You can sleep when you get home
My grandmother taught me that education and travel are two things that no one can take away from you. Gram was a teacher for little ones and each summer she chose a destination. If you earned a college diploma, you could accompany her to the next place on her list.
She traveled with each of her children, and later their spouses, then extended the gift of travel to each grandchild. If we earned a diploma, we earned a second trip with Gram.
She made very few plans. Her companions were handed a Fodor’s Travel Guide and after each stop she would say: “Where do we go next?” Our hotels were cheap; simply a place to rest our heads. We ate cheese and crackers on park benches, walked fast, never took taxis and spent our money on museums and donations for church candles.
The show “Amazing Race,” would be on TV decades later. If Gram was still alive, we would have entered, and we would have won.
“You sleep when you get home,” she would say as we plunked down on a cheap mattress after a long day of exploring this and that.
One memorable day was our visit to the Sistine Chapel in Rome. I had read Irving Stone’s “The Agony and the Ecstasy,” and circled all of Michaelangelo’s artwork in the dog-eared travel guide.
The man at the Sistine Chapel gateway tried to send us away; he was due to kick out the tourists in 15 minutes. Gram used her teacher’s voice, and soon we were racing down the hallway. We passed dozens of priceless paintings and arrived with only a few minutes to crane our necks at the soot-darkened biblical panels. The art would make more sense 10 years later when the paintings were restored and I learned about them in Smithsonian Magazine.
Yet, at age 15, I saw them with my own eyes, and never forgot. Gram made certain of that.
Recently, our work crew arrived in Athens for a workshop with about 90 international attendees. The last time I was in Europe was in 1990.
The planning took months, with three of us toiling at computers in our offices at Chico State. The hotel in Athens had an amazing view of the Parthenon. Yet, for those first few days, I sulked over things unexplored.
After using the hotel computer and printer in the hotel lobby, I peeked at the stacks of tour pamphlets and felt sorry for myself that there was no time for a half-day trip to an island. There was no time for the National Museum that our taxi driver had said was a “must-see.”
One afternoon we had tea with officials from the Greek Ministry and Fulbright Commission. The outdoor cafe was at the Benaki Museum. I poked my head through the entrance but was soon whisked away. We needed to finalize plans for the final banquet, which meant walking briskly past the Temple of Zeus and the National Garden. No time to dally. Bossman’s to-do list included finalizing our workshop topic lists.
Instead of gratitude for this amazing work location, I resented that I was not born into aristocracy, and my job was not simple sightseeing and shopping for high-end shoes.
The day came when our workshop attendees arrived, dozens at a time, suitcases in hand, jetlagged and gleeful. We welcomed the former visitors to Chico like proud parents as they reunited with long-ago friends. One day we boarded two coach buses to visit the Parthenon and the Acropolis Museum and I remembered that I have the best job in the world.
By the time our workshop was complete, I had seen most of the old city, in bits and pieces, gained a few pounds from baklava and chocolate-covered pistachio ganache, and witnessed so many important moments, most of which had nothing to do with me or my planning.
I should have planned to stay the weekend for an island hop. Instead I made plans to meet a friend in Ireland.
On that final day in Athens, our Chico team gathered again in the hotel lobby to finish reports, tabulate conference surveys and pack our conference supplies. We finished early and had the afternoon and evening before flights the next morning.
Bossman accepted my sheepish apology for my grouchy mood those first few days, but he had one more “assignment.”
He had studied the city map in the lobby of the hotel.
I needed to run/jog to keep up with him as he raced to the nearest Byzantine church, near the ruins of Hadrian’s Library. We found a second church where workmen were placing bouquets of white flowers along the pathway for a wedding. There was no time to wait for the bride.
“Didn’t you want to see the garden?” my boss said with a smile, increasing his stride.
The garden?
I had forgotten.
“The National Garden is two blocks away,” he said over his shoulder as I power-walked to beat the light at the crosswalk.
Chrysanthemums, every color of chrysanthemums you could imagine, blooming in neat rows near the ornamental sundial.
We raced through the vine-covered archway and stopped long enough to take photos of statues. I’ll look at the statues more closely on my computer at work as we plan for the group of international visitors who arrive in Chico in January.
The plants in the National Garden were mostly familiar, Dusty Miller, Cannas, Pampas grass, lantana … but they were in Greece! I’ll see some of these plants again when our next international group arrives in California. We’ll race through San Francisco and to the coast. Our visitors will wish they had the leisure to explore, but there’s a lot to see and only so much time.
I’ll tell them they can sleep when they get home.