Off The Grid: Priceless
For a few days in 1985 my family and I enjoyed a period of forced relaxation that most people will never know again.
My husband and I were moving back to the States after living in France. We’d left New York City childless and carefree with the idea of staying a year or two. We were returning nine years later with our five-year-old child in tow.
Instead of the backpacker-filled student charter flight we’d left the States on in 1976, this time we were traveling in style: aboard the Queen Elizabeth the 2nd, the glorious ocean liner commonly known as the QE 2.
Though we were more comfortable financially than we were in ’76, as struggling freelance writers this was still way above our pay grade. Luckily, we’d managed to score a significant press discount for writing a travel piece about the cruise.
We ate well, tried some of the activities, and enjoyed the view, but mostly we enjoyed the forced relaxation. Those were the days before email. Before the World Wide Web. Before cellphones. And long before social media.
We couldn’t research housing options. We couldn’t check out reviews of providers. We couldn’t excitedly scan “What’s On in … ”
In short, we couldn’t check anything off our to-do lists or “get something done.”
It was blissful.
The weeks and months prior to our departure had been a race against time, trying to wrap up nearly a decade of our lives. The ship would take us to New York where we planned to stay briefly with friends and family. We intended to live in a small college town in North Carolina, but we didn’t know exactly where.
No employer was paying for our move. We didn’t have jobs waiting for us in the States, so we did everything the hard way. We sent our books in countless small post office boxes so they’d qualify for French book rate. Because we didn’t have an address to send them to, we mailed them to friends in another North Carolina city.
We sold household items and some furniture to friends and neighbors and gave away a lot. Yard sales weren’t a thing in southern France at the time. We sent the few pieces of furniture that we wanted to keep by container ship to be picked up at the port in another state months after our arrival. The clothing and most personal items for the three of us were in trunks and suitcases and totes—thus the need to travel by ship, with unlimited baggage.
We had worried about finding a place to live. We particularly had worried about the difficult transition we anticipated for our five-year-old with special needs, about arranging services for him, about everyone’s adjustment to life in a very changed culture.
We had long to-do lists that seemed to get longer instead of shorter before our departure. There would, we knew, be new and longer lists on our arrival.
But for now—for those five days off the (nonexistent) grid—there was absolutely nothing we could do about any of them.
It wasn’t easy at first—that impotence was frustrating. But it didn’t take long to realize that we really had no choice but to relax and enjoy it.
While on board, time seemed to stand still. There’s something about looking out at the tranquil blue water as far as the eye can see that helps reinforce that timeless feeling.
I’ve never had that feeling, of no choice but to just let things be, before or since—and virtually no one ever really will again.
We have far too many options now, too many pressures and temptations to stay in the loop, on the grid. (FOMO didn’t exist back then.) We typically think of options as privilege, as freeing (advantages certainly denied to people on the margins of society).
But ironically in this case, the higher up the food chain you go, it’s that very plethora of options that will eternally deny the ultra-rich the blissful luxury that my family and I enjoyed that week—on our luxury voyage on the cheap.
I can’t help but enjoy a certain degree of schadenfreude when I think about that.
A version of this article originally appeared in Digital Global Traveler, a Medium publication.
