The Other Side of the Photo
The France trip was great buuuuuut those posts were the highlights from the trip.
I didn’t talk about how we were dripping with sweat while in Paris, and there was a particularly awful train ride from Versailles back into the city where we could barely breathe. There was the night we couldn’t agree on a place for dinner and we ended up consuming what may have been the grossest pizza that has ever entered my mouth. Or how many times I worried about the freakin’ rental car because they made us upgrade and the car stressed me out. (The happiest moment of the trip: returning the rental car.)
I didn’t write about the waiter who HATED us, or how he talked shit about us to our new waiter when we returned the next night, or how Josh gleefully announced that he needed to go back to the restaurant a third time because we were smitten with this waiter who hated us. (We did. We went back. He was still mean.)
I didn’t write about the bird that shat on me in Luxembourg Gardens. It was my first time ever having a bird shit on me. It hurt. It felt like someone shot me with a paint ball. I had to take off my shirt in a public bathroom (after paying 1 euro for the privilege of using said bathroom) to wash my shirt. I became wary of all pigeons after that moment despite being a huge lover of pigeons.
The main point: Yes, it was fun. Yes, I love traveling with the twins and Josh, especially when they are providing alternative titles to art at the Louvre. But behind every pretty picture of Sacré-Cœur there also exists a woman worried about pickpockets.
11 comments
I’m still jealous! And half of every travel story is the bad stuff that happened. I love to tell about how my sister and I got flashed by a creepy old man in Rome, but I was looking away and didn’t see it. My sister gasped and I asked what happened. She said “that guy was waving at us…with other than his hand!”. It still cracks me up. (Her verbiage, not the flashing.) Andy favorite story about going to Ireland is how we couldn’t leave the airport because none of us could figure out how to put the car in reverse (it was a stock shift – you had to pull up on the knob). The looks of expectation and then disappointment every time we tried…hilarious!
As long as everyone arrives home healthy, even the bad parts are good!
*And my, not Andy
*stick shift
Ugh, I should try proofreading!
We toured the southwest of America in 2015 and it was a trip not a vacation and halfwau I was sort of convenced it was a dailure and now we have such sweet memories. I was so scared of all the guns and gunsigns. The fact that husvand had to drive an automatic through losangeles with a jetlag while finding out Americans take over on the right side aswell as the left. Oh god that was scary.
The actual tressppassers will be shot made me so wary of all the way to sweet Americans we encountered.
The poverty o my the poverty. It wasn’t even under Trump but oh we encountered so much hardbreaking poverty..
Trops are hard but they are hard because they stretch your comfprtzone and thereby make you grow!
Hahah what A said above about half of every trace story being the bad stuff. That’s exactly true, and often I would guess it’s more than half. But if we talk about that then we seem ungrateful or only bringing up the negative stuff. When that’s usually the funniest stuff of the whole trip. You can’t tell me that you guys won’t laugh about the time mom got crapped on my a French pigeon a couple months from now!
But I get it, it’s why I don’t write up much about our big family vacations because there’s always so much ridiculousness of crappy things. But those are also the things that make the best stories.
I agree, the crappy (ha ha, pigeon crappy) parts of a trip usually makes the best stories, but typically you don’t photograph those! Although a picture of the bird crap might have been hilarious. After the fact of paying to wash it out, of course. I hate heat, so that part of your trip sounded awful. I might not have survived. It’s nice of you to share the other side of the photo, since social media is always so full of the carefully curated and not the human reality, and we can forget that the whole story isn’t there. I heard it’s good luck to have a bird shit on you, so I’m sorry it hurt but maybe there’s a plus side lurking! Maybe…
I love that you shared your real moments, the good and the not as good. We left a camping trip early this week because, although we had some fun moments and I will remember those, we also had everything that could go wrong, go wrong. And that’s life and one day they will be funny stories, too.
This is why blogs > social media. There’s so much curating in social media that you’re left wondering if you’re the only one getting shat on once in a while. And of course, you’re not.
Yes, thank you for writing about this. I sometimes think the largest category of vacation/trip (and even /life) items I have stored are the ones where I thought, “This is not fun right now, but it will be great in the retelling!” Huge category. Huge. Now that I’m aware of its existence (and value), many of those moments are more fun in the moment even though … they are not fun in the moment!
Haha. Not that I’m laughing AT you, dear Pigeon Poopee, but that yes, every good trip has stories like these that make it even more memorable.
I’m amused that you all came up with alternative titles. THAT sounds memorable!
Three times to the same awful waiter’s restaurant? It just have served amazing food!
Ha! Yes. Every trip has its down sides. I can relate to being sweaty tourists – on this last trip, we found ourselves in Vietnam in the hot season. Doh! Instant sweat, only about ten metres out of the hotel air-conditioning. The crowds in Kyoto were frustrating. And I discovered in Korea that – like Paris – service does not always come with a smile. (Though our experience elsewhere in France was very different.)
We also tell stories about being forced to take a vehicle upgrade in Spain (when we had specifically chosen a smaller car to cope with smaller narrow European streets), which meant we were unable to stay in a hotel we had chosen because it was too big for their underground carpark. As we were driving away, the GPS directed us to turn right, but the road was too narrow and the car too big to make the turn, which meant that somehow we ended up in the pedestrian-only area of Granada, driving down a residential street filled with tourists glaring at us. The street got narrower and narrower around our big car, and there were even grooves gouged along the outside of the houses to make room for cars’ wing mirrors. It was very stressful! But we can and do laugh about it now.
oh yes this is so true! I guess even the bad moments are all just funny stories eventually!
hahaha this is every vacation, right? especially the international ones!