish these fine people one from another.
And they all have learned through long experience that it is best to offer few explanations to their charges – such as what continent they’re on, or what city they are going to end up in at the end of the day, details that would only confuse them – but to simply tell them what to do next and keep them moving along smartly as a group. Exactly the type of thing that ordinarily you respond to positively.
Well, it usually works, doesn't it?
As referenced earlier, back there somewhere along the line is the little lady, by now no doubt arm in arm with happy beaming Germans in a Teutonic line dance swaying back and forth in festive celebration of whatever it is that this big damned beer thing over there in Munich celebrates.
Germans don’t get lost much I’ve noticed, so it is likely well attended. You don’t, for instance, see anyone in this lobby of German descent looking around in the confused manner of someone who was expecting the Munich bus but is presented the Montreal bus instead.
She likes that type of thing, she likes to dive in, while you have always been more the quiet type sitting at the edge of the room.
So in that regard this trip to Montreal is a little more up your alley; you can sit back in the bus and let the tour guide tell you all about that fine community, and you can simply soak it all up or let your mind drift as it will.
Really, when you look at it the right way, it’s not so different than if you were both centrally located in some fine old European capital in some fine old European hotel, and it just so happened that one of you was interested in this Portraits of the Renaissance excursion over here, and the other of you was interested in this Foods of the Mediterranean excursion over there, so you decide to split up for the afternoon and meet back up at the hotel this evening.
Well, that presupposes that you’re on at least the same continent.
Still, I contend that in general the theory holds.
For now, as you sit in the hotel lobby in some city in Alaska, or Canada, or just within the Arctic Circle, some tundra-like place in any event to judge from the view out the big picture window, you simply tip your coffee cup across the continents, the oceans, and the time zones, in the general direction of where you think Germany might be and wish the girl well.
She’ll take good notes over there in Munich and you intend to remember everything there is to know from this Montreal tour.
A toast then to your dream vacation and to the two of you!
Something tells you that you’ll have a lot to talk about once you get back together.
