It’s just gone midnight. I’m in Berlin, desperately scrolling through Booking.com, looking for a cheap hotel. I shouldn’t be in Berlin. I was meant to land in Dublin an hour ago. I’d like to blame Berlin Airport. If you’re going to schedule two Dublin flights departing from opposite sides of a gargantuan building almost simultaneously, you should make this fact abundantly clear on your departures board. It wasn’t. I walked 25 minutes to the wrong gate. Now, I’m paying through the nose to spend another night in Berlin. Exiting border control, I explain my situation to the officer on duty. “This must happen a lot,” I say. “It doesn’t,” she replies. Clearly, the fault lies with me, not the airport. I’m a mediocre traveller.
I travel a lot, mostly for work. I write for a living. The advances and royalties from my books aren’t enough to pay the bills. Most writers are in the same position. We all have our own side hustles: academia, ghost writing, supportive partners with steady income streams. I’m fortunate enough to be widely translated. I am also an Irish writer and, internationally speaking, Irish writing is having another hot minute right now. Plus, I have an odd predilection for budget hotels. It makes sense that travel’s my bit on the side.
If a writer’s prepared to tour, there’s decent money to be made on the speaking circuit, both in Ireland and abroad. In Scandinavia, (where artists are exorbitantly – though proportionately - paid), I can make a whole month’s wages in a single week. In France, the crowds are large and keen. If this isn’t draw enough, French book festivals often employ an in-house chef. I travel to earn, spending around half my year away from home. It can be lonely. It’s also hard finding time and energy to write while shuffling from one place to another, waxing lyrical about writing books. However, I’m painfully aware that if it weren’t for these opportunities, I’d have to get a second – unarguably, less interesting – job.
It’s not all needs must. I love to travel. In the last decade, my books have taken me to dozens of different countries. Rarely do I feel like a tourist. I’m usually hosted by interesting locals: writers, artists, academics. Nine times out of 10, we’ll venture off the beaten track to eat or drink in some fabulous, known-only-to-locals spot. What a way to see the world! Why isn’t every writer perpetually transient? Probably because each of these Instagrammable moments equates to half a dozen days where I’ll see nothing beyond a hotel lobby and a lecture hall. I grab every chance to explore I get, but I’m travelling for work, not pleasure. My life’s less glamorous than it sounds.
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I think I’m a fairly competent traveller; a cross between Judith Chalmers and Phileas Fogg. I rarely get lost. I’ve outgrown my dour Protestant stomach. I’m now grand with foreign cuisine. I’ve developed my own set of travel hacks. Ask me about ironing shirts with hair-straighteners, drying undies in a trouser press and secreting books upon my person to flaunt hand luggage rules. Yet, I still seem to have a lot of travel mishaps. My brother recently said, “Surely you’ve enough material now for a book about your disastrous trips.” In my defence, I think the problem’s proportional. If I travel almost constantly, I’m bound to end up on the wrong continent from time to time.
Travel mishaps fall into two categories. Some are definitely self-inflicted: the consequence of exhaustion, concentration lapse or a particularly heavy/late night out. Among these horrors I include the time I arrived at Bristol airport one month early for my flight home, the time I attempted to fly to an Oregon wedding on a passport five years out of date and the time I trained from Alsace, France to Freiburg, only to discover Germany has two Freiburgs. Needless to say, my hotel was in the other one. All these mistakes were costly, embarrassing and entirely my own fault.
The second category of travel mishap sits beyond the realms of mea culpa, and there’s some small comfort to be found in blaming some other entity – God, the weather, Icelandic volcanoes, Ryanair – for the fact you’re not where you wanted to be. The list of my grievances here includes, a bus crash, a Midwestern snowstorm, an unsigned diversion on the M1 which left me driving from London to the Lake District via Manchester’s pedestrianised zone and the SNCF’s in-train announcements, which I didn’t understand because, despite two years on Duolingo, I’m still not fluent in French. Let’s just say it’s something of a shocker to find yourself 350km away from your intended destination at 11pm on a Sunday night. I’ve now seen enough of Le Mans to know I probably won’t be visiting again.
The travel disaster’s an absolute gold mine for writing material. Temporarily trapped in an airport or train station, the world, in all its weirdness, comes to you
When your suitcase is permanently in the hall, home feels like a holiday. You want to spend time with your people, wash your clothes in a washing machine and eat as many fresh vegetables as possible. Losing precious time to a travel disaster is always going to be a loss. However, as they seem inevitable, I’ve been trying to view these mishaps in a more positive light. It’s not the worst thing in the world to get a little lost or stuck from time to time.
First and foremost, you’ll experience the kindness of strangers. Innumerable individuals have leapt to my assistance during moments of travel distress. The Galway man who lay down in a puddle to yank a traffic cone out from underneath my car, the bus driver in Virginia who went several blocks off route to drop me outside my hotel because I didn’t know where I was, the elderly ladies in a Portuguese taxi who said they’d pray for me when I couldn’t find the email booking for my hotel. Chuck Palahniuk, in his novel Fight Club, talks about the “single-serving friends” (that you meet just once) who you sometimes encounter during flights. On the road, I’ve encountered many single-serving angels who’ve met me in my hour of travel need. At the risk of sounding like a fridge magnet, sometimes bad things happen to remind you how good people are. Under normal circumstances, I’m far too independent and self-contained. The vulnerability which comes with a travel disaster can be a timely reminder of how much I need other people in my life.
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Next there’s the hard-learnt realisation that the journey can be just as meaningful as the destination. Granted, this is often difficult to acknowledge when the journey in question’s a dull detour or an uncomfortable night on a waiting room floor. Still, I’ve experienced enough of these small redemptive moments to understand how amazing they can be. My unintended sojourn in Le Mans was cold and soggy, yet while resident, I did consume the Platonic ideal of a pain au chocolat. Similarly, I’d never willingly choose an eight-hour layover in Taiwan, but the earthquake while waiting for my delayed flight was something I may never experience again, living, as I do, in a supposedly stable part of the world.
Douglas Adams, writer of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, sums this sentiment up perfectly: “I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.” There’s historical precedent for this phenomena. Christopher Columbus was searching for a quick route to Asia when he accidentally stumbled upon America. I once had a similar experience following my dad’s AA map from Armagh to Belfast, convinced my departure point was actually Omagh. A detour, delay or misread map can occasionally pitch you into an unexpected adventure. Or it can be the straw which breaks a tired traveller’s back. It all depends on your attitude – and how long you’ve been on the road.
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Finally, the travel disaster’s an absolute gold mine for writing material. Temporarily trapped in an airport or train station, the world, in all its weirdness, comes to you. All the canny writer need do is pay close attention and write everything down. We writers are frequently asked where we get our ideas from. In all honesty, around half my stories were inspired by odd encounters on the road. The professional horse inseminator I met while traipsing, lost, round Sydney airport. The man on the Enterprise train, whose insistence that he travel with an axe, held up the train’s departure for half an hour. The morning, desperate for a pee, I left a box of books unattended in Minneapolis Greyhound station and came back to find the police instigating bomb scare protocol. Most famously, I once returned from what I’d been told was a Portuguese book festival with a story about a bewildered Irish writer who finds herself in a water park, giving the keynote speech at a memorial service for forest fire victims. Not a word of this piece was untrue.
My brother’s right, there’s a book in my misadventures. Perhaps someday I’ll get round to writing it. Right now, it’s ten to one, and I, like the snow-stuck traveller in Robert Frost’s poem, have ‘miles to go before I sleep.’ I’d swap all my hilarious anecdotes from the road for an on time flight, and a home-cooked meal and an early night in my own wee bed.
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