D. has a way of conjuring an element of spontaneity in her planning. An itinerary she's designed will have several options, room for surprises, room for being lost and amazed. Her intent and thought-process is around being sunk into the fun and learned experience of travel as opposed to a mechanical following of instructions, guides or maps.
We traverse life this way, not going from point A to point B, but reveling in between.
Our four-day trip to Hong Kong revolved around a two-day pass to Disneyland in celebration of our boy's Fourth. In my mind, that was our sole agenda, almost as if I had a mercantile approach to planning a trip alongside achieving an objective. I had to be reminded, or perhaps enlightened, with the fact that we needed to delve and enjoy the most minute of details as opposed to seeing a trip as a purchased experience. That was the look on the little one's face when he saw his own Mickey Mouse hotel slippers, of Mickey Mouse speaking in the elevator, or Mickey Mouse as the chef in the restaurant.
Though I didn't even count on being able to run because we had a full agenda, she did ask me to pack my running shoes. I might find Victoria Park or the well-equipped hotel gym's treadmill inviting. When I looked down from the window of the tasteful hotel she picked for us in Lantau Island, the view unfolded like a well thought-out running path. My feet tickled. From nine floors up, I looked down and said, I'm running there.
As I may have only run this path once, I dropped the idea of keeping a decent pace or even covering a set distance. Beaded in sweat, I ran this path with the purest of reasons: seeing the breathtaking views, inhaling the mountain air, immersing in another country's everyday life and finding myself, in yet another unfamiliar path - where I ran for the first time.
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