Rudy's Rules for Travel

by Mary K. Jensen

  As the ship comes to the end of its journey and enters the Dover harbor, Rudy, his camera strung about his neck, finds me. “Come meet me up on the top deck,” he says. “Bring two glasses of good red wine, OK?”

  I find him on the top forward deck, leaning far over, photographing the chalky, statuesque White Cliffs of Dover, quietly singing the lyrics. “There’ll be love and laughter, and peace ever after . . .”

  He puts his arm around me, drawing me close. “Whoever wrote that song had no idea just how lovely those cliffs could be.”

  “You must have flown over them on the way back to Tibenham.”

  “We did. We’d escape enemy gunfire, fly toward England, finally see the Cliffs rising up ahead of us, then watch them slip under the wings of our plane.”

  He pauses, takes another photograph. “There were times when our plane was so torn up we didn’t know if we would reach them even to say good-bye.”

  He lifts his glass of wine in a toast toward the White Cliffs. “Those times we limped in, you were especially beautiful.”

  AS we experiment with cruising, Rudy has one major criticism of the trips, a wrong he is determined to right. Shore excursions cost too much. He organizes small cost-sharing tours for a few select passengers, but these in general do not go well.

  On a small island in Tahiti, he meets a local resident whose van will take us to Major Event, an important day for the island, a festival of some sort, one not mentioned in the ship’s calendar. Rudy fills the eight seats of the van and we head off for a bumpy but very short ride to the next village. With fanfare, our driver/guide parks along the side of the road, opens a weathered shed, and pulls out a worn white plastic chair for each person, arranging us in a precise half-circle facing a tall palm tree. We are, he tells us, lucky to be here today, because today is the day. Today the island gets its first satellite dish put up on the tree, and we have the best seats.

  I personally like the Satellite Event in Tahiti better than the Bird Street Event in Hong Kong. Three unsuspecting fellow cruisers, a young couple and their five-year-old Davey, come with us to tour the vibrant city. Beyond the frenetic pace, the bright lights, the cell phones everywhere, Hong Kong is a world built for Rudy. It has thirteen-cent tram and ferry rides, free public markets, and the colorful Bird Garden. Parrots, parakeets, canaries, a mynah—birds of brilliant colors hang in elaborately carved cages amongst the trees, chirping, singing, waiting for their mostly elderly owners to finish chess games or conversations. While they wait, the birds mangle and eat their breakfast, a live cricket whose struggle for life captivates Davey and Rudy.

  Eventually, the elderly bird owners stop chess and visiting, place cages atop tall bamboo poles, and walk in a bit of a line down the narrow alleys, past the shops selling cages and seed for pampered pets. We follow.

  “Where are we going?” I whisper to Rudy.

  “It’ll be great,” he responds. This means he does not know. He is only following the bird cages.

  The procession ends at a darkened tea room and our fellow cruisers are reluctant to enter. Rudy, who does not know Chinese, translates the signs on the windows: “Good, cheap tea,” “Tourists welcome.” A waiter dressed in a colorful, traditional jacket comes to the door to gesture us inside and we all follow. (Maybe the sign does say “Welcome.”) We sit at a long table in the center of the tea room, the only table lacking a tall stand for a bird cage. The old men are each sitting in a booth now, directly below their birds hung high along the wall. Our table is covered with previously white, now tea-stained, paper and used teacups left over from the last occupants. No one makes an attempt to clear it and replace the paper.

  “Not to worry,” Rudy assures us. “Things are very hygienic. Look at how long these people live.”

  Just as I spot a nest of huge live grasshoppers in the booth to our right, our waiter pushes a cart with a basin of muddy gray water to our table. One by one he lifts each used cup, shakes it in the bath and waves it in the air to dry. Hot brewed tea follows, but our thirst that came on so quickly has now left just as rapidly. We each suddenly remember somewhere we need to be, some commitment in Hong Kong we had forgotten. My commitment is to my hotel room. Rudy is disappointed that his tour is ending early, but he has an idea.

  “I’m going to ride the ferries back and forth, learn what the people think about the island returning to China. Got to find out.”

  He returns to our hotel room hours later. “I found university students who wanted to talk,” he says. “It’s not a scientific survey, but I would say there are a lot of worried people.”

  ANOTHER cruise ship docks at a Hawaiian island Rudy knows well. It has a mix of upscale hotels and restaurants, as well as locals’ destinations. We know which Rudy prefers. “We’re on our way to authéntico,” he tells two passengers. “This place has cooked the cheapest Hawaiian breakfast for decades—eggs, waffles, Portuguese sausage, free coffee.”

  The two passengers follow us to the restaurant, looking uneasy as we enter the aged, deserted café and take our seats on worn, wobbly benches. We are the only diners. I am seated beside Rudy and across from Joy and Mark. From where I sit, I have, throughout the bountiful meal, full view of authéntico mice running directly behind the couple, chasing each other, darting in and out of holes at the baseboard. I find it hard to converse, even harder to eat what I have to admit looks like a tasty breakfast. I don’t know which is the greater distraction, studying the mice in full view or wondering what might be frolicking behind me.

  AS time goes on, cruise ships and their seductive ways continue to erode implementation of the Rules. Rudy grows older; I grow older too, but not so much. He keeps the cabin drapes closed at night more often now, sleeps in and orders room service breakfast, photographs fjords from a lounge chair on the deck, reads Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi atop the river barge. He still, however, shops for his trips at a well-stocked local thrift store.

  And he works to convert younger cruise passengers to the Rules, urging them to abandon the lure of leisurely voyages and embrace the edicts while they can. He usually singles out for his counseling those who sit on the top deck, regardless of weather, watching a foreign port come into sight, reading a book, preferably a history book. (“They have potential,” he tells me.) A common starter to the conversation is the bucket list. Most people have not realized the bucket list must be put in chronological order. He corrects the misunderstanding.

  “So, where are you traveling next?” he asks. “Hawaii? Well, Hawaii is a beautiful state, but it’s a good example of a place you can visit right up to your deathbed. Easy walking, English-speaking, elevators everywhere. Handrails on banisters. Pleasant climate. No, no, the Hawaiian islands can wait. I’d suggest you move Hawaii, cruise liners, and U.S. travel down deeper into the bucket. Have you thought about Thai beaches or Yucatan ruins for now?”

  Unbidden, he continues. “You may wonder about going to politically unstable places. Well, there are two ways of looking at them: one, they are dangerous now. Two, they may be more dangerous later.”

  “In short,” he confides, “you have to remember that you’ll never be younger. And you’ll probably never be healthier. You’ve just got to grab that brass ring when it comes by. Which reminds me, there’s a wonderful carousel in Avignon . . . and have you seen the one that townspeople crafted in Missoula?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  AND OTHER TRANSITIONS

  I MAKE THE MISTAKE OF ATTENDING A CONFERENCE OUT of town, leaving Rudy to entertain himself for a week. Home alone. As we have seen, a week is a long time in this man’s life.

  “I found it,” he yells into the phone.

  “You found what?”

  “Well, it’s on approval. If you don’t like it, back it goes.”

  “You found what?”

  “Our new RV—actually a fifth-wheeler—twenty-two feet, portable, perfect. You cannot believe the deal we got. I told the salesman you would rule out a used trailer, that we had to get
a new one. That was right, wasn’t it?”

  “It certainly was.”

  I did not know we were seriously looking for an RV. We have seen a few of these cozy quarters and said that “someday” we would slow down, abandon long, crowded flights in favor of long, leisurely road trips. But as I walk out of the Sacramento airport, I see a bright red and gray Ford truck towing a fifth-wheeler and parked at the “no parking” curb. Rudy hugs me, takes my suitcase, and tosses it into our new home on wheels. While the parking patrolman appears to be waiting patiently, my RV mate escorts me up the steps and points out highlights.

  “Look, I have little sheets for the little bed, two towels, a bar of soap, a coffee pot, coffee, two bottles of wine and—” Opening the dorm-size refrigerator, he adds, “Some of that Brie you like, straight from Paris. We’re all set, booked for our shakedown trip tonight at an RV park right down the road. You cannot believe the deal I got off-season on that.”

  I remember the bucket-list rules and know we are taking a significant step tonight. We often say that when foreign travel means physically challenging travel, it is time to see the USA. America has handrails, toilets you can sit on and also rise from, 24-hour food and medical help, grand national parks, and RV campgrounds that look like Westin resorts. (Note: We won’t be staying in those.) In America, we won’t wonder how to convert currency, how to balance our days around siesta time. (Well, maybe the siesta tradition can stay.)

  For all its contrasts, we learn that first night some commonalities of domestic travel with foreign ventures, namely that the road has challenges but kind strangers appear. On shakedown night, four seasoned RV campers help us back the rig into a tiny space at dark, plug in electricity and sewer lines, and make a bed while lying across it.

  So his intention, at least as he describes it, is to become an RV retiree. But I think I detect the old pace hanging on, and I am betting to myself that we will not end our RV phase until we see fifty states. Or rather, until we have seen the states and Canada. He buys a thick, used volume of Canadian history and I know that our itinerary is expanded.

  “Rude,” I ask at one Montana campground, “how about we sleep in late tomorrow and stay another night here in the mountains?” (That is translation for “Let’s not drive four hundred miles in one day to see the American Indian monument that has already agreed to wait for us.”) Then my mistake. “There’s always tomorrow,” I say.

  He looks at me sternly, answers rapidly, vehemently. I hear anger I rarely hear from him. “That’s not true. You can’t count on tomorrow. Whoever said you could count on tomorrow? That’s never a promise.”

  He opens the RV screen door, heads off for a walk. Returning, he is calmer. Sitting down in the small space, he agrees it might be good to stay an extra day, get refreshed for the road ahead. Lost time can be made up by reading a set of Churchill’s letters. “That’s the other thing,” he says, “I’m too old to read insignificant books—can’t waste my eyesight hours on trash.” He looks suspiciously at my stack of mysteries and romances.

  DRIVING north, we head to Canada. We have seen photos of Alberta, but, as they say, no photo can do it justice. One evening we walk about a lake while a young man sits on the grass, strumming his guitar, entertaining a dozen mallards gathered on the water in front of him and his placid dog. We find a recommended restaurant where we dine on seafood stew—undoubtedly the best I have ever eaten, with crab and shrimp dancing in a pungent red sauce laced with clams and mussels and something indescribable. But in the middle of the night, I wake with a startle in the tiny RV bed, realizing my face and eyes are swelling, my throat sore and constricted. A victim of something indescribable.

  I remain calm. “Rude, Rude, I hate to wake you, but I’m dying.” Then, whispering to conserve my voice, I add, “I won’t be able to talk much longer. Listen carefully. Get me to a hospital.”

  He uses only a moment to inspect me and the red rashes I have not yet seen, then he locates our shoes and jackets and we are off in the truck to find help. The campground night supervisor jots down directions to the emergency room. As it turns out, the doctor we need has just delivered a baby. He will finish up and meet us next door in his office.

  The office door is unlocked and we sit alone in semi-darkness. When a portly, seventy-something man opens the door, a booming voice greets us. “My, my, let’s get some lights on in here.”

  I assume the man is the receptionist until he throws a stethoscope around his neck. He glances at my closed eyes and twice-its-size face, takes my hand, and moves me rapidly down the short hallway toward an examining room. “Got to get to these problems fast—no time for pleasantries.”

  There is no time for the examining room either. We stand in the hallway, where he says, “I’m the nurse too. Drop those pajama bottoms, now, dearie. Let me at that bum.” A rather long but virtually painless shot finds its way under the layers of skin and cellulite, and being a bit suggestible, I know the swelling is now receding like the Red Sea and I am healed. For good measure, the doctor hands me a package of Benadryl and his card. Rudy asks where the secretary is so that he might pay our bill. “I’m that too, the secretary,” the doctor responds. “Let’s see—I think that was worth about twenty dollars if you have it. Maybe fifteen. Just glad to be of help.” Rudy hums “Oh Canada” all the way back to the campground.

  In a few days I am, thanks to my personal Marcus Welby, rid of the last trace of rash and tiredness in time to join Rudy on a train trip. He loves trains and cannot sit for long within miles of a station without hopping aboard. He and the stationmaster work out an itinerary that involves only one night away from our fifth-wheel home. We will travel west to Kamloops, stay overnight there in a motel, then catch the early-morning train back to Jasper. It doesn’t occur to me that these arrangements are a bit unusual for a train that goes across the country.

  The train ride is beautiful if long, and we arrive at the darkened station at midnight to see only one taxi in the parking lot, its neon sign saying “Not Available.” In minutes we learn that the taxi is unavailable because it waits for us. “The Jasper agent called ahead for you,” the cab driver says, “so we’re off to Kamloops’ finest motel. I’m Bill. I called to be sure they saved that room for you. Can’t have our guests sleeping out in the cold.”

  He drives us to a lovely lodge-style motel and helps us find registration cards and a room key behind the front desk. The manager is sleeping and there’s no need to disturb him. “I’m so sorry not to be here to say good-bye in the morning,” our driver says, “but I’m due on another route tomorrow. My friend Phil who drives the other cab will be here for you.”

  “I think the train leaves at six tomorrow,” I say.

  “Not a problem. Phil will take good care of you.”

  These acts of faith in strangers are hard for me and I barely sleep that night. Rudy snores happily. That morning, shortly before five o’clock, a soft knock wakes me. I struggle to find a robe, then open the door a bit. “I’m Phil,” the man says. “Bill just called and said I should wake you up, since you might not have an alarm clock. He said to tell you he recommends we stop to pick up donuts—much better here in town than on the train. Do you want any coffee now?”

  Canada turns out to be a hybrid travel destination, a place for slowing down but not stopping. It can be reached by driving through magnificent U.S. national parks, and is just different enough (think British heritage) to be interesting to my mate, just familiar enough to be comforting to me. I know how to find the emergency-room doctors.

  AS time goes on, the erosion of the Rules continues. We meet forces even stronger than the lure of cruise ships and RVs— aging, illness, time itself. Even the fifth-wheeler slows down, parking now for much of the summer on a quiet, local lake-shore. Although Rudy no longer talks about his intention to camp in all fifty states, he has an urgency about his daily life.

  He balks at my suggestion that he slow down, relax. His den is crowded with projects in progress—watercolor
paintings on easels, the beginnings of a radio-controlled boat, a papier-mâché parrot waiting for its final coat, a computer packed with letters and advice to his congressmen. He and his daughter Day are on a waiting list for the Honor Flight, a trip to Washington D.C. to visit the World War II monument. “I need to go now,” he tells the organizers. “You never know about tomorrow.”

  One evening he gathers a half dozen fellow environmentalists in our living room. They are planning their next anti-development demonstration when Rudy admits he feels chest pains. No, he will not go to the hospital up the street, but will instead call their emergency room to learn the approximate wait time.

  “I don’t have time to waste standing in your line,” he tells the nurse. “We have an important cause we’re working on here.”

  My spouse and I are not amateurs at this illness business. Shortly after our first trip together, Rudy contracted Guillain-Barré paralysis, a side effect of rolling up his sleeve for the new swine flu shot. School principals had been asked to model faith in the new immunization, and his near-deadly dose was administered on the school stage before a PTA audience. I came to the hospital each evening to read his favorite book, Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley. He pushed himself through a year-long rehabilitation. He had to get back on the road.

  Twenty years later, when Rudy’s turn as caregiver came, he spread world maps across the floor of the medical center during my day-long chemo infusions, pulled out a clipboard and marking pens, and we began planning. Nurses stepped around the maps, taking time to point out their favorite destinations, and in some cases, to submit to Rudy’s counseling services. Critical illness tried these times to interrupt our travel dreams, but travel dreams won, interrupting critical illness.