Wellsprings of Affection and Generosity

Yesterday we climbed down the ladder from the loft bed in our Rotterdam Home Exchange at 6:30 a.m.; almost 24 hours later, clumbed into bed at home in Charlottetown.

In between we took a metro to Rotterdam central station, a train to Schiphol Airport, flew to Toronto, had a layover there, and then flew to Charlottetown. In the way all transatlantic travel feels when it’s over, it feels like magic, like it shouldn’t be physically possible to move so far so fast.

Our trip was a delight, a combination of resting in place (in Liège),  moving under our own cycle power (from Brussels to Bruges), with a coda of the maximum modernity that is Rotterdam. Along the way we got to spend time with friends (here, here), a lovely addition.

In the book shop at Schiphol I came across the book How to Travel, and the chapter “The Pleasure of the Romantic Minibreak,” which starts:

One of the stranger aspects of relationships is that we  may, in order to sustain them, need to go away together every now and then. 

In theory, it should make no difference to love quite where we happen to be. But in practice, the furniture may have to alter, so that we can. The familiar backdrop of home keeps us too tightly and punitively tethered to whom we have so often been – which may mean, to the less impressive and more unkind versions of ourselves. The sofa remembers that argument we once had on it; the kitchen keeps us connected to some unpleasant scenes that unfolded in it over too many evenings. But the new surroundings have no such memories. They allow us to start afresh and rediscover wellsprings of affection and generosity. 

More than anything else, it’s those “wellsprings of affection and generosity” that I will remember from this trip: lubricated by miles on bicycles, cactus beers, accidental finds, accidental falls, by the myriad pleasures of being a connected partnership engaged in a grand adventure.