It's just after midnight. I'm in Berlin, desperately scrolling through Booking.com looking for a cheap hotel. I shouldn't have been in Berlin. I was supposed to land in Dublin an hour ago. I want to blame the Berlin airport. If they schedule two flights to Dublin that depart almost simultaneously from opposite sides of a huge building, they should clearly state this fact on the departure board. But they didn't. I walked 25 minutes to the wrong gate. And now I have to pay an exorbitant fee to stay another night in Berlin. I exit passport control and explain the situation to the agent on duty. “Is this a common occurrence?” I say. “No, it's not,” she replies. Clearly the fault lies with me, not the airport. I'm a mediocre traveler.
I travel a lot, but mostly for work. I make a living from writing. My book advances and royalties don't cover my living expenses. Most writers are in the same situation. We all have our own side jobs – academia, ghostwriters, supportive partners with steady income streams. I've been fortunate to be widely translated. I'm also an Irish author, and internationally speaking, Irish writing is now becoming popular again. Plus, I have a weird obsession with budget hotels. It made sense for travel to be my side job.
If an author is willing to tour, they can make quite a bit of money on speaking tours, both in Ireland and abroad. In Scandinavia (where artists are paid proportionately, though exorbitantly), you can earn a month's salary in a week. In France, the audiences are large and enthusiastic; if that wasn't enough to draw in, French book festivals often hire private chefs. I travel to earn money, spending about half the year away from home. It can be lonely. It's hard to find the time and energy to write, all the while moving from place to place and talking passionately about writing books. But I'm painfully aware that without these opportunities I'd have to take a second job that was definitely not fun.
I don't travel by necessity. I love to travel. I've been to dozens of countries for my books over the past decade. I rarely feel like a tourist. I'm usually greeted by interesting locals: writers, artists, academics. Nine times out of ten, I get to go off the beaten path and enjoy food and drinks in amazing places only locals know. It's a great way to see the world. Why aren't all authors on the road all the time? Maybe it's because those Instagram-worthy moments amount to six days of seeing nothing but hotel lobbies and lecture halls. I grab every opportunity to explore, but I travel for work, not for fun. My life is not as glamorous as it sounds.
I consider myself a pretty competent traveller; something like a cross between Judith Chalmers and Phileas Fogg. I rarely get lost. I've grown out of my stubborn Protestant stomach; I'm now open to foreign cuisine. I've developed my own travel secrets; just ask me about ironing my shirts with a hair iron, drying my underwear in a trouser press, and hiding books to circumvent baggage rules. And yet I seem to have a lot of travelling mishaps. My brother said to me recently, “You'd have enough material now to write a book about your miserable travels.” In my defence, I think the problem is proportional. When you're travelling almost constantly, it's inevitable that you're going to end up on the wrong continent every now and again.
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My travel mishaps fall into two categories: fatigue, poor concentration, or some that were clearly self-inflicted, like drinking too much or staying up too late. Some of these horrible events included arriving at Bristol airport a month early for my flight home, trying to fly to a wedding in Oregon with a five-year-old passport, and taking the train from Alsace, France to Freiburg only to discover that there are two Freiburgs in Germany. Needless to say, I stayed in different hotels. All of these mistakes were costly, embarrassing, and entirely my own fault.
The second category of travel troubles is beyond the realm of self-blame, and there is some solace in blaming other entities like God, the weather, a volcano in Iceland, or Ryanair for not getting where you wanted to go. My list of grievances here includes a bus accident, a snowstorm in the Midwest, an unsigned detour on the M1 that forced me to drive through a pedestrian zone in Manchester from London to the Lake District, and an SNCF train announcement (that I couldn't understand because my French is still not fluent, despite using Duolingo for two years). Let's just say that it was quite a shock to find myself 350km away from my destination at 11pm on a Sunday night. I've seen enough of Le Mans to know that I'll probably never visit again.
Travel mishaps are a veritable treasure trove of writing material. When you’re temporarily trapped in an airport or train station, the world opens up to you in all its strangeness.
Having your suitcase sitting at the door makes being at home feel like a vacation. You want to spend time with your family, wash your clothes in the washing machine, and eat as many fresh vegetables as possible. Losing precious time to travel mishaps is always a loss. But since they seem inevitable, I try to look at these mishaps in a more positive light. Getting a little lost or stranded every now and then isn't the worst thing in the world.
First of all, you will experience the kindness of strangers. There are countless people who have helped me when I was in trouble while traveling. From the man in Galway who lay in a puddle to pull a traffic cone out from under his car, to the bus driver in Virginia who went a few blocks off route to drop me off outside my hotel because he didn't know where I was, to the elderly ladies in a taxi in Portugal who offered to pray for me when I couldn't find my hotel reservation email. In his novel “Fight Club,” Chuck Palahniuk talks about “one-time friends” (friends you only see once) that he sometimes meets on flights. Along the way, I have met many angels who met me in travel troubles. It may be a story that sticks to the refrigerator, but sometimes bad things happen to remind me of the goodness in people. In normal circumstances, I am too independent and self-sufficient. The vulnerability that comes with travel mishaps can be a timely reminder of how much I need other people in my life.
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Then there is the hard-learned realization that the journey is as meaningful as the destination. Admittedly, this is often difficult to acknowledge when the journey in question is a tedious detour or an uncomfortable night on a waiting room floor. And yet, I have experienced these small moments of relief enough to know how wonderful they can be. My unexpected stay in Le Mans was cold and damp, but I savored the Platonic ideal of pain au chocolat during my stay. Similarly, I would never willingly choose an eight-hour layover in Taiwan, but the earthquake that occurred while waiting for a delayed flight is something I may never experience again in the supposedly stable part of the world where I live.
Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, summed up this feeling perfectly: “I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I've arrived where I should be.” There is historical precedent for this phenomenon: Christopher Columbus stumbled into America while searching for a shortcut to Asia. I once had a similar experience when I traveled from Armagh to Belfast following my father's AA map, thinking I had actually started in Omagh. Detours, delays, and map misreadings can land you in an unexpected adventure. Or they can be the final push for a weary traveler. It all depends on your attitude, and how long you've been on the road.
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Finally, travel mishaps are a veritable treasure trove of writing material. When temporarily trapped in an airport or train station, the world, in all its strangeness, unfolds before your eyes. All an astute writer has to do is pay close attention and write it all down. We writers are often asked where we get our ideas. To be honest, about half of my stories are inspired by strange encounters on the road. A professional horse artificial inseminator I met while lost wandering through Sydney airport. A man on an Enterprise train who insisted on traveling with an axe, causing the train's departure to be delayed by half an hour. I left my bookcase in the Greyhound station in Minneapolis because I desperately needed to go to the toilet in the morning, and by the time I returned, the police had begun bomb scare protocols. Most famously, I came home from what I had heard was a book festival in Portugal with a story about a bewildered Irish author giving the keynote speech for a memorial for bushfire victims at a water park. There was not a single lie in this piece.
My brother is right, my misfortunes could be a book. Maybe one day I'll write it. For now, the odds are 10 to 1 that, like the snowbound traveler in Robert Frost's poem, “I've got a long way to go before I sleep.” I'd trade funny road anecdotes for on-time flights, home-cooked meals, and early sleep in my own little bed.
