Polly Campbell: Satisfying travel, like jazz, takes planning, improvisation

I never seem to be able to get good seats on airplanes, but recently, on a trip to attend the French Quarter Festival in New Orleans, I was seated on the aisle. It gave me the occasional chance to stretch out my leg with the bad knee and I have to say, I was pretty excited about it. Then the guy next to me, having ascertained I was from Cincinnati and that I liked chili, offered me a $50 Skyline Chili gift certificate if I traded places with his wife, in the middle seat across the aisle.

I thought about how many cheese coneys that represented. But I turned him down. That’s how much that small measure of aisle seat comfort meant to me. 

In other words, flying is terrible these days. Even if nothing goes wrong, the long day of getting to the airport, dealing with luggage, the crowding, the seat-kicker behind you, making the connection, getting the cab when you get where you’re going feels like an ordeal. I did wonder several times during that day what the point is. It’s a lot easier to stay home. 

But when the cab turned the corner into the French Quarter I was suddenly in that unique New Orleans atmosphere, familiar from past visits, but so different from my everyday. My husband had gotten to the city before me, so I dropped off my luggage and walked down to Jackson Square to meet up with him. Delfeayo Marsalis and his band were playing jazz with the unmistakable New Orleans funky beat, and I felt so happy. The irritations of the trip that got me there disappeared. It felt like I’d been transported in a flash.

But the question does keep coming up: Why travel? I look at a bustling airport and wonder what’s so important that gets all these people out of their routines and sends them hither and yon, standing in lines and running for gates. 

I thought I’d do a lot of travel in retirement, go see all the places in the world I haven’t seen yet. COVID-19 postponed that, and gave me some time to realize I didn’t really want to do as much travel as I thought. And when I did, I was going to make the most of it. 

 But what does that mean? A cruise where you don’t have to make any decisions? A tour with a group of people you don’t know so you can pack in every experience available? Spending hours on the internet figuring out the best restaurants, walks and museums so I could come home feeling sure I didn’t waste time on anything second-rate? 

None of those approaches are for me anymore. I realized at the festival that it offers a metaphorical guide to traveling. Like any music festival, you start out entranced by the sheer number of acts, then realize it’s not possible to see them all. You have to choose, which can be very anxious-making. One way to deal with that is to spend a lot of time with the schedule, optimizing your time down to the minute. I’m over that. 

We picked a couple of acts a day we wanted to make an effort for, and let serendipity do the rest. Neil wanted to make sure I saw the Pinettes, an all-female brass band I loved. We checked out some old favorites. We saw some traditional jazz recommended by a knowledgeable friend. We took the suggestions of a random guy we met in a park where we were eating muffaletta breadsticks from Ayu Bakehouse, which I’d found on the internet. And we stopped to listen to a singer-songwriter whose soulful singing caught my ear. 

That, to me, is how you make traveling worth it. Plan lightly. Allow for spontaneity. Talk to people in the park. Do not spend a moment worried about what you didn’t do. Realize even the terrible days make for good stories. (And know where the good bakeries are.) My favorite travel memories are things that just happened. I think about pre-internet and cell phone traveling with my brother in Japan when I was 17 where we only got where we were going because we got lost a lot and had to ask for help, which led to meeting people and getting a tiny bit under the surface of Japan. 

And for me, it’s about getting away from the crowds, though I might get a little too focused on that. I can handle one or two of the major sites in the company of throngs of other people, per trip. But I would be willing to give up the Parthenon if I could see all the second-best Greek temples with few to no people around me. 

The last day of the festival got so crowded I may have had a minor panic attack. But later, walking back to where we were staying, through dark streets in balmy air, my feet killing me, I realized the French Quarter, away from the busiest streets, was completely quiet. I filed it away, that moment of serenity and satisfaction, in an easy-to-reach place in my head, where I could retrieve and remember it on the plane trip home, in the middle seat.

Polly Campbell covered restaurants and food for the Cincinnati Enquirer from 1996 until 2020. She lives in Pleasant Ridge with her husband, and since retiring does a lot of reading, cooking and gardening, if that’s what you call pulling weeds. 

She writes monthly on a variety of topics, and she welcomes your feedback and column suggestions
at editor@moversmakers.org.