Wake Me Up Before You Go

Boy #1 and Boy #2 enjoyed a relaxing in-town vacation last week during spring break. This Monday morning, they seemed happy enough to be back in their routine, but on Tuesday, they both needed to be at school early. At bedtime on Monday night, I reminded them, "Guys, everyone needs to be at school at 8:00 tomorrow morning, so you need to get up and get at it."

Although Boy #2 has an intense dislike for anything that contains the word camp, he has a sense of comfort around anything that involves the word school. "You'd better set my alarm so I won't be late, and turn it up so it will alarm me," he told me. And so I did.

Boy #2's alarm clock is set to beep at him a number of times, but also has the option to wake to the radio or to a CD. Similarly, my alarm clock also beeps at me three times, takes a break, then beeps at me three more times until I turn it off or hit the snooze.

I have awakened in many a town, city, country, tent, guest house, hotel, stranger's house, friend's house, hostel, and lodge. Many times, my location determined the wake-up method.

My first morning in Indonesia, on the island of Timor, the wake-up call came early and often, beginning at 4:30 a.m. First came the earsplitting rooster that I was certain was under my bed. On the heels of the rooster came the call to prayer, long about 5 a.m., over the loudspeaker in the center of town. The wailing continued until getting back to sleep was no longer an option, and I realized that in this predominantly Muslim country, I would be hearing the calls to prayer every day, numerous times a day, beginning in the wee hours of the morning.

When I left for a semester abroad in England, my parents gave me a tiny travel alarm clock, the size of a credit card. It sat on my makeshift bedside table, a box hidden beneath a scarf, and woke me every day for class. After a month or so, I was invited on a weekend trip with two other study abroad friends, both men. We took the train to the town of Norwich, and roamed around until we found a cozy B&B. When we inquired about the availability of a room for the night, the woman working behind the front desk was flummoxed. She clearly had issues with me, a female, spending the night in the same room with these two men, under her watch. We held our ground, and told her a tall tale, "Well, we had a bad experience up north, and....," implying that I was afraid to stay alone. Begrudgingly, she granted us the one room, but let her displeasure be known every time we passed the front desk.

Norwich Cathedral - Photo by Jean Brooks

After a lovely weekend touring Norwich and its historic cathedral, we returned to Essex. Monday morning I overslept, and realized that my alarm clock was missing. I checked with the guys, and of course, the clock was gone, no doubt forgotten in our scandalous room at the B&B. I had to call that disapproving woman and politely ask her to mail me the alarm clock. Miraculously, she did. That alarm clock traveled with me for the next five years, until it fell apart.

I spent a month in and around Queenstown, New Zealand, utilizing the facilities of a backpacker's hostel, while sleeping in a tent out back every night in order to reduce my nightly rate. Every morning, I woke up with the sun to a view of stunning Lake Wakatipu.

Lake Wakatipu - Photo courtesy of www.dangerous-business.com

In Victoria, Australia, I was up before dawn every day to beat the heat while working on a grape farm. But it wasn't the early morning wake-ups that were memorable. While there was grape picking going on at the farm, there was also a fair amount of work that involved drying fruit, in this case sultanas, which are small, sweet and golden colored raisins. The grapes were dried on racks, shaken from the racks, raked out on tarps on the ground, and further dried in the sun. At the first hint of a raindrop, those sultanas needed to be covered to protect them from further moisture. Behold the middle of the night wake up, the farm's owner pounding on my bedroom door, "Rain! Rain! Cover the grapes! Cover the grapes!" We all rushed outside, shook the grapes into the center of their tarps, folded the edges over, and tucked those sultanas into their own snug beds. If I was lucky, there was still time for me to tuck myself back into my bed before heading out to work again at dawn.

Today, my alarm clock glows blue on my bedside table, replacing the red digital numbers that stared at me during my younger years. Most days, I don't need an alarm clock anymore, Boy #1 and Boy #2 make sure of that.

Information Age

Backpack in tow, I hit the ground running in New Zealand in the fall of 1992. The plane ticket was one-way, the itinerary was rough, practically non-existent. The plan was to travel until the money ran out, and seek opportunities to work along the way to replenish funds. Travel. Work. Repeat.

Provisions were scant: tent, sleeping bag, Therma-rest, hiking boots, Birkenstocks, a week's worth of underwear, 4 pairs of shorts, 4 t-shirts, one long-sleeved shirt, one pair of pants, 4 pairs of socks, one jacket, one swimming suit, hat, toiletries and a towel that quickly became musty. Sony Walkman and some cassette tapes. Journal. Toilet paper. Water. Travelers checks. Credit card for emergencies only. And a few books.

If you can wind your brain back to 1992, you will recall it was a seemingly ancient, pre-internet and cell phone era. My trip was not documented by blog, facebook post or tweet, but in letters and on rolls of film. If I found the right kind of telephone, I called home to check in with my parents every few weeks. I developed rolls of film along the way, wrote details on the back of each photo, and mailed the photos home, a manual blog, if you will. I incessantly wrote letters to family and friends, and kept track of recipient and date mailed so no one felt left out. It was mostly a one-way exchange of information.

And then there was my friend, Poste Restante. Poste Restante is a service where the post office holds your mail until you claim it. A well worn joke? "Who is this guy, Poste Restante, that you keep telling me to send letters to?" 

With a rough itinerary in mind, I included contact information like this in every letter: "I will be in Darwin, Australia in July, so send mail to Emily Follman, c/o Poste Restante, GPO, 48 Cavenagh St, Darwin NT 0800." Every time I arrived in a scheduled, known destination, the first order of business was to run to the GPO and check Poste Restante for mail. More often than not, I left disappointed, my old friend Poste failing me time and again. During a six-week stint working on a grape farm in Robinvale, Australia, the workers at the Robinvale post office just laughed when they saw me coming again to check on my mail. It was few and far between. And it was depressing.


Fast forward to today, when this caught my eye: China reaches 1 billion mobile subscribers. The travel experience is forever changed by the connectedness of this era. Even if you are far from home, you are never far from being in touch. I wonder how this connectedness might have changed my travel experience. But would it have changed it for the better or for the worse? At least some of the communication might have been two-way.  

I know now that while I was on the road having new adventures every day, most of my friends and family were home, living their lives, and let's face it, most of our lives don't include riding in the milk truck, tubing through caves, or climbing active volcanoes. Maybe they didn't write because they felt like they didn't have much to say. Maybe they were busy. Or maybe I just had too much time on my hands. And maybe my poor old friend Poste is nearing extinction.