Best Laid Plans

“Any arbitrary turning along the way and I would be elsewhere; I would be different.”

Under the Tuscan Sun: At Home in Italy by Frances Mayes

If there is one thing that I have learned in the decade that I’ve been travelling solo, it’s that things go wrong. Constantly. The unpredictability of life seems to escalate exponentially when you’re on foreign land, with only a bag of clothes to your name and limited phone service. It can lead to the worst of moments as it is happening but, in hindsight, these are often the times that most shape my growth as a person, while also providing entertaining anecdotes and stories to be shared years later.

(Although, in the current political climate, the story of the time I got accidentally detained in after an emergency landing because my pilot had a heart attack is less fun. That’s definitely still on my record.)

In the kind of travel I’m doing at the moment – the “slow” kind that is, by design, supposed to feel a bit less like travel and a bit more like living elsewhere – I suppose I grew complacent in my expectation of these hurdles. This wasn’t a time where I was rushing around with a suitcase from destination to destination; this was a time where I was gently progressing my life through various parts of the world. 

Perhaps I had too easy of a first couple of months, that I forgot about the twists the road can throw up. Yet, that morning as I packed up my things in a small hotel room in Florence to head to the Tuscan coast, I was apprehensive in the inexplicable way I sometimes get when things are about to go awry. I had the sense that it was going to be an exceptionally long travel day, which was odd for a destination only an hour or so away by train. As I said goodbye to my parents (who were passing through that weekend) at the train station, it didn’t really feel like a goodbye, more of a “see you in a bit”. 

All that to say that when I arrived into the train station, got into the car of my accommodation host, and his first words were, “so, we have a little bit of a problem”, it didn’t come so much as a shock as a realisation.

Ah. There it is.

That doesn’t mean I immediately knew what to do. I sat for almost an hour on the unmade bed in the spare room of this man’s house (not my intended accommodation, to be clear), bags by the door, and twisted over the options ahead of me.

I didn’t want to change my plans. I had intended to have a peaceful month ahead of me of writing, practicing Italian with the limited inhabitants of the small town, and wandering down toward the sea once in a while. But despite the assurances that a plumber was coming, something about a burst pipe in a centuries old Italian building didn’t assure a quick or easy fix.

So, I returned to Florence. I booked a hotel room for one night. I had dinner with my parents. I extended my hotel another night. I found an apartment in town for a week. I found another apartment for after that in a smaller town half an hour outside of the city.

And I tried to relax again. My general ethos is that things work out the way they are meant to. So, for now, maybe I was meant to spend a week in an apartment overlooking the Arno river that would come close to flooding shortly after I left, in a building once owned by the Botticelli family, whose most famous son was tied into the Florence-set book I was redrafting.

Yes. Maybe I was meant to be here. I woke to the bells from the church next door in the morning and watched the rose-pink sunsets over the river in the evening. I found familiar corners of the city, and some new favourite ones besides.

Then, a day or two before leaving, another bend in the road. The new small-town apartment I’d found had a plumbing issue. (Again? Again!) The host, extremely apologetic, cancelled my stay. 

This is how I would come to be in Livorno, a slightly larger and more industrial town directly on the coast. It would rain heavily for several days – the same rain that would almost flood the Arno – turning the sea into a churning beast and the sky into a miserable canvas.

I, too, was quickly miserable. It was too small of a town to keep me occupied but too large of a town to be able to find a nearby spot in which I could entrench myself with locals. I made a point of leaving the house every day, even when it rained, sucking in lungfuls of the salty air. I quickly became a novelty to the local supermarket, to the point that a chorus of la ragazza scozesse! (the Scottish girl!) would erupt when I came in.

I was bored, certainly, but I also had a job to do while I was here. And faced with nothing better to fill my time with and nowhere to go, I set to work. So for being a dull place in which I spent several evenings crying on the floor out of sheer isolation and frustration, I also wrote an entire draft of a screenplay in just over a week.

My best laid plans had taken me on a winding route through Tuscany but, ultimately, they had led me to the one and same destination. On one of my last mornings in Livorno, the sun now returned to the skies, I went for a gentle run along the seafront. The sea was still, a rich, deep turquoise. In the distance, the hills rose up a deep blue, a shadow to the sandy yellow buildings dotting the shoreline. 

How special to be here. How special to be running along the Tuscan coast on a random Thursday morning in March. How different to my life a year ago. 

I returned to Florence as to an old friend, familiar and even more pleased to see her having been away. I would start journeying north soon where, too, my booked apartment had cancelled last minute (I don’t know if it was the plumbing this time). Once again, this was fate intervening: perfectly working around a tentative plan to visit my parents for Easter, and leading me to a homey apartment by a large park where I now sit.

The spring sunshine is in full force in Copenhagen, flowers blooming along the edge of the park. I have a little over a week left to edit my screenplay before a submission deadline. What plans I have are flexible, and extend only a few months in advance at most. I have no idea where I will be this time next year. But I think I trust that it’ll be wherever I’m meant to be.