There was something echoing and bubbling within me, within all of us, anticipating our departure. “Finally!” I thought, taking a good look at the feeling. It was stress.
“Are you packed already?” mom asked when I emerged from my lair.
“Almost,” I returned. I had clothes for the week ready but was heavily deliberating what book(s) to bring. “How’s it going here?”
“Not so good,” she said. “There’s still so much I want to do, and really I wanted to be on the road already.” She raced off, cleaning utensil in hand, leaving a trail of not-dust in her wake.
Mother had experienced the joys of stress prior to prior family outings, but it had been of a different kind. This year it spread from her to all of us, and amalgamating through our interactions into a seven-colored hydra of unfinished chores and unpacked items and newfound fears of losing control and of what all might happen as result. After doing one chore, or quelling one fear, two new ones took its place.
The revolving tides of happenstance inherent to such a non-form road trip couldn’t be overcome. After a valiant struggle we could only let them take us. We hit the road late, dropped our two cats off at a cat hotel surrounded by a great, stunning hedge and quickly encountered a problem. The idea of ‘just going somewhere’ sounded nice on the soundboard but turned out to be impractical. For, really, how could we, human beings bound to the compulsions of our subconscious, become agents of chaos?
Our first choice for splits in the road was a coin toss. This would help randomly decide to go left or right, but it lacked the nuance to deal with road forks with more than two options.
“You know,” my brother said, theoretically speaking, “there’s an infinite number of coin-toss combinations that will eventually lead us right back home. So how can we actually ever leave?”
Mother bluescreened.
My brother studied mathematics and was probably theoretically right. Practically, too, kinda: if our route was left to pure chance and a streak of bad luck came along on our trip, we might’ve ended up back at our place in Rotterdam. Which really wouldn’t have been a great start to the vacation.
“I have an idea,” I said from the left back seat. I usually sat there when the three of us were all in the car. “Instead of a coin, let’s use playing cards to decide randomly. How’s that for a method?”
“Ditto,” said brother. He had turned into a Pokémon.
“Okay, let’s try that,” mom said later, when relevant. “There’s three options coming up: left, right and straight. Where do we go?”
I had taken out our deck of cards and had drawn up rules for what options could present themselves. Ace-4 for left; 5-9 for straight; 10-King for right. I shuffled and drew the King of Hearts, and we went straight because making the decision this way had taken too long. We opted out of this method also.
The conviction we had possessed first stepping into the car started waning. Choices started being made only moderately haphazardly. We were further discouraged when pausing at a tank station.
“It’s gotten more expensive,” brother said without looking up from the Trivago app on his phone.
“More expensive?” mother asked. That was one of her least favorite word combinations.
“Yeah. When I searched for the same hotel rooms this morning, they were cheaper. Quite a bit.”
As if struck by lightning, mother suddenly remembered how planning our destination in advance could be a wonderful thing. So the idea changed. We would still not-plan out the trip far in advance, but we needed to set constraints for our destination early during the day. If the road trip was completely free, it would be much more expensive.
With our renewed main concerns being monetary, plus the fact we’d forgotten the special windshield stickers needed to get into Germany (should we want to)(—although, would we ever really want to?)(answer: yes) plus the fact that our random decisions had only gotten us as far as The Hague, we ended up going back to Rotterdam. Indeed; a great start to the vacation.
The lock to our home clicked hollowly behind us and we were greeted by the cats, in their absence. Usually they ran right up to the four-pane door to the small hallway that served as an airlock, as soon as they heard the front door rustle open. At minimum they would saunter to within eyesight, sit themselves down with an air of royalty, and stare silent demands at us. Without them, the quiet in the house was empty.
“This feels weird,” I said as I walked in.
“It’s like something is missing,” mother agreed, following.
Brother put his backpack down in the general hall area and looked around. “I hope they’re doing alright in that hotel.”
“Yeah,” I said. “But hey, at least we got them a hotel.”
But I shivered. Even beyond the cats’ attempt at a natural carpet missing from the wooden laminate floor mother had swept clean before leaving, our home was different. An unfamiliar current ran below the surface. We were different people, on vacation. Perhaps that was it.
To prevent having to bring it back up and back down again, our luggage had been left downstairs, and in the car. Different as I perceived myself to be, I refused to fall into my usual come-home routine, bent on only using the things I had with me in my own bag.
With the single night worth of groceries retrieved from the nearby Albert Heijn we cooked up a meal. I read a bit in one of the two books I’d brought from and to home, the Jack Reacher book Nothing to Lose. Then I went to sleep, disturbing the bed that had, obviously half-heartedly, been ‘made’. But hey, at least it was a pretty nice bed.
This was the first day of ‘A Place to Get Lost Towards’. Click here to read the second day where we – my brother specifically – almost got stuck in Maastricht. Click here to return to the overview page from where you can visit all other days.
