The Right People – The Wrong Destination

I’ll be honest, Tunisia wasn’t my first choice for the trip. It wasn’t quite one of those “throw a dart at the map and see where it lands” type trips, but as it materialized, the destination became a toss-up, not one decided by a burning desire to uncover some distant land that had always been on the bucket list, but more a matter of convenience. Algeria, a place where Pop (my grandpa) had disembarked in the winter of 1942 and motored across with furious speed as his unit rushed to support the invasion of Sicily, was what I had really wanted to see. But it seemed a destination that was perfectly happy discouraging tourism in all its forms.

So Tunisia it was. And after a few phone calls, it was a trip of three: myself and my two brothers, my OG travel partners, you could say. Decades ago, I hopped around the world on their dime with them using their flight benefits for Delta. Before we all went and grew up. Got real jobs. Started families. It was a time in life that had the adventure of an Indiana Jones movie, but with fewer conspiratorial Nazis and snake pits: to pack a bag for an unknown destination and end up the next day sipping a cocktail on some far-flung beach or having a cold meat tray in a central European dive bar.

We all want it back, I think. Not to say that growing up is all bad, but the spontaneity you give up, and still long for, lingers in the back of the mind always. And it’s not something you can easily recreate with kids. The romance of having no plans will punch you in the face when you are in charge of keeping a family fed and kids entertained.

A Plan, Loosely Held

But with Kurt and Kent, I get that back. If only for a few days a year. And that’s how Tunisia happened. Not to say we walked in there without any plan at all: we had a guide. An itinerary. A plan to venture into the desert. But we didn’t know what we’d find there. And in a way, that’s what we, or at least I, were searching for: to still be searching after arriving. Maybe it’s an underdeveloped sense of planning, or an overdeveloped laissez-faire attitude about life.

Tunisia is full of mysteries. We went south into Tataouine, the one that inspired the planet where Luke Skywalker was born. We walked in the second-biggest still-existing Roman amphitheater, its very existence a mystery that makes you wonder what this place must have looked like and why it was so important to the Romans thousands of years ago – and the Carthaginians before that. It’s a place that always gives you the sense that as much as you think you know about a place, there’s always more to it than meets the eye… if you dig a little deeper, explore a little further, think a little longer.

The primordial desert. The remnants of the cultures that were here centuries before, now layered on top of each other in their shared, if temporally separated, space. After only a few days, I’d almost forgotten the whole reason I even knew about Tunisia in the first place: its intersection with America’s role in WWII, and the final shores Pop would see before boarding an LST and joining the Allied push into fascist Europe. Just another layer that makes up the country’s fascinating history.

I’m not sure if I can say that what we found here was unexpected, because I intentionally did not expect anything. Maybe it’s an old guy trying to find that adventure again. But I’m positive that if I did have expectations, Tunisia would have blown them away.