Part 2: A change of ways

those ways in life.. it is strange how they turn sometimes, you scribble them on a paper, you do the one and other version of it until you feel you got it right, and then you call this piece of paper plan and expect life to respect it. like with this trip, that was supposed to start at a camping site in the Ardennes with the meeting of a friend, and then should continue onwards to Brussels to meet another friend. all was settled and arranged, the tent waiting in the car, the road map printed, the arrival times neatly written in the timer. but things went another way, a little virus changed it all, my friend had to leave the camping site early, and there i was, fallen through my own plan, with not even a help desk to go to and complain, nothing left for me but the option to shift schemes. and isn't it odd how hard this is sometimes, how our mind seems to be glued to that first plan, and how it takes an effort to get that stuck mind going again. it was a bike ride that did the trick for me, maybe it was the moving landscapes, the moving viewpoints that made the difference, i don't know, but it was there on that bike ride that the trip fell into place again, all upside down but right in a new way: starting into another direction to visit another friend on another way to Belgium, arriving in Brussels a day earlier and having more time for the city this way, staying in a hotel instead of sleeping in a tent, and turning the way that was supposed to be the long way abroad into the long way home.

but it seemed life wasn't convinced i had learned that lesson well enough, and so gave me an extra-teaching. Wednesday, 11 o'clock, everything ready to go, me sitting in the car, starting the engine, turning on the music, opening the windows to catch the breeze… and there it was, this noise cars make to tell you that this is the end of the trip, at least for the moment. so for me, this trip didn't start with the first step, but with a telephone call, a hither and thither of organizing, a trying to figure out how to get started at all.

"there always is a way, you just have to find it" ~ that's what someone in India said to me, in this land of riddles and dead end diagrams, in this land that teaches you how to have patience and how to take alternative routes. and yes, there was a way, there really always is, i will spare you the details, otherwise we will never get started here, and i have enough of waiting anyway, i really feel like going, i so feel like going, just like i always do when the time to travel has come, when i know that there are all these places out there waiting for me, when i can feel yesterday, tomorrow and today merging into one as i drive down the lanes that float towards the horizon

Part 3: Lost and found

this travelogue is part of the subside travelzine
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