In reality, serendipity accounts for one percent of the blessings we receive in life, work and love. The other 99 percent is due to our efforts.
Peter McWilliams
I am booking my hotels in Norway. I’ve picked a hotel booking site based on the cute guy on the commercials and even cuter Chihuahua used in one of those commercials.
Hotels mean adventure, mean travel, mean I’m not in my small apartment with my stack of dirty dishes and piles of laundry. Why, if I can live three weeks out of one bag, can’t I live ten years without so much stuff?
What I like about hotel rooms is the simplicity, the empty closets, the bare necessities (if you consider hairdryers, microwave, mini frig, coffee maker, and a 100 channels on the tv bare necessities) and those miniature shampoo, conditioner bottles, the petite soaps, and, even the tiny package with the shower cap as if people still use shower caps anymore.
I scroll through hotels in Bergen and Oslo with the basic checklist of cost and location (I will be walking a lot), and whether they include the can’t-miss Norwegian buffet breakfast.
I have booked three hotels, one modern, one convenient, and one traditional. The modern, if the photos are accurate, is space chic with the lighting of a 70’s disco dance club. It’s sort of Star Trek with a twin bed.
But it’s the features I can’t find on the booking sites that I’m most interested in. As I scroll, I imagine who might be the taxi driver who gets me there, the desk clerk who checks me in, the servers at breakfast, the tourist I share an elevator with, and the maid I pass in the hall. It’s the serendipity of booking that fascinates me; that a chance decision will determine the people I meet and the possibility of life-changing encounters.
The word serendipity was coined by Horace Walpole; it is from the Persian fairy tale, “The Three Princes of Serendip,” whose heroes “were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of” (Dictionary.com).
Serendipity is not something you seek but something you run into, the unexpected delight around a corner chosen at random. It is the people you have no way of knowing you will meet but that you will never forget.
With a few clicks on a website, there are now people in Norway, who don’t know it yet, but they will change my perspective, decide my memories, and end up in my photos.
This hotel or that hotel, next to the train station or next to the ferry dock, the early train or the late train…this road or that as Robert Frost wrote, being one traveler, I cannot “travel both.”
Frost’s narrator could only take one road leaving the other for a future trip yet lamenting, “knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back.”
Planning a trip means making a lot of choices but also leaving a lot of choices. A trip is never long enough for me, but I know how lucky, how serendipitous, I am to be taking this one.
Hi, Mom!
Journeys 