It’s December 6. While I was traveling a couple of weeks ago, I found out that’s the day the Dutch celebrate Christmas. The day I arrived was the day they turned on the Christmas lights. It felt meant to be.
Today, I got updated Ancestry DNA results – that put the Netherlands smack in the center of two overlapping circles, my own Venn Diagram of genealogy. So, I’m celebrating some Dutch heritage, and feeling festive.
This week, I’ve been watching cheesy Christmas movies, eating chocolate-covered raisins, and meditating for 40-50 minutes a day. Last year, I was doing two of those things. I’ll let you guess which ones.
Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be putting up a series of posts about my trip. I’m feeling an apprehension that I haven’t felt before about posting. Sure, I felt a twinge about the sex books, but this trip feels bigger than that.
I could whitewash it. But as they say, if you’re going to lie, you’d better hope you have a good memory. I don’t, which is why I write everything down. So I’d rather tell the truth than try to keep my story straight.
I went to the Netherlands because what I wanted to do is illegal in the U.S. That makes some people uncomfortable.
I don’t want to put a disclaimer up about my content, but I do want to invite you, if you choose to keep scrolling when those posts start coming, to keep an open heart and to stay curious. It’s been a phrase that has been coming up in my life for 3/4 of a year now – that invitation to stay curious.
It’s a lot easier said than done. I often get judgemental, indignant, and hurt before I remember the part about curiosity. So go ahead and feel those other things, too. But remember the curiosity.
When I’m packing for a trip, I always spend some time working out which books to bring and how many. I typically think I’ll read more than I actually get to. I also usually travel with my family. But this most recent trip, I’d be traveling alone. So the books I was bringing were going to get my full attention. Also, I was going on retreat, so it was important that I was putting the right stuff in. I needed to bring books that were physically lightweight and easy to carry since I was traveling alone and not checking any bags.
In addition, I was super, skin-crawling anxious ahead of this trip, and knew I wouldn’t be able to concentrate on anything too heady or deep, at least on the way there.
Crazy Rich Asians met the criteria on all counts.
When this publishes, I’ll be on a train to New York, but as I write, my trip is a little less than two weeks away.
But the way I feel today is exactly what set me on the path towards this trip in the first place. In hopes that things are different when I come back, I wanted to save the feels from today, the ones I would like to be able to approach with a little more aplomb and a little less rigidity.
I’m feeling stuck.
I’m leaving for the Netherlands in about a month. I’ve already started packing. I recognize I will never have enough time all at once to pack as I’d like to. Instead, a few minutes here, 20 minutes there, is what is going to leave me feeling relaxed and ready the afternoon I hop onto my train headed to New York and the airport.
I’m packing a carry-on for the trip. The cost of checking a bag was obscene, and I like a challenge. Now I have two challenges: what to bring, and how to fit it all in my hiking backpack.
After doing a little internet research about what Europeans wear, one article advised not to bring a backpack. I am traveling alone and will be doing a lot of walking. I’m not doing it with a dinky wheeled suitcase, and I have a really nice hiking backpack from my 2014 Mt. Hood Trip. The backpack is German-made, so that has to count for something, right?
I haven’t been to Europe since I went on a missions/sightseeing trip to Austria, Hungary, and Romania between my sophomore and junior years in college. The trip was amazing, but, as one young man who came with us said with annoyance, “This is a missions trip! Not a musical.” And indeed, the group would burst into song at any time, on public transit, or just walking along the street.
One thing that was on my Summer Bucket List that we hadn’t done yet was go bathing at the beach.
I remember what a big deal it was to go to the beach as a kid. We lived on the bank of a river, so we regularly got a water fix, but there is something you get at the ocean that you can’t get anywhere else. It’s like synchronizing your heartbeat with God’s as the rhythm of the waves moves through you.
