Parliament building in Budapest - Photo by Ron Hendricks (used with permission)
By Kathy Hendricks
My husband, Ron, and I started planning our trip along the Danube in early spring. Following the advice of our travel agent we chose the second week in September as an optimal time in which the river would remain high enough for the journey. We booked with AmaWaterways – a cruise line that provided us with a memorable experience along the Rhine a few years earlier.
Things started to go awry not long after we arrived in Prague where our cruise was set to depart. The weather turned stormy, making for a soggy first-day walking tour through the city. The rain did not abate for the next eight days and caused the river to rise to dangerous levels. This meant skipping some planned stops along the way and creating a logjam as dozens of ships stalled in the Vienna ports. The scene from the balcony in our room was thus limited to a ship docked next to ours. Our last stop in Budapest was to be a magnificent entrance along the river and into the heart of the city. Plans changed once again when the captain announced that Hungary had closed the border along the river and that we would need be bussed into the city from Vienna. The day we disembarked from the ship, the sun came out. The entire trip culminated with a dead battery in our car after our ten-hour flight home.
Needless to say, this wasn’t the trip we anticipated. Even so, memorable moments arose out of plans gone awry. We ate a sumptuous dinner at a Prague restaurant where we were entertained by dancers, musicians, and a talented (and generous) wine steward. There are worse places to be stranded than Vienna and we attended a beautiful concert by the musicians, soloists, and dancers from the Vienna Residence Orchestra. At the newly opened “Strauss House”, the great-grandson of Eduard regaled us with stories of his famous family. We shared delicious meals on the ship with fellow passengers and made new friends along the way. Katya, the cruise director, pulled off an extraordinary feat when she managed to book the entire shipload of passengers into a brand new and opulent hotel in Budapest. A block away from the swollen river, we were afforded a gorgeous view of the Parliament building, which Ron captured at various times with his camera. And our dead battery was quickly charged by a helpful agent at the off-site parking lot. Our drive home, after a night spent in Denver, took us along a route lined with aspen trees in full autumn splendor
In assuring us that we would be well cared-for no matter what, Katya urged us to “go with the flow.” The well-intended pun resonated strongly and kept us all in good spirits. It’s good advice, not only for a vacation that doesn’t go as planned, but for the curves that arise in our lives. In the end, it may be those unplanned moments that become the most memorable.
Response by Barbara Anne Radtke
Kathy, that was a trip of a lifetime in so many ways! Your cruise director’s advice to “go with the flow” is one we can all use frequently, especially later in life. Father Time intervenes with the same insistence as Mother Nature. Knowing you as I do, I suspect “going with the flow” was not an entirely new attitude for you to learn. It has been supported, too, by your cultivation, on a daily basis, of gratitude, joy, and finding beauty . You practice them in ordinary times. I bet they emerged naturally on this extraordinary trip. I hear genuine delight in the beauty and joy your found on your rain drenched adventure. I wonder, dear reader, what practices and or attitudes you use when plans -- big or small -- go awry.
Since I knew about Kathy and Ron’s tour, my awareness peaked when I heard on BBC about a mammoth storm named Boris that was flooding eastern and central Europe. It is not lost on me that we are writing about it as the U.S. is facing the aftermath of two hurricanes, Helene and Milton, that devastated several states in the South. Perhaps these phenomenal pleas of nature urge us to also cultivate strategic, ecological resilience and care of the earth in our garden of virtues.
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