Trips and Tripping

Are those two words in the title related, I wonder--tripping is a miscue, and a trip is a planned venture, right?  Well, I hope you can trip over things while on a trip.  That's part of the joy of travel, I think.  With the right approach (which I would define as not much of a rigid structure or schedule), you can stumble across people and things you didn't plan on.  It is usually the unplanned sights, sounds and situations that delight me.  I was at the Cliffs of Moher in Ireland on a rainy day and it was a marvel, even the rain.  Until I stepped out of the van there and looked about, breathed and felt the rain on my face, I would never have agreed if you had told me visiting such a place in the rain would be such a delight.  I was not alone in that point of view.  While half the people there scurried around with their heads down, a portion of the crowd was like me, "soaking" it all in.  Having it rain was not in the plan, but somehow it made the moment.

On another trip, I agreed to a tour of a dunes preserve--totally unplanned.  My sister, my wife and I just showed up at the far end of the parking lot at the appointed time and met a strange old woman who professed to be a mover and a shaker in her little town.  To hear her tell it, she was the person who started the ball rolling in this multi-million dollar project of creating a nature preserve along the shores of Lake Michigan and the Kalamazoo River.   I will remember the walking tour she gave us for a long time, and I think it is because of what a strange character she was.  I just stumbled over her and it made that little walking tour memorable.

Similarly, looking for a book of poetry written by a local person and published by the University of Michigan Press took me into a little place I would never have stumbled across there.  What sticks in my mind was a remark made by the person manning the register in the little bookstore that day.  I had run across the poet in an essay the poet had written about a local political storm centered around that nature preserve I mentioned above.  Tracking her down, I found her little web site and she named that bookstore as one of the places selling her book of poetry.  When I told the man tending the register in the bookstore, he said. "Our little 500 square foot bookstore on the Internet?"  Stumbling into that man and circumstance made the visit to that bookstore stay with me.  There were thousands of books, seemingly stacked randomly on desks and tables and bookcases jammed into that little room, yet he quickly told me. "if it's poetry it will be in that bookshelf atop the table on your left."

It's what and who you trip over that makes tripping worthwhile--or is it tripping over people and places that make trips worthwhile?