My Awesome Blossom Family Man

The most important fact about travel is that it is really hard and, if done correctly, it makes you feel like going straight home and watching reruns of Dexter for the rest of the summer while eating saltines and losing all connections with the outside world. True statement. For every incredible moment that we have earned on this trip, there have been approximately ten micro-disasters leading up to said incredible moment that have made me wonder why people (read: these two teachers) even bother venturing outside of their brand new luxury apartment (with a brand-new Dexter-watching couch) to sleep on the ground in Eastern Europe with a host of new and strange biting insects that have left me swollen and pock-marked with itchy bruise/bump/nodules that look disturbingly similar to pictures of blood-poisoning from the Civil War. Nitty gritty backpacking is not a vacation, which can be stressful when you realize that you are using up all of your vacation time to not have a vacation, and I cannot tell you how frustrating it is to be strolling down the Roman streets of Dubrovnik on the way to a ferry for a romantic, highly au natural frolic on Lokrum (no cameras allowed...google it, unless you're related to me), only to look up and realize that you look like a homeless person with smallpox and unkempt eyebrows. Europe, for the record, is utterly teeming with unnaturally attractive women. Not useful for a female backpacker (me) trying to maintain some semblance of pride after a wealthy American hag with a painted-on face offered me some change in Split because she thought the girl (ME) sitting by the backpacks on a side street was a beggar. True statement.

This trip has not been easy. Clearly.

Chris and I have both been having a hard time with certain aspects of this adventure. See, we're active people, and by active, I really mean that we are almost always moving, doing, touching, singing, wiggling, going going going. Meet our dogs and you'll know this to be true. Europe, meanwhile, does not appear to be about going. Quite the opposite, actually. Europe appears to be all about idling, as in, Chris and Lauren sitting at a table at a "fast food" restaurant for forty minutes wondering why we had to finish our whole drink before the waiter would bring us some chicken nuggets (with mayonnaise, because nobody's judging). We are terrible at luxuriating. Chris has gotten more quizzical looks than a guy running naked with a pet tiger on a leash because he just swallows his thimble of espresso instead of sipping it like a real coffee drinker. We don't want dinner to be three hours. We want dinner to be five minutes and snorkeling/sea kayaking/avoiding sea urchins with our bare feet to be three thousand hours. Central America was good to us in that regard. They slapped a meal in front of you, you ate it, they snatched it out from under you, and then you paid twenty bucks to go swim with sharks and rent a canoe with a hole in it for ocean explorations. It was like our brain had created an entire region of the globe as our own personal playground. Europe, meanwhile, cannot understand our pace, wishing instead that we would just slow down and purchase a pair of $500 pumps with massive orange puff balls on the ankle. Chris was almost sold, but would he ever really wear them? We're having a harder time adjusting. It's very grown up here. Like, wine and cathedrals grown up. We were meant to roll around in the forest...which is probably why that wrinkly old bag wanted to give me cash to go to the soup kitchen.

What is really important for me to note, though, is that Chris is the better one at dealing with the waiting, the watching, the shopping, the staring, the utterly blase nothingness that we have sometimes been a party to. I, meanwhile, have been a total nutjob. When Chris gets bored over waiting for eight million years for a Coke, he suggests we play cards or plan for our year, like a regular person would do. When I get bored over waiting eight million years for a Coke Zero, I whine and say I want to go home and canoe at the Gorge, like a nutjob would do. You can see who the champion is, and it is decidedly not me. This is why I fell in love with my big Gumby of a guy (yep, it's one of those posts - my blog, my topics). If there is anything I can rely on in this world, it is Christopher being unreasonably optimistic and gung-ho about a stupiddumbboring situation. For every second I have spent pretending to perish on a particularly hot, nauseating bus ride, Chris has been composing speeches the likes of which Obama could use to actually get the Republicans to do what he wanted. Every grumbled, sardonic bit of fluff that has fallen of my mouth has been swept up and away by this man's zest for anything he decides he wants to be awesome. It's like mixing Mr. Roger's Neighborhood with Dick Van Dyke and a little bit of E. I call it Roger's...well, you get the idea. When we were trapped in stinky sewer town (i.e. Split), I seriously wanted to change our flight plans. Across the table from me, where we were again waiting, Chris' eyes were wide and he was already launching into a planned presentation on the importance of "allowing travel to become a part of your mental map, so you have a broader understanding of the world around you, even if it isn't always positive, and we can stick anything out and make it fun, you know this, so have a little faith in me..." and on and on and on. (It's like dating the UN, but a UN that cares and gets things done.) Half the time, I don't have any idea what he's talking about because I just want to go on a dangerous excursion involving outdoor activities, but it's the earnestness, the pure hearted wonderment that sticks with me. This kid knows what it means to really be joyful and open. If he were a Hindu, his third eye would be the biggest one around, and in it would be all of the wisdom of the universe I've ever wished to have. I was reading How to Achieve Total Enlightenment when I met him. It took me two seconds to realize that the book should just open and have a picture of him inside.

Specifically, this one:

Chris is so Zen, he doesn't even need to maintain his motorcycle.

And I get to be with him. Awesome Blossom.