Whenever we can't do something on vacation that my parents did no problem while traveling... it galls me.
For example, when our flight arrived at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam beginning of this month, we got off the flight, walked a bunch, then through several security checkpoints including passport control on the other side of which was baggage claim.
Whoops. Not baggage claim. Not ours, at least. You see ours was still a bit of a walk away so we walked and walked and walked until finally our baggage claim appeared, then our baggage conveyor appeared, then finally our bag appeared. So we grab the bag, start rolling it toward the exit where I imagine my cousins are gonna be.
Why?
Because this is my long-ago memory from when I was a kid with my parents and we started making our way out of baggage claim and I saw my aunt, my mom's older sister, waiting for us on the other side of the glass, waving at us.
There was always family waiting to meet us right there as far as my memory's concerned.
So then this last trip, thirty, forty years since I traveled with my parents, we exit baggage claim and there's no one there. Now, one or another of my cousins was gonna be there but I couldn't reach either of them on my cell phone either by message or voice so...
Dead in the water.
Here we are, a long, long, looooooooong way away from home, with no way to contact anyone.
One more time:
No way.
To contact.
Anyone.
And yeah. You bet it's moments like these when I'm like
HOW DID MY PARENTS DO THIS???
Seriously.
How did they do it without WiFi and data and airport apps and voice-to-voice and texting and messaging and laptops? How on earth did they do what we're doing now only without massive, hand-held computing power with real-time functionality?
You see, they always were able to do this. No sweat.
And here we were sitting around the airport outside the recently exited baggage claim waiting for someone to find us.
Waiting for someone.
To just.
Find us.
No joke. That was our plan.
By the way I'm always surprised at how hard we lean on tech. And I'm also always surprised by the fact that my parents didn't have any.
How did they do this?
It's galling.
Planning and foresight, I'm guessing, though. Not a single minute of improvising, of winging it. They made arrangements in advance and told their relatives what flight, time, and place. And when the time came, the flight landed, we all converged on the agreed-upon place with no doubt we would soon see each other.
Call it the analog way.
And it worked.
Dang it. It worked.
Every time.
So yeah. Moments when our own limitations and inadequacies our so obviously revealed...
Moments when we're just waiting to be found because we are profoundly out of contact with anyone...
These moments definitively, unequivocally remind me of all the hard work my parents put into making things like international travel...