On Luck and Traveling

We are lucky people here in Gaming. Or, if you don’t believe in luck, blessed people. Either way, we all take one look out the window or one deep breath of soft mountain air and we know it’s true.

But not until this past weekend did I ever imagine just how much luck goes into travel. How else do you explain the stories that went around the lunch table today – on our first day back from a non-school-led trip?

What about the group that was comfortably settling into their spots on what they thought was the train to Prague and were informed by a fellow passenger, in the nick of time, that they were in fact about to depart for Moscow?

Or the two girls who unknowingly booked a hostel in a rough section of town, and arrived to find that they were on a waiting list for a room – what if they hadn’t met up with the group of fellow Franciscan students who welcomed them into their far-safer apartment-style hostel across town?

And as far as my own travels – I can hardly count the number of times we slipped through the closing doors of trains or subway cars or avoided troublesome layovers by a lucky chance. We even started our travels with a little bit of luck; we planned to take a 6:05 bus to the Gaming train station Friday morning and catch our 6:30 train (saving ourselves a half hour plus walk). However, when 6:15 rolled around with no sign of either of the two buses that were scheduled the realization that we would never make the train by walking sunk in, and the seven of us decided to try hitchhiking (a common and fairly safe travel method in Gaming).

We split up – four and three – and stuck out our thumbs at the occasional car that whizzed by. Around 6:25 three of my friends and I were picked up, but with only minutes until the train departed, we were sure our friends wouldn’t make it in time. We waited, looking hopefully up the road, as the train arrived and passengers started to board but, still, there was no sign of the rest of our group.

Then, when we were just resigning ourselves to the two-hour wait for the next train, a car pulled into the station with the rest of our group and we caught the train with barely a minute to spare.

Lucky. Divine Providence. Blessed. Maybe they are just one and the same in Europe.

Blog Post written by Cara Weiss, Fall 2009 Study Abroad Student in Gaming