The Three Rules of Travel

First of all, happy June! In true Washingtonian fashion, Bellingham has celebrated with an epileptic seizure of sun and clouds all day, finally settling on a dreary drizzle. Lovely.

But never mind that, because I've received my new Bible answer to all my problems Rick Steves' Britain book today! As anyone who isn't my mother who has traveled with me will tell you, I have an inordinate amount of faith in Rick Steves, but so far, he's never let me down, so my unwavering devotion continues. I've basically been waiting to get this book to plan the rest of my trip, and it took me all of thirty seconds to start paging hungrily through it and covering its soft white pages in yellow highlighter. It even comes with a detachable fold out map, and--I'm sorry, you don't care and I totally understand that. Onward.

This last weekend, I had a planning meeting with my mother and Janna that lasted several hours and involved a Starbucks, three laptops, and some embarrassingly oversized cups of coffee. Various decisions were made and reservations booked and so on, which is boring, but what we did get to discuss were general rules for our travel this summer. We agreed on two, but I'm adding a third, which seems to be self-evident.

First, an important definition: disaster. From Greek, meaning "without/away from the stars," but now meaning "a calamitous event, esp. one occurring suddenly and causing great loss of life, damage, or hardship."* This is not really the sense I'll be using it in; for the purposes of the Rules, "disaster" means anything that doesn't go according to plan, from personal injury, canceled reservations and lost luggage to closed museums, renovations, getting rained on on a hike, accidentally ordering the wrong kind of coffee, or going to a party that you thought would be fun only to find that it's much more raucous, obnoxious, and drunken than you expected. Basically, it's any situation in which frustration, disappointment, and problem-solving skillz are involved. This overlaps in some places with emergency, in which your safety (personal, financial, etc) are in jeopardy. So:

I. The Golden Rule
Yes, that Golden Rule. Although applicable in all situations, it's especially important in the heady distillation of all of the highest and lowest experiences of living that is traveling. As Jesus puts it in Matthew 7:12:

So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.

This means that in every situation, especially in disaster situations, the first reactions should be grace, compassion, and respect.

II. The Disaster Contingency Rule (DCR)
This has been my personal rule for a long time. You can state it a bunch of different ways, but the basic idea is:

No matter what happens, make the best of it and move on.

Whatever disaster strikes--and the great philosopher Murphy has decreed that it will--no moaning, complaining, weeping, or bad attitudes are allowed. You make the best of every situation, and if you're not getting the most out of your time, you problem-solve and adjust your attitude until you are. Which brings us to...

III. The Top Gear Rule
Named after my second favorite TV show, the Top Gear Rule evolved out of the usual conduct of the lads on the show when out on a challenge across some corner of the world in crappy cars: when someone's car breaks down, the other two just leave them behind and keep going. Somewhat modified and only applicable to interpersonal disasters (and not emergencies of any kind!), the Top Gear Rule reads:

If someone's having a problem, split up and meet up again later.

The value of this rule is that it not only allows but requires time apart, which is vital for people living together in high-stress, high-anxiety situations for weeks on end. It's imperative that when one or more of the group gets irritable, cranky, rude, or unpleasant (or in any other way breaks Rules I and/or II), the group can split up for some time apart and reconvene later. It's really just a specific application of Rule II, just that the bad attitude of the other person is the relevant disaster.

So there you have it. I've got all my rules figured out and a beautiful new book to do my planning. Now there's just that blasted senior thesis to finish...

*Side note: This sentence has been bothering me for days, and I just figured out why. I automatically read the phrase "great loss of life, damage, or hardship" as "great loss of (life or damage or hardship)", which makes sense for the first element ("great loss of life" is definitely a bad thing) but is a definite "qwha? Oo" for the other two: a great loss of damage is nonsensical, and a great loss of hardship doesn't sound like a bad thing to me. Naturally, the reading should be "(great loss of life) or (damage) or (hardship)"; this sort of governing error is exactly the kind of thing that my ELLs do all the time. Of course, the ambiguity can be resolved by moving around the pieces around ("damage, hardship, or great loss of life"), which makes more sense to me anyway since they're now in ascending order of...badness. Okay, linguistic moment over, move along...