A Travel Day with my Husband

My oh my… this one is for you brother Tyler. Only you have traveled extensively with Travis before using planes, trains and other forms of transit when you backpacked Europe together years ago. You’ve warned me that Travis has a little worrying problem when it comes to traveling. I’ve also experienced it myself many times in our six+ years together. But, nothing ever prepares me for the COMPLETE CHANGE of personality that comes over my husband the day before and the day of a trip. A trip can be defined as any form of travel that requires reservations and/or tickets. It doesn’t matter if the tickets are purchased months in advance or if they are to be purchased the day of. When it comes to having something “reserved” and being there “on time,” Travis seems to have no other way to cope than to think only of the worst-case scenarios:

“What if we miss our train?”
“What if the hostels didn’t receive our reservation?”
“Should I call them to be sure?”
“Are you sure that’s the right time?”
“Are you sure that’s the right date? Look at the calendar again.”
“Shouldn’t we go there earlier?”
“I better check if my credit card was charged so I’m sure they received our reservation.”
“What if we can’t put our luggage there?”
“What if our luggage gets stolen?”
“I’m putting a lock on that suitcase.”
“I better check the weather forecast again.”
“Are you sure you set the alarm early enough?”
“What if a herd of elephants blocks the train tracks?”

This is just a very small sampling of the number of thoughts and questions that I’ve heard from Travis’s mouth in the last 14 hours or so. Keep in mind- this is only a 4-night weekend trip to Seville and Granada. We’re not crossing any borders, not getting on any planes, not even separating from our shared bag of luggage. We have 3 reserved train trips (with seat reservations and all) that we booked through a licensed agent, and 2 reserved hostels that we booked online. All the plans have been made, and it’s all out of our hands now, right? Isn’t this the time to sit back and relax to anticipate and enjoy the trip?

Well, here I sit on Friday at 8:30am on the slick and speedy AVE bullet train that is transporting us to Seville, in the south of Spain, this morning. Travis is beside me and is finally calmer than he’s been in hours. But let me just paint you a little picture of what life was like with my husband starting from about 9:00pm last night to now. I guess it started when we began packing. This overwhelming sense of worry seems to come over Travis and it entirely holds him captive. He thinks about the oddest things, and many of his words and questions come out being totally unreasonable to the average listener. But you see, I’m not the average listener- I’m his wife. So, I have to listen to these humorous, somewhat insane worries and fanciful ponderings with a delicate, understanding and calming ear. Giving him reassurance and telling him the best case scenarios doesn’t seem to ease his worries at all. Instead, he just needs to be listened to and not made fun of, while at the same time needing to observe and take in my calm self.

(***Just to note- I don’t want to give myself too much credit here and let you think that I am a person who is worry-free. For anyone who knows me, worrying and stress are definitely a part of my nature as well. However- when it comes to travel and transit, I’m as calm as the sea before a storm. I can’t tell you how grateful I am that our periods of stress don’t usually hit at the same time!)

So, because our hostel reservations were made online, I ask Travis to locate the confirmation email in his inbox and write down the addresses so we know where to find them. As he’s searching through his inbox of 3000+ emails (he’s not one to clear out and erase junk mail), I note a slight change in his voice, alluding to stress, as he starts to ask me, “Are you sure we used my email for this?” “When would the emails have arrived?” I fill him in on more details, present to him several other options of ways to possibly locate our reservations, and get back to my packing. Several moments later, I check back in. He’s now frantically looking up his credit card statement online because he can’t find the confirmation email or a phone number to the hostel and he’s paranoid that the payment maybe didn’t go through… leaving us with no reservations for the weekend. I calmly reassure him that when we booked the reser and pushed “enter,” the payment went through and the new screen said, “Thank you, we received your reservation and you are officially confirmed.” After asking me over three times if I was sure about this, he still proceeded to find the credit card statement and was somewhat relieved once he discovered that they charged him just for a down payment, and the rest will be charged upon our arrival. I took a deep breath (for him) and thought we could now rest easily for the evening.

Not the case. As I turned the lights off to go to sleep, Travis was still hammering me with questions, fears and “what if’s” regarding our hostel reservations. “I don’t know Trisha- how do we trust that online booking system? What if we show up and they’ve never heard of us? Where will we stay? etc. etc…” I quietly listened but truly I really couldn’t believe how worked up about this he was. It didn’t matter how many times I told him that everything would work out alright- it’s all an adventure… he was still a wounded up ball of stress. So, as you might have guessed, Travis didn’t sleep too well last night. It didn’t help that halfway through the night when I got up to get a drink of water, I forgot about the suitcase lying in the darkness on the middle of the floor and tripped falling into it causing a loud “bang” and a scream as we (me and the suitcase I was now lying inside of) went sliding across the floor until we halted to a stop when we hit the bed. Travis was gracious enough to wake up and help me out of the suitcase as well as tend to my new wounds. Unfortunately, he didn’t fall back asleep after this. The Thursday night party crowd outside didn’t help much either.

So this morning we woke up with plenty of time to spare before our train departure (I double checked the alarm for him several times). Things went quite smoothly as we zipped up our bags and headed out to the metro station. It was very chilly this morning and still dark at 7:45am as we walked down the street. We were going to a new and different metro station as opposed to our usual one because of its direct connection to the AVE train station. The “worry-power” holding Travis captive began to creep up and show its face again. “Are you sure you know where this station is?” “Did we leave early enough?” “Do you think I have the tickets in a safe place?” “Is the lock secure on our luggage?” Coupled with this was his compulsive need to look down at his watch about every 30 seconds. If you think I’m not walking on eggshells yet, you are wrong. Believe me, on mornings like this, I take every effort to be as “low-maintenance” and calm as possible, not adding one extra minute to my getting ready routine. That one extra minute would be like 3 hours of possible lateness in Travis’s head… and I wouldn’t want to be around to watch the sweat pour down his face if he had to go through this type of stressful situation.

The new metro station turned out to be a maze of tunnels and stairways underground. None of the previous stations we’ve been to have had this many staircases without escalators- so here’s poor Travis dripping in sweat (despite the cold weather) carrying our luggage as we weave through the people and hurriedly find our train. The metro ride went well. I think he only asked me 3 times if I was sure that the Attocha/Renfe stop was the correct one. Finally, we made it to the bullet train at 7:55am, with 35 minutes to spare. After finding the correct terminal (to make sure the train was there) and double-checking the train number with our printed ticket number multiple times, Travis’s sweating began to ease and he even let me stop to get a coffee. Although, he didn’t want to stop and use the bathroom because he thought it would require him having to leave the secured area and go though the security line again to return to the terminal. This would take too much time and then… “what if the line was super long when he tried to get back in and he missed his train!” The world would be ending!!!

To clinch it all, when we handed the train attendant our tickets, she paused a little as she overlooked them. I observed Travis’s face and could literally feel his heart drop in my heart because I could sense his panic so well. Of course, there was nothing wrong with the tickets, the lady tore the stubs, and we walked right through to our train.

That is the story of the last 14 hours or so. Poor Travis. If this was the first time this happened, I probably wouldn’t have written about it in a sarcastic manner. But, being that this is a completely normal occurrence with Travis every time we travel… he actually gave me permission to let him be the subject of this blog today. Just know that I wrote it all out of complete love for this precious, compulsive travel-worrier of a man. Days like this actually make me feel like I’m a worry-free person!