7 years, 5 months, and 9 days ago I arrived in Canada for the first time. Since then a lot has happened that prevented me financially, logistically, or mentally to leave the country. Recently, my mom turned 60 years old. She’s never been to Paris but always wanted to. Last January, I finally took the plunge and booked us flights for October to meet in Paris. Right at this very moment, I would’ve been in that flight, but, if you’re reading this is my timeline or if you’re a historian reading this 1,000 years from now (first of: do people still read? No telepathy? Or instant knowledge absorption? Or are you just a hipster? Anyway.) you probably know that COVID happened and that the trip was cancelled.
Just to start off in the correct path: I don’t think this cancellation, in the overall scheme of things, really matters. People have lost their lives; economies and jobs are shaken up quite drastically; simple human connection has become a great threat, so loneliness has impacted more people than ever before… So yeah, truly not a big deal. But it started getting me wondering if this also will make it the best vacation to Paris ever, simply because it never happened.
Point is, mom’s “long time dream” to visit Paris already created the expectation of an amazing vacation. Then, to meet those expectations, I started obsessing about what are THE best things to do in Paris. Is visiting the tower enough, or is spending an exorbitant amount of money on dinner there the “right” way to experience it? What’s the best time to visit the Louvre? Do we go to the catacombs? Are these all too touristy options? Should we go for a more “authentic” experience? What are the best streets in Paris? Where do actual local French people eat? Is this our only time in France? If so, do we also go to Versailles? What’s the best way to visit Monet’s gardens?
These are just a very small sample of actual questions I already had been working on in January. For a trip in October.
The next step is where most of us gets wrong when going on a trip: we try to plan and schedule as much as possible to make the most out of it. We arrive there with a checklist and a plan. If you’re great at planning, you didn’t make it so everyday you wake up at 8am and stay out until 10pm because you know that’s not physically sustainable (especially when you wake up at 10am-11am every day in your regular life). But even if well planned, trying to do as much as possible generally leads to making your vacation becoming a chore or, at least, exhausting.
Instead, what we have is this shared sadness of a trip that never was bringing us together. In this memory, I’m not concerned if my husband and I are fighting too much in front of my mom; or if she’ll spend more money than she has available trying to bring gifts for random extended family members; or if I’m going to show too much of the sadness I carry inside of me and she’ll get worried about me being in Canada and she being in Brazil… We still didn’t get to wait longer in line than we thought it would take us to get into the Musée d’Orsay; or debate if paying to watch the Moulin Rouge show would actually be worth it, even though it would make a decent impact to our modest budget; or see how much the subway there is dirty and how a lot of areas inside it smell like pee (ok, this one is from experience because I had been there in 2011.)
But none of that matters, because every time one of us sees something related to Paris or France, it already reminds us of one another. And in the end, that was the whole goal of the trip: creating memories of our experiences to bring us closer together. By taking all of these moments away from us, we just made any reference to Paris or France, the best trip we’ve never had.
