Cassandra Jones: A Lesson in Letting Go
I am not a “go-with-the-flow” kind of person. I am a planner at my core, so I have never handled deviations well. Even when I was little, I would plan my family vacations: pick out restaurants and things to do, make an itinerary with costs listed, and the recommended times to go.
When I went to study at the University of Winchester in England, my newly made friends were not planners. Talking through itineraries and activities seemed to stress them out as much as not having a plan stressed me out. So, traveling together was an experience. My friend, Lyndie, and I booked a trip to Italy for a week since our professors had cancelled classes because of strikes. I had really wanted to go to Verona while Lyndie really wanted to go to Venice. We split up the trip between the two of us, so we were both planning for the place we were most interested in going. I had booked our hostels and tickets and then I had started researching. I was looking on TripAdvisor and Google to find restaurants and tours and things to do. I had fully mapped out our two days there checked in with Lyndie to see if she wanted me to look up anything for Venice but she said she was good.
The time had come. We were sitting in Stansted Airport when we saw our flight was delayed. Planner that I am, I had prebooked all of our train and bus tickets so I knew we were covered. The longer we were delayed, the more and more stressed I got. Lyndie, on top of not being a planner, was also not necessarily known for being on time. She was completely relaxed.
“What if we don’t make it in time for our bus?”
She replied, “we’ll talk to someone at the airport about booking another. We have a few hours between the plane and bus and then the bus and the train, right?”
“Yeah, in case our flight was delayed.”
“Then why are you stressing. Don’t freak out until there’s something to freak out about.”
I took a deep breath and tried to listen to her. Everything she said had made sense. After all, I had planned for a slight delay.
We boarded the plane and after we landed, there was a delay on disembarking the plane. Once again, I started panicking. We had a very similar conversation with Lyndie reminding me that there are people who work in the airports whose jobs are to help in these situations and I had made sure we had a little bit of time in between each leg of travel. We got off the plane and found our way to the bus terminal. We walked outside to see that our bus had been delayed. I didn’t even say anything, I looked at Lyndie and opened my mouth to speak and she started before I could: “We have time in between the bus and train. If we miss it, we’ll figure it out.”
When the bus got to the train station, we ran inside to find that the train had been delayed. This is when it dawned on us that maybe Italian public transport was just not very timely. We had three train connections to get to Venice. I had planned an hour between the bus and the train, which had now been cut down to 15 minutes, if the train had been on time. The connections between the trains were all supposed to take about 10-15 minutes. The train was 5 minutes late getting there and then ended up taking more time between the stops. I was watching the Trainline app as the numbers turned red because we were too far behind schedule to make it.
“Take screenshots and when we get there just book the next train, hopefully Trainline will refund you for the ones we missed,” Lyndie said. So I did.
We arrived to the next station and saw that the next train had been delayed. Everyone on our train took off running to make their connections.
Long story short, every single service we used in Italy was just late enough that we never missed a connection. We walked to the hostel as the sun was setting and got checked in. We had only planned one full day in Verona so I had a plan almost down to the hour. I wanted to go to the Juliet statue, write a letter to the Juliets, see the Colosseum, go up on the tower to see all of Verona, and a few other monuments. I had it in order so we could go from one to the next without deciding which one was closest and had timed meals and snacks so I had suggestions for places to stop to get snacks.
As I said earlier, this was not how Lyndie traveled, but she didn’t complain. She offered to take pictures and shared in my excitement at each stop. After dinner, we had done my whole list, so we just went back to the hostel. We didn’t wander and look at new stuff to do. I had checked off my list. I was good so Lyndie was good.
Venice was not planned out. Lyndie had decided the best course of action was to walk around and find things to do. She had two things she knew she wanted to do: gondola ride and tour St. Mark’s Basilica but hadn’t looked up details or times or anything. I tried to let go, because she let me do Verona my way, so I let her do Venice her way. In the mornings, I would wake up early and get ready and walk around the little island we were staying on adjacent to Venice while Lyndie got ready and would eventually find a little bench and just people-watch until she was ready. Then we would go to Venice and walk around and mosey in and out of stores. If we saw something that looked good when we were hungry, we’d go in and eat. At night, we met up with some girls from our hostel and talked with them about what they had done and what they were going to do. We’d just mentally add things to the list.
In this experience, I realized some things that were kind of shocking to me. First, there was something very relaxing and nice about walking around and just doing what you want when you want. Second, sometimes planning beforehand ended up being more stressful because one wring thing could throw off the entire plan.
The rest of my study abroad, I tried to incorporate both. Have things picked out that I knew I wanted to do, but also leave time to not have a plan and wander these incredible places. With this experience, I’m much better at adapting. At Lander, all my friends are planners. We all get panicked when something looks like its going to get thrown off track For example, when we went to Greenville a few weeks ago to go to an event and finding parking took much longer than we were planning. We all got worried that we weren’t going to be able to make it in time, but I heard Lyndie’s voice in my head telling me it was going to be okay and wouldn’t be the end of the world if we were a little late. Not only has this greatly helped my stress level, it’s also helped increase my confidence in myself. If something goes wrong, I can probably figure it out. It’s not the end of the world.
Cassandra Jones is a senior Psychology major with a minor in Business Administration who will be graduating in Spring 2024. She is a member of the Honors College and Psi Chi, and is working on research. After graduation, Cassandra is planning on pursuing a career in Human Resources.