All Over the Place Read online

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2017 by Geraldine DeRuiter.

  Published by PublicAffairs™, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address PublicAffairs, 1290 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10104.

  PublicAffairs books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the U.S. by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at Perseus Books, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103, call (800) 810-4145, ext. 5000, or e-mail [email protected].

  Brief sections in Chapter 10 are reprinted from the author’s blog.

  Book Design by Amy Quinn

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: DeRuiter, Geraldine, author.

  Title: All over the place : adventures in travel, true love, and petty theft / Geraldine DeRuiter.

  Description: First edition. | New York : PublicAffairs, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016042568 (print) | LCCN 2017000532 (ebook) | ISBN 9781610397636 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781610397643 (e-book) | ISBN 9781610397643 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: DeRuiter, Geraldine—Travel. | Adventure and Adventurers—United States—Biography. | Bloggers—United States—Biography.

  Classification: LCC G226.D47 A3 2017 (print) | LCC G226.D47 (ebook) | DDC 910.4—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016042568

  First Edition

  E3-20170317-JV-NF

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  A Disclaimer

  Chapter 1:

  Gelato Is an Excellent Substance in Which to Drown Your Sorrows

  Chapter 2:

  Sometimes You Run Screaming from the Person You’re Madly in Love With

  Chapter 3:

  The Contents of My Mother’s Carry-On Look Like Evidence from a Prison Riot

  Chapter 4:

  In Which I Am Surprised to Learn That Getting Lost Doesn’t Bring About the Apocalypse

  Chapter 5:

  Life Lessons from a Three-Hundred-Year-Old Dead Guy and His Boring Clock

  Chapter 6:

  You Take the Grenade My Mom Brought to Dinner; I’ll Book Our Flight—Finding Balance in Relationships

  Chapter 7:

  Marry Someone Who Will Help You Deal with Your Shit

  Chapter 8:

  Listen to Your Heart, Even If It Tells You to Steal Things

  Chapter 9:

  Home Is Where Your MRI Is

  Chapter 10:

  It’s Always Easier to Leave for a Trip Than to Be Left Behind

  Chapter 11:

  Bucket Lists Are Just Plain Greedy

  Chapter 12:

  Is There a Gaelic Word for “I’m Freaked Out About Our Marriage”?

  Chapter 13:

  Salvation Looks a Lot Like Wisconsin

  Chapter 14:

  Turns Out, Things Aren’t Always What They Seem

  Chapter 15:

  Munich—Land of Sausages and Epiphanies

  Chapter 16:

  Where There’s a Fiat, There’s a Way

  Chapter 17:

  Just Go

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  For the love of my life.*

  A DISCLAIMER

  THE PROBLEM WITH WRITING A book ostensibly about travel is that people automatically assume it falls into one of two categories:

  1. It is somehow informative.

  2. It involves a button-nosed protagonist nursing a broken heart who, rather than watching The Princess Bride while eating an entire five-gallon vat of ice cream directly out of the container while weeping (like a normal person), instead decides to travel the world, inevitably falling for some chiseled stranger with bulging pectoral muscles and a disdain for wearing clothing above the waist.

  Let me disabuse you of each of these notions immediately.

  First, this book will likely teach you very little about the places mentioned herein. Despite having spent the last half decade in the state of transient unemployment known as travel blogging, I am woefully unqualified to provide any useful information in that regard.

  I cannot tell you how to find the best restaurant in Rome or where to get the best rate on plane tickets, nor can I provide any historical context for a single geographic location without wandering into the fictional and oddly perverse. (Did you know that the Washington Monument was built to subtly ridicule our first president’s shockingly angular wang? I have never been to the Leaning Tower of Pisa, which is probably for the best.)

  There are plenty of travel writers and personalities who have covered all those important topics in the travel realm far better than I could (even if I were sober, and not drunk on sugar and the intoxicating power of having one’s own blog, as I usually am). They even cite reputable sources beyond “the Internet” and “I think I saw it on Jeopardy one time” and “Shut up, dickface, it’s totally true.”

  If that is what you are seeking, I recommend the work of the inimitable Rick Steves, the apotheosis of all travel writers.

  Steves has made a career of helping the hapless travel the world, and his guides are useful if you actually want to know something about planning a trip or finding your way through a foreign country.

  I feel that I must take a moment here to say that while I respect him for his travel prowess and will begrudgingly admit to even having benefited from it on occasion, I am automatically disdainful of people who know what they are talking about (mostly because I so rarely do). Consequently, I have described Steves as “a human turnip,” “John Denver minus the sex appeal,” and “a toe with glasses.” (I know these are unkind things to say, and insulting someone based on their appearance is wrong. By way of explanation, I’m kind of a horrible person.) I might also be slightly jealous of his sheer popularity. Not to mention, this is a man who named his book series Europe Through the Back Door and then didn’t even have the decency to make them the least bit pornographic. I just can’t condone that sort of wasted opportunity.

  Second, while most travel memoirs would dictate that I find love somewhere along the way, that was not the case for me. I met the love of my life long before this story began, on the bastion of romance that is King County Metro’s 43 bus, under flickering fluorescent lights, surrounded by drunk college kids. As one does.

  And I do not think one could call the love of my life chiseled. But he has twinkly eyes and puts up with my insufferable jokes, and he makes a good schnitzel. (That’s not a euphemism or anything. He really makes a good schnitzel.)

  Also, my nose would never, ever be described as button-like.

  So if this book by a travel writer is not about travel or about finding romance somewhere along the road, then where does that leave us? These last six years have taught me a great number of things, though being able to read a map is not one of them. I still have only a vague understanding of where Russia is, but I understand my Russian father better now than I ever have before. I have learned that at least half of what I thought was my mother’s functional insanity was actually an equally incurable condition called “being Italian.” I have learned about my family and myself, about brain tumors and lost jobs and lost luggage and lost opportunities and just getting lost, in countless terminals and cabs and hotel lobbies across the globe.

  And I’ve learned wha
t it’s like to travel the world with someone you already know and love. How they help you make sense of things and can, by some sort of alchemy I still don’t quite understand, make foreign cities and far-off places feel like home. How days roll into weeks and months and years, and during that time you will fight and scream and laugh and cry with them, possibly all at once. That you can see so much of the world, and realize it is far bigger than the two of you, and still somehow feel that your love, squishy and imperfect and mortal, might be a story worth telling.

  So, if there is any advice I could dispense, it would be this: it’s absolutely incredible, the things you can learn from not having a clue about where you’re going—lessons that emerge after making a wrong turn, or saying the wrong thing, or even after accidentally doing something right. And in my case, this was all undertaken not in the company of a new love, but one that has enough miles on it to circle the earth three, maybe four times, is now sufficiently jet lagged, and lost its pants somewhere over Greenland.

  I offer these minor epiphanies to you with the caveat that you shouldn’t try to replicate the circumstances that led to them. Learn from my mistakes, but do not repeat them. Doing the latter will almost certainly result in unintended consequences, in particular petty theft, destruction of private property, low-blood-sugar-induced screaming, and flooding a boutique hotel room in New York City with a deluge of putrescence so heinous you will consider crafting a new identity to escape it.

  But most notably, if you follow my lead, you will get hopelessly, miserably lost. As in, “I may have just crossed over an international border without realizing it” lost, or “I have never seen any of this before and supposedly this is my hometown” lost, or that panicky “I think I accidentally entered a magic realm via a portal in the back of a wardrobe” sort of lost.

  That said, as I’ve learned, getting lost isn’t the worst thing in the world. If you are trying to find yourself, it’s a great place to start.

  1

  GELATO IS AN EXCELLENT SUBSTANCE IN WHICH TO DROWN YOUR SORROWS

  IF THE MANY TIMES THAT I’d been dumped were any indication, I was not going to handle losing my job well.

  Blessed with this knowledge, and that of the many red flags signaling the impending end to my employment, I preemptively went into breakup mode. I figured I needed plenty of alcohol, sugar, and carbohydrates at close proximity. So, in a shocking display of fiscal irresponsibility from someone for whom unemployment was imminent, I decided to go to Italy. I reasoned the country had seen its share of ugly endings: that whole mess with Caesar in the Senate, the fall of the Holy Roman Empire, the final scene of The Godfather, Part III—so it could handle mine. Plus, I wasn’t sure if they would pay me for the vacation time I still had left.

  It was early 2008. America was about to enter its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression: 2.6 million people lost their jobs that year, and I was about to become one of them.

  MINE WAS A DEVIATION FROM how most travel stories begin. The path for the modern wanderer always seems to follow the same course—one that traces through Southeast Asia, involves at least three life-changing epiphanies vaguely invoking Buddhism, and necessitates wearing those pants with the zip-off legs. And the starting point is invariably this: they quit. They voluntarily cast off those miserable shackles of stable employment; they spin the globe and pick a spot at random. There. I shall go there.

  And to their credit, this tactic works if you are young, debt-free, and willing to accept Anthony Bourdain as your lord and savior.

  Personally, I’ve never understood quitting a stable job in order to see the world. I’d put it in the same mental file in which I’ve placed “eating cake for every meal” and “sex with Jeff Goldblum circa Jurassic Park.” That is, things that are fun to think about but impossible or irresponsible in practice, due to the constraints of space-time, existing restraining orders, and the limitations of the human pancreas.

  “Life is too short to spend behind a desk,” says every damn job-quitting travel writer, ever. But I’d argue that, statistically speaking, life gets a hell of a lot shorter without health insurance or a steady income.

  Not to mention, whenever I’ve spun a globe and tried to pinpoint a destination, my finger always ends up in the middle of the Pacific, adrift, surrounded by thousands of miles of blue enamel paint in every direction. (I try not to extract too much symbolism from this.)

  I am not impulsive. I do not like spontaneity. I like order and predictability, and I want to immediately know whether or not the protagonist lives until the end of the story.

  Whenever people ask about how all this started, I am very clear about one thing: I did not quit.

  I was laid off.

  I AM A RARE BREED—like morning people or children who enjoy visiting the dentist or vegans who aren’t self-righteous—I liked my job. My coworkers were funny and brilliant and caring, the sort who could make a deadline with time to spare and drive you home in rush hour traffic that one time you got food poisoning, simultaneously screaming at someone for cutting them off while patting your back as you threw up.

  In the years since the small board game company I worked for folded, my former colleagues have gone on to do amazing things. They’ve started their own successful, award-winning companies. They’ve served as musical directors for nationally renowned productions. The driver who deftly navigated Seattle traffic while I barfed repeatedly into a bag went on to write and illustrate numerous award-winning children’s books. And to this day, he’s never, ever held that vomitous afternoon against me, though I hold hope it will one day be fodder for a rather amazing pop-up picture book.

  They would fan out across the country and the world, lighting up dark offices and stale conference rooms with their talent. But for a little while we’d been together, shining in one place—chasing one another around the office in absurd Halloween costumes. Taking trips to toy stores in the name of research. Working on a product for so many hours straight that we were rendered tired and giggly.

  “Someone give me a tagline for this game in under five words!” I once yelled to no one in particular.

  “CHOKE SAFE!” someone shouted in reply.

  We felt invincible and suffered the obligatory punishment for our hubris. Ultimately, we were powerless in the matter—as editors, designers, and marketers, we had no control over the swift expansion into other media that caused the company to lose millions within the span of a few months.

  We knew it was a fire sale, regardless of all the interviews our charismatic CEO had given about how this was his triumph. The spring of 2007 had already brought one round of lay-offs, and the rest of us felt like we were on borrowed time. Christmas was marked by a lack of end-of-the-year bonuses, and soon after we got the news that our stock was worthless.

  THE TRIP TO ITALY HAD been my friend Kati’s idea, discussed the previous summer as a means of breaking up the months of steady rain and gray skies that characterized every month in Seattle that wasn’t August. It began purely as a joke over Gchat, one that grew and caught us up in it so that there was no turning back. We simply had to nod and go with it, like the sartorial rise of trucker hats or the return of the mustache. By the time you realize what’s going on, it’s too late: you’ve already decided to book round-trip tickets to Rome, and every guy at your local bar looks like Ashton Kutcher, circa 2005.

  Kati, like me, had Italian ancestry and a decent understanding of the language (her grammar was significantly better than mine, but I grew up screaming it fluently at my relatives over a kitchen table). She’d spent a semester in Italy years ago and wanted to go back.

  I teased her about leaving the next afternoon, she countered with the following week, and by the end of it we’d decided to leave in a few months, at the tail end of winter, because utterly abandoning all your obligations seems more reasonable when you schedule it farther out.

  This was going to be the first trip Kati and I took together, though we’d known one another for years.
We first met during our freshman year of high school, thrown together by honors classes and extracurricular activities targeting awkward, intelligent girls who had yet to grow into their features. We would share notes and edit one another’s English papers, and she would try to dissuade me from having a crush on a guy who would, years later, pick as his social media profile picture an image of him wearing a giant diaper and bonnet while chugging a beer.

  The point is, Kati always had better judgment than I.

  While my brain has mercifully blocked out most of my memories from the early years of our relationship, one remains clear in my mind and serves as a good microcosm for my and Kati’s friendship.

  The film Titanic came out our senior year of high school, and the student officers decided to make this the theme for our prom. Presumably because they figured the only way to make a room full of dry-humping teenagers in rented tuxedos and ill-fitting Jessica McClintock dresses more romantic is pairing it with the tragic, icy deaths of 1,500 people.

  The pre-prom assembly involved students acting out selected scenes from the historically dubious film in front of their peers. At one point, a massive paper iceberg crashed into the front of the stage, which had been decorated to look like the ill-fated ocean liner, and a bunch of students spilled out on the floor of the gym, writhing and dying. This understandably took precedence over our classes.

  At the dance itself, which was held at the Seattle Aquarium (a small detail that I find both perverse and delightful, considering the circumstances), the backdrop for our formal portraits featured a giant iceberg and the doomed Titanic heading straight for it. It was in front of this that we smiled brightly—myself included—with our dates, documenting forever our youthful callousness and the ability of time to not only temper a tragedy but to adapt it into a great motif for high school dances.

  But Kati’s pose for her photo was this: she, making a face of poorly feigned horror, pointing to the iceberg while her friends smiled sweetly and obliviously in front of her. The caption could have read, “Oopsies! They’re all going to die!”