Where's Blair?

Lots of things go wrong when traveling. Wrong turns, objects lost or stolen, misunderstandings that lead to weird food or, worst of all, FOMO. I try to take these mishaps, big and small, as an opportunity to recenter and focus on the good stuff around me. I think traveling provides especially important opportunities to practice this because while the stakes can sometimes be very high – maybe you need to extract yourself from a bad situation – if you can figure it out and move on, another good thing is often right around the corner. When I make a mistake at work or in a relationship, I can spend weeks or months returning to it in my mind, questioning my decisions, shuddering with shame. In travel, I may have regrets about messing something up or missing something cool, but things keep moving and you are forced to stay focused on the present. Moreover, sometimes when you are forced into an unexpected detour, you find something much more interesting that’s not on the regular-degular tourist route.

The Wisdom of the Waterfall

Whenever I need to remind myself to chill the eff out, to let something go and be grateful, I remind myself of the “wisdom of the waterfall.” This mantra comes from a trip in Southeast Asia about fifteen years ago. I was traveling with my family in Laos, when they set off to do some activity from Luang Prabang but I went my own way because I was really intent on biking to a waterfall. I set up the bike ride through the hotel and they told me to meet at a certain time and a driver would pick me up, presumably to take me to the bikes. As I was being ferried out into the countryside, I kept asking when we would get to the bikes and the driver assured me soon, very soon.

After about half an hour, we arrived at the waterfall. I was upset – what about the bike?? Turns out, there had been a language barrier at every step of the way – no one understood that what I really wanted was a bike ride, some exercise in a beautiful place. Dejected, I walked to the waterfall. It took about five minutes of standing there with my arms crossed and a stinky little pout for it to hit me. This waterfall was the literally the most enchanting scene I’d ever seen. And I was about to waste it being a crabby brat. Yuck.

So, that’s the wisdom of the waterfall. And I’ve needed it pretty much every time I’ve traveled, including a few instances on this trip already. Most significantly, when I arrived at the airport in Catania and tried to pick up my rental car but was told I couldn’t because I don’t have an international driver’s license. There was a cost to my pride for being a lawyer who missed something in the fine print (in my defense, it was very fine and several clicks off the main agreement…) but of course the bigger cost was the actual many, many Euros that flew out my bank account for both the prepaid rental and the new one I had to get on the spot instead. WOOF.

But I want to focus on more interesting and more photogenic applications of the wisdom of the waterfall. Specifically, what my mom and I did when faced with enormous, unyielding crowds on the most popular islands in Greece.

Side Quests of Greece

Let’s start with the big one: Santorini. You know it from photos of whitewashed buildings with blue trim and caps tumbling like pearls down a cliffside towards the ocean. Trust me, you’ve seen a picture of it. Which is good, because I don’t have one to share here since it was so crowded we literally could not even get on the island.

Let me back up though, because that statement requires some explanation. Santorini is actually five islands today but some 3,600 years ago it was one island. But it turns out that island was also a really, really massive volcano which blew out its entire center creating an enormous caldera open to the sea in two places. Picture the big island as a slender crescent of moon, but also maybe like PacMan about to swallow the four smaller islands. The result is that two islands that mark the outer edges of the ancient circular island have full shear cliffs hurdling down into the basin, like if you’ve ever looked down into a volcanic crater, on a particularly massive scale.

Those picturesque towns are on the on the top of the cliff and there’s only one way up from where the boats enter inside the caldera: a funicular that takes 36 people up every 15 minutes. Now throw an endless parade of cruise ships ferrying thousands of passengers to the slim strip of land where you wait in line for the cable car and you understand what I mean when I say we couldn’t even get on to the island.

Instead of fighting of the crowds, we opted for a hike on one of the two islands in the middle of the caldera, Nea Kameni and Nisis Palaia Kameni, which have been formed by more recent eruptions, and a sail around the crater. We didn’t have that iconic shot of the town Oia, but hey I can pull that up on the internet whenever and we got a totally different kind of experience away from the crowds.

Mykonos also suffered from the same overcrowding problems as Santorini (which is crazy because it’s October – I can’t imagine what it’s like in August). At least there we were able to get on the island. However, we found that the main town felt like Disney World’s version of Greece – the stores and restaurants were upscale chains and the beach in town was polluted (see again, endless parade of cruise ships). So, ever in search of opportunities to go swimming, we side quested to a quiet beach outside of town and were rewarded with a colorful sunset on the way back.

Rhodes was also very crowded, both in the main town and further south in Lindos, where we visited an impressive acropolis and charming village. The crowds encouraged us to wander off the main paths to floral back streets and to once again seek out a gorgeous swim spot.

On our last day on the boat, we docked on the main land at Nafplion and went pretty far afield by road to visit some very worthwhile ancient sights which felt largely off the well-beaten path.

Finally, I had an afternoon to kill in Athens before my flight to Sicily. It was cold and rainy and I definitely didn’t want to fight to crowds to get to the Acropolis (which I’ve been lucky enough to visit before). I opted instead to view the Parthenon from a distance from the top of Lycabettus hill, enjoy an excellent lunch of spanakopita and a desconstructed gyro at Mpirmpilo, then wander around the National Garden, where the foliage provided shelter from the rain.

Travel provides a special opportunity to practice the wisdom of the waterfall. Things frequently don’t go as planned and pivoting rathering than lingering on what I wanted to or thought should happen is typically quickly rewarded with an unexpected and wonderful alternative. This helps build the skill of just getting over it when something doesn’t go my way and prepares me, hopefully, to flex that muscle when I’m back IRL.