MAKING A TRIP

Some may be fond of travelling. For me to travel is to go through a gradual state of nerve wrecking.

Once my wife and I decided to take a holiday trip. So I went to an agency to book a cabin on a ship. While I was away my wife was supposed to be packing. To my astonishment it was only half done when I returned as my wife was in doubt whether to take a trunk or just a few suitcases to carry our things in.

It was no use urging her to hurry or to be ready at a certain time because she was not the person to be hurried or ordered about. To try to speed her up was to make her excited and bad-tempered.

With only an hour to spare, the packing to do and the city to cross, I could not but be impatient, so I simply began to throw the things into the suitcases without folding them. The suitcase nearly burst, but I was willing to burst a dozen suitcases to catch the train. I knew my wife would have to iron everything again. But I thought it would teach her not to put things off to the last moment. Within 20 minutes or so we were ready to go.

I immediately found a taxi which seemed almost too good to be true and requested the driver to hurry and get us to the station in time. How the taxi-driver managed to get us to the station alive is difficult to understand because he drove at breakneck speed through the heavy traffic of the city. We got to the station, though strange to relate, quite safely to find the train still there and with a few minutes to spare. Some acquaintances were waiting on the platform to see us off, but we hardly had time to say " hullo" to them. We were almost the last passengers to arrive. This was no time for me to be genteel. Up went the mountain of luggage; down sank my wife in a corner, and away went the train.

In the compartment we were not the only ones to want to put our luggage on the racks. Our fellow passengers wanted to put theirs as well, only to find there had been no room left to speak of. It was enough to make anyone angry. When they tried to dump their suitcases in the corridor, the conductor would not have them do it. They tried to convince him that it was nothing to make a fuss about but he replied that corridors were to walk through, not to store luggage in. In the end the conductor calmed down. But the people were just bursting to tell us a thing or two.

When we had to change stations to go aboard the ship, my wife wanted me to carry all the luggage. She didn't want to waste money on porters when she had a strong, muscular husband to do it for her. But I had no desire to take the risk of breaking my back and so I went on strike. In the end my wife gave in.

It took the porter three trips to transfer it all and when he had finished he had no breath left to speak of. And the beauty of it was that she had us drag all that luggage only to leave half of it unopened when we did get there.