36 Hours in a Mystery Location

On an ordinary Monday afternoon a couple weeks ago, I decided to do something I’ve always wanted to do. I packed a bag with the bare essentials — toothbrush, passport, tarot card deck — and stepped out of my apartment, ready to be transported. I went to Berlin’s Central Station, where for years I’ve boarded trains to Frankfurt, Milan, Copenhagen, always with a ticket, knowing my plan. But this time, I didn’t have a destination. My idea was to take the first train out, no matter where it was headed. 

Before I even left, I was already dreaming about what could unfold on this trip. By midnight I might be strolling through the Marais or biking over the canals in Jordaan. Tomorrow I could be in a Viennese coffee house or the thermal waters of the Széchenyi Baths, clean and renewed. On the bus ride to the station, I saw passengers tethered to their groceries and children. People were so zoned out that they barely looked up as their bodies dragged them down the street. Everyone seemed to know where they were going, but nobody looked as excited as me. I was headed nowhere in particular with no expectations, and when I arrived at the station, I felt my heart pulsing in my hands like something big was about to happen. I went to the hall where they show the departures. I looked at the list. Then at the clock. My fate was sealed. 

It was 4:34PM when I boarded the train. I wasn’t going to Paris or Budapest, but it was still a place that I’d been curious about. A summer destination known for its beaches and busy harbor. From the window, I watched the altbaus and train lines fade into golden fields full of windmills and horses. My seat assignment was one facing in the opposite direction of the train’s movement, but I didn’t even care. I didn’t need to see where I was going. I had taken the leap and now I was ready to be surprised.  

Four hours later, I arrived, very hungry and very tired. So the first thing I did was check into the closest hotel I could book, which was a 16-minute walk from the station. I was expecting an 8.2-star hotel, as the ratings reflected, but what I got was a very beige experience – beige floors, beige sheets, beige windows, beige walls. It looked like a hotel that was done with impressing anyone. The kind of place that stopped shaving its legs and started wearing elastic pants everywhere and just said screw it, I’m gonna live by the beach in my muumuu and collect stones. 

As soon as I arrived, I wanted to leave because I was starving. But it was already ten o’clock, and the only option was the quick market back at the train station where I soon realized that my choices were even more limited because my beige hotel room didn’t even have a microwave. I usually enjoy going to foreign grocery stores and checking out the products, but aside from the packages of salty licorice, nothing else made me feel like I was in a new place having a new experience. I bought instant mac and cheese and Cup Noodles soup and went back to my hotel room. This wasn’t a great start, but I’ve done enough traveling to know you shouldn’t judge the first few hours in a place. Sometimes all you need to turn things around is a good night’s sleep. 

The next morning I woke up to new colors. The world wasn’t beige anymore, it was gray with a bruised sky. Thick marshmallow clouds pressed down on the city as I walked through the Old Town. I haven’t mentioned where I went, and I’m not gonna tell you because my experience doesn’t have anything to do with the place or how you might experience it. If I had come on a sunny day, I might have had a beautiful walk on the beach instead of fighting the wind. If I’d known anyone here, I might have found tucked-away vintage stores and galleries. Instead, I visited the city’s number-one tourist attraction, the largest collection of taxidermied animals I’ve ever seen. There were blank-eyed foxes and bears frozen on their hind legs. A fifty-foot whale skeleton hanging from the rafters and a tiny widow monkey that had probably never stayed so still in its life. It was an impressive assortment, but the effort that had gone into collecting these lives and preserving them in stuffed, posed positions left me feeling sad and strange. There was no life here anymore, but there was also no death. Every body was stuck in a performance, pretending to be what it no longer was. 

When I left the museum, it was pouring. I hadn’t planned this trip enough to pack an umbrella, so by the time I made it back to the hotel I was soaked and tired and hungry. Why had I come all this way, spent money and time to be in a place I didn’t even like?

And maybe you’re thinking this is what I get for being spontaneous. But the truth is, I’ve felt disappointed and unprepared even on trips I meticulously planned. I once stayed in a luxury hotel in Nice that I’d looked forward to for months. When I finally got there, the place was more tacky and run-down than the pictures, and outside, I felt like just another body on the promenade getting suckered into buying ice cream. I’ve been on good trips that have suddenly lost their spark, once walking through the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and not being able to care about any of it. Is it me? Is it France? No, because I’ve been in freaking Rome, a city I love, and still, I’m in a piazza counting down the hours until I can go to the airport. Sometimes my trips just don’t turn out as expected and whatever magic or revelation I’m hoping for never arrives. 

There’s this thing Elizabeth Gilbert says about travel, how 90% of it is actually boring. It’s delayed trains, lonely hotel rooms, overpriced food. I tried to remember this as I peeled off my rain-soaked clothes and considered what to do next. I knew that shitty travel was sometimes just part of the deal, but I was holding out for that 10%, for that thing that would make the risk of going on this mystery trip worth it. I still had one more night booked at the hotel. A prior version of me would have made me stick it out. You already paid for the night, she’d say. You can’t just leave! I considered whether leaving was the 10%, the lesson of taking my agency back, but I know how to do that with travel. Yeah, maybe I’d feel a little guilty about the wasted money, but I don’t have a problem cutting a trip short. That just didn’t seem like my 10%. So what was this trip all about? I thought about it more, and then I decided to ask the tarot. 

I shuffled the deck and pulled a card. It was one I’d gotten before. A skeleton dressed in armor riding a horse and waving a black flag. In front of the horse, a woman and children are crying, begging to be spared, but the skeleton’s grin is fixed. Behind him a boat sails, escorting souls to their resting place. I had pulled the death card.

Death actually isn’t such a bad card. Upright, it represents transformation, change, and transition. It’s about endings but also about beginnings and rebirth. In that moment, though, sitting in my beige hotel, I wasn’t uplifted. Because I already knew I was in transition. I already knew this was the messy middle where an old version of me was dead and the new one wasn’t born yet. I didn’t need the tarot to tell me that. 

Or maybe I did need a reminder that death involves letting go – not just of the past (things like identities, material items, relationships) but also of the future, of all the expectations about who I’m becoming. I’d taken a risk by going on this trip, and I’d expected my risk would reap some instant reward. Where’d I get this idea? Well, we’re told this is how it works, jump and the net will appear! But sometimes there is no net. Sometimes you just face plant and nobody’s even there to help you stand up again. 

A part of me felt stupid for taking the risk. The trip was a fail, and I worried that it was also an omen. That I couldn’t trust myself. That all my joy and enthusiasm for this idea had been really naive. That I didn’t have good sense when it came to risk-taking. 

I packed up my tarot cards, passport and toothbrush. I decided to leave early, arriving home thirty-six hours after my trip began. It hadn’t been what I expected, but at least by going home I wasn’t trying to turn this trip into more than it was. 

But that’s not the end of the story. Because a week later, I found myself back in the same train station in Berlin, getting ready to go on another trip. This time, I had a destination in mind – but that was about all I had. I didn’t know much about where I was going. I didn’t have a plan for what I’d do when I got there. I wasn’t even sure where I’d sleep that night. In some ways, this looked like me making the same mistakes all over again, but it wasn’t the same. Because this time I had a rain jacket, and I was also prepared in another way – I knew that going into the unknown might disappoint me. But my trip to the mystery location had taught me that I could take a risk, I could be disappointed and I could still want to try again. I wasn’t going because of the certainty of what I would find but rather because uncertainty is still worth it.  

This second trip wasn’t perfect. It rained almost every day. I got sick. I had days when I was bored or annoyed or tired. But the trip also rewarded me for stepping into the unknown again. I hiked through the most beautiful mountain range I’ve ever seen. I soaked in a healing spring. I was alive in the mountains with the shy red deer and the ibex and the chubby marmots. We weren’t always going to be here, but while we were on this earth, we owed it to ourselves to exist as much as we could. To listen to our deepest calls and see any risk, no matter the outcome, as a road back to ourselves.