Although I wasn’t on my own the entire time, last week’s trip to Scotland – at least the Saturday until Wednesday part of it – was the first vacation I’ve ever taken by myself.
I’ve gone places by myself, but it’s been to visit someone.And I’ve done plenty of business travel by on my own. But this was the first me-myself-and-I vacation I’ve been on. (Other than last August’s over-nighter to Bellows Falls, Vermont, where I was on a mission to inter a tiny bit of my husband’s ashes in his parents’ grave, which really doesn’t count.)
Somethings I liked about it; other things less so.
The flight over was fine. I did what I always did, whether I was with my husband or not: read and dozed, read and dozed. The one thing I missed is the one thing I’ve missed on every flight I’ve taken since Jim died: for some reason, we always held hands on take-off (not landing). I missed that. Sigh.
What I didn’t miss was Jim’s agitation with lines and waiting.
TSA in the States and passport control in the UK were actually both pretty quick, but, in any case, they were easier to get through without my having to listen to Jim pawing and snorting.
The same with the long-wait cab line at Edinburgh Airport. Not that I was thrilled to be standing there in the freezing cold and wind at midnight wondering when the next taxi was going to show, and continually recounting the number of heads ahead of me in line. But compared to what my husband’s reaction would have been, I am a cool-as-a-cucumber Zen goddess.
Another plus of traveling on my own: in my four nights in the hotel, I didn’t bother to turn the TV on once. This feat would not have been possible with Diggy, for whom TV was the backdrop of life. Ah, peace and quiet.
Then there’s the ability to pop into any little tourist site or shop that catches my eye without driving Jim crazy.
Sure, he would have liked eating out in the National Gallery’s very nice restaurant, but he’d have taken a pass on the quick cruise I did through the museum itself.
As for shopping, Jim was the anti-shopper. Other than bookstores – which, given his somewhat esoteric reading interests (economics, statistics, physics, math) were almost always a disappointment, unless we were visiting a university town – and Brookstone-y, Sharper Image-y places where there might be something to dazzle his eye and wallet, my husband could not have cared less about shopping. When it came to clothing, he was purely needs-based. If he needed a new jacket, well, fine, he’d look at jackets. But never once in nearly 40 years did I know him to do the sort of casual grazing that I’m certainly capable of. No impulse purchases for my boy! Sometimes I’d point something out to him and say something like “those shirts look nice.” Inevitably, he’d answer, “But I don’t need anything.” He did not understand the very basic concept that the word need does not enter into a shopper’s vocabulary,
And for anyone who knew my husband, it does without saying that there would have been no 12 hour bus tour of the Highlands. Oh, we might have taken a side trip, but we would have hired a driver, as we had done for a number of jaunts in Ireland, and for a trip from Paris to Normandy.
The downside of traveling solo is that there’s no one to point things out to, to say ‘that reminds me of’ to, to share things with.
And that’s a plenty big downside.
One of the great pleasures of traveling with someone is making observations, and making memories. The older I get, the more I appreciate that one of the more enjoyable aspects of aging is ‘remembering when’, retelling stories, recollecting interesting people and places – and doing so with the person who was with you the first time around. So I won’t have that for my first four days in Edinburgh.
Which is not to say that I won’t be telling stories about my trip to others, or entertaining myself by recalling things that happened. It’s just not the same.
Before this trip, I had not realized just how much of a tourist day can be consumed by figuring out where to eat.
While Jim didn’t like to pop into stores, he loved to pop into restaurants, check out menus, and make a dinner reservation for later in the day.
I looked at an occasional menu posted outside, but by the time I’d seen one or two, I was ready to declare and just go in and eat.
I don’t mind eating out on my own, and I most definitely DID NOT want to give in to the single traveler’s refuge of eating in the room, or dining out book in hand. Other than the one night when I was kind of tired (and grabbed a sandwich and pear at Pret a Manger and ate back in my room), I went out for all my meals, ordered a glass of wine with dinner, and sat there observing. Oh, at the first place I ate, I did feel compelled to tell the waitress – a very pleasant young woman from Hungary – that I was there by myself because my husband was dead. (Just wanted her to know that I wasn’t some sort of loveless weirdo…) But mostly it was enjoyable enough to sit there and take things in. Not that I lingered in any one place, but I didn’t do a gulp and go, either.
Still, going out to eat is more fun when you’re with someone else. I missed sticking my fork in Jim’s plate to grab a bite of what he was having – and I missed having him stick a fork mine.
On Wednesday, I met up with my sister Trish, her husband John, my niece Molly and Molly’s friend Julia. They had taken the Queen Mary over and flown up from Southampton. We all stayed together in a spacious and modern apartment that John had found online, had fun being tourists, shared some nice meals out, and ended each day watching goofy TV shows and drinking wine.
I’m something of a loner by nature. I like being by myself, draw strength by having a lot of quiet time and white space in my life, and am comfortable being a fairly well compensated introvert.
So flying solo doesn’t freak me out. I can definitely see myself heading off again on my own. There are places that I want to see, and I won’t necessarily have anyone I know who wants to see them with me.
I enjoyed the entire trip: the together bits and the alone bits. Certainly, I missed Jim plenty of the time, but things were fine.
As my cousin MB (also a widow) told me after Jim died. “It’ll be fine. It’ll be good. It’ll just be different.”
Yep.
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