Just-in-time travel

     Those of you who believe overseas trips must be carefully planned well in advance are going to appreciate the incident I am about to recount. And you know who you are. You are just about everyone I know. (See my friend Neil Offen’s piece on traveling as you get older.) My wife and I (despite being undeniably old) are exceptions.

      We two were sitting atop a couple of not-light, non-electric bikes on the third day of a not meticulously planned ride along the Canal du Midi bike trail in France, when one of us announced that she was not having fun. “All I’m seeing is this canal,” she complained. And she was exhausted—so tired that she had to depend on the kindness of a stranger for a lift, heavy bike and all, into Carcassonne—that day’s destination.

      So the next day we walked our bikes over to the train station. The plan was to train ahead a couple of stops, giving ourselves some rest and shortening the Canal du Midi bike ride. For the record: that did not require cancelling any hotel reservations, since we had not secured any advance reservations.

      But, when we got to the train-station ticket window, we were told there were no seats available in that direction on any train that day.

      I know you dedicated travel planners could have predicted that, but this is still not your big I-told-you-so moment.  

      We hastily grabbed a ticket on a ridiculously crowded train in the other direction: back to Toulouse, where we had rented the bikes and left our suitcases. That essentially ended the bike ride.

      And then—quixotic last-minute travelers that we are—we began fantasizing about places we might go instead. Why not a train to Seville, where we have never been? It might take half a day to get there, but she sleeps on trains, and I like to look out the window.

      When we arrived in Toulouse, my wife checked at the train station. No way they could get us to Seville.

      Oh.

      I suspect this is starting to sound like the story you want to hear: the one that justifies all those weeks of diligent trip planning.

      “Well, how about Montpellier?” she suggested. “Supposed to be a nice town and it should be a little warmer.” And there were tickets to Montpellier available that evening. All we had to do was return those heavy bikes and reclaim the suitcases we had left at the bike-rental shop.

      We walked the bikes a couple of blocks to that shop. It was about 4 pm, but the door, oddly, was closed—fermé.

      Then something occurred to my wife: It’s Sunday! They still close shops on Sundays in France.

      So here we were with two heavy bikes and without our suitcases on a Sunday afternoon in Toulouse, with no place to stay and no plans for tomorrow.

      Okay. I know.

      This is why you would have read in advance all those online accounts of Canal-du-Midi bike rides, why you would have bought the train tickets a fortnight ago, why you would have lined up a hotel for every night of such a trip weeks in advance. This was why you not only would have been well aware of the days of the week, but you would have known what you were doing on every day of every week.

      It’s a grasshopper-ant kind of thing. And, indeed, it would have been a situation just like this that you would have been intent, at all costs, on avoiding.

       So yes, you travel worrywarts. Yes, almost everyone I know: There is something to be said for preparation. We sure felt lost, perdu, standing outside that Toulouse bike shop. We felt—and indeed had been—stupide.

      We were experiencing—strange city, things closed down, no place to stay—your nightmare.

      But—and this is the main point I want to make—your nightmare ain’t necessarily so nightmarish.

      What did we do?

      While I watched the bikes, she walked back to the train station and bought us tickets on a train to Montpellier the next morning. I saw a hotel near the station that looked kind of nice. She walked in and secured an inexpensive room. (Most places in the world now mostly have many more available rooms than people looking for one, And prices do not necessarily go up if you wait until the last minute. This turned out to be one of the best deals we got.) Yes, they did have a place to put our bikes. She found a good restaurant. (Tables at restaurants also are rarely in short supply.)

     And Monday morning we returned the bikes, reclaimed our suitcases and were off to Montpellier. She began looking at things to do. I located an inexpensive but interesting hotel online while on the train. Our usual just-in-time traveling.

I know most of us still have a buy-early-cause-they’ll-raise-the-prices-when-they-start-to-run-out attitude toward hotels and transportation. But in the age of algorithms often the reverse is true: They lower the price if it looks like the room will otherwise go unsold. The best deal I got on a hotel on our trip was this same-day, online purchase.

     And Montpellier did indeed prove warm and very, very lovely. And we are, as I write, having plenty of adults-in-a-new-French-town fun, though perhaps missing a sight or two due to not having sufficiently studied the guide books.

      So, yes, I respect your diligence and research, you impeccably-prepared travelers, our fellow oldsters, my friends. You don’t waste time standing in front of closed bike shops. You can be sure you’ve ogled the full complement of sites.

      And I believe you when you say all this advance planning is fun for you, that you actually pre-enjoy the trip as you plan it. Not my thing: never enjoyed homework. But good on you.

      Might we all also agree, however, that advance planning is not everything, that we also can benefit from some spontanéité in travel—from adjustments to, digressions from and lapses in the plan, whether to accommodate sudden fascinations, onsets of exhaustion, changes in the weather or beguiling whims?

     Such improvisations do work for us—most of the time.