You Can’t Schedule Adventure.

When I was 16 my grandmother took me to Paris France for two weeks. We went with two other adults and two other teens. One of the ladies we traveled with embodied the word tourist. I generally travel with either my parents or my grandmother and when we travel we like to learn about the culture and the people who live in the place we are going. When you get there you act like you belong to the culture. That’s just how it works when you travel, or so I thought. That is not how this person travels. Now this particular woman has a bad habit of worrying about everything and voicing those worries. To the point of practically making the stuff she’s scared of come true. But that’s a post for another time. At the begining of our trip she decided our little group of six needed a schedule. According to her we needed a list of every place we were going to go, what day, and how much time we would spend at each place. She pulled me and the other two teens aside and tried to get us to “team up” against our grandmothers to put this schedule into place for our trip. The amusing part is we just looked at each other with a look that said, “you have got to be kidding me” and I said: “What if we like not having a schedule?” One thing you must know about my grandmother is she isn’t easily controlled, that includes with a schedule. But honestly, the biggest reason to not put a schedule into place for our trip was because you can’t schedule adventure. That’s why we were there to begin with. We wanted to experience something new, in a fun adventurous way. If we have put a schedule on it we would have been so worried about where we “needed to be” that we wouldn’t have enjoyed the adventure of the trip. Of course schedules have their place, but I have never been on a truly amazing adventure that had a rigid schedule. I’ve also never seen “Adventure” penciled in on a schedule that required you to be at certain places, at a certain time, just saying. Because you really can’t schedule adventure, no matter how hard you try.