Transcript
Brett: When Megan and I were in Puerto Rico. We found ourselves on a publico going who-knows-where with no plan of how to get back.
Brett: Welcome to the Discover Your Wilderness podcast.
Welcome back after 12 months, a little over 12 months?
Alicia: Yeah, last September.
Brett: So tell me, where have you been in the last 12 months?
Alicia: My living here, mostly. My office, a little bit, a lot, actually. My kitchen, probably more than healthy, how about you?
Brett: Pretty much the same.
Alicia: My kitchen?
Brett: Your kitchen and your office, no. I am still in school and a lot of it is online with COVID. So I have been spending a lot of time at home. I did my internship remote, which means mostly I’ve been in my house. And sadly, some days that means I get to evening realizing I’ve not even left the house yet. But Megan and I were able to get to Puerto Rico as our late honeymoon. We were about a year after we got married, we ended up being able to go on a honeymoon. It was a great experience. The funny situation, which plays into some of our assumptions, where we had been told you have to go to some of the islands that are off of Puerto Rico. You can just take a ferry to because they’re beautiful. The beaches are awesome, they’re a little more secluded. So we got on a ferry, we went out there, and we jumped in the first publicly that was there because we were thinking that there might be Ubers or that we could get one of those electric scooters, they had nothing there. So we went into it with all these assumptions of how easy it would be to traverse this island and learn quickly that we were totally wrong. So we got in a publico, which are their public transit, their buses, their vans. And we got taken to a nice beach and then the publico drove away. And it wasn’t until we were trying to get home that we realized we had no way of getting the 20 minute drive back to where our ferry came in. We tried hitchhiking and everything and we couldn’t do it. So that was our refresher as to how to constantly check your assumptions that you might want to know what you’re getting into before you just jump into something, maybe do a little more research than we did.
Alicia: The fact that that didn’t occur to you seems pretty unique. What is it that you think happened that caused that oversight?
Brett: It was an element of we rushed it. We studied Puerto Rico. We knew where we wanted to go there. But then we didn’t think we would have the time to go to one of the islands when some of our activities freed up and we had a free entire day. We thought, “hey, let’s go to one of the islands.” And we assumed that it would be very similar to Puerto Rico, that it would have cities, that it would have taxis, that it would have all of those. And it was much, much less populated than Puerto Rico was. And so it took us by surprise just the kind of culture and what it was exactly that was there. So it wasn’t a lack of know-how in traveling. We had both been in vans that were public transit, paying, negotiating the price before we got there, doing all of that. But it took us by surprise was just how different that experience was from what the rest of our trip looked like.
Alicia: So based on our philosophy or this approach of discovering what is wilderness to you, what aspect of this experience was wilderness?
Brett: It… That was jumping in wilderness in the deep end. So that oftentimes I think our proposition to our listeners is to do something that’s a little bit outside of your comfort zone, extend yourself a little bit. And this was, we don’t know what we’re doing, jump into it. So it was very much discovering our wilderness. It was a lot of wilderness. It wasn’t, it didn’t end up terribly knowing from the end that it all worked. I would do it again because the ferry didn’t care what time our return tickets were for. So it was fine. We were able to call a taxi that showed up 20 minutes later, but not knowing at the time it was, it was fairly stressful.
Alicia: Well, it’s interesting because we often think of wilderness as that space that’s scary to step into. But in this case, it wasn’t scary to step into it because you didn’t realize you even were stepping into it until you’re already there. But I think something that we all struggle with is what don’t I know? I don’t know what I don’t know. And so that’s where our assumptions come into play. That’s where a lot of people get paralyzed with travel in general and going to foreign countries where they don’t speak the language or they don’t know the culture. So how did you, and again, you are both fairly versed with travel, how did you find your way out of that?
Brett: It comes down to the experience that we did have and having a positive attitude because since we were in that situation and we didn’t know what was going to happen, we could have easily had a bad attitude and said that we shouldn’t have done this, I regret this, and that whole island experience could have been negative. We had a positive attitude about it and it was just constantly trying to problem solve and to think creatively that ended up that everything worked out for us. Also remembering and recognizing that people are good, that just like the TED Talk where the guy hitchhikes for 10 months or something like that in every country he goes to, they say, oh, the people in the next country don’t trust them and then he goes and they’re totally trustworthy, we were worried that the ferry was going to say, you can’t go back or something like that. If they had done that, which they didn’t because they realized that we were stuck, they were humans, they empathized, they let us go. And if that didn’t work, we would have found somewhere because people are nice, people are good. So recognizing that people are good, that there’s multiple ways to solve a problem and having a positive attitude, not letting an unexpected experience dampen what could ultimately be a good experience, were all elements to what made a positive outcome.
Alicia: Well, and I like that this is a beautiful demonstration of your wilderness, partly because you’re so experienced with being in foreign countries and navigating public transit, that this was a new level of navigating a hard scenario. But that discover your wilderness piece being whatever is uncomfortable to you, step into that a little bit. This is not a scenario that somebody who’s never traveled abroad, never left their very familiar surroundings should find themselves in because you want to kind of work your way up to that kind of sort of loosey, goosey travel. And so by starting with smaller pieces, by starting with smaller adventures, you can get to the point where you’re stranded on an island in essentially a foreign country and you’re okay and you know you’ll be able to figure it out, you know you’ll get back, everything will work out.
Brett: Mm-hm. And I’ll return the question to you. Do you have an experience where you found yourself unexpectedly stepping into wilderness and if so what was the outcome of that? And I know I put you on the spot so I can talk more about how for not being a foreign country, Puerto Rico is a province of, or a commonwealth, part of the United States it has the elements of traveling abroad in that they speak a different language, they primarily have a different culture but fortunately there are also some things that make it a little easier, our cell phones worked, dollars worked, we didn’t have to exchange money for going to these various places and the cost was fairly comfortable even if we had needed to pay again for the ferry it’s not like that would have put us out, it was eight dollars or something like that. But returning do you have an experience of when you were put in, because sometimes we intentionally make the effort of discovering our wilderness and sometimes we’re just thrown into it.
Alicia: Yeah, when you asked that the first thing to come to mind for me was part of the time that I was in Italy I was with a specific travel companion that loved to take the scenic route even from the town that we were working in that day to the train station she would say let’s go this way and see if that’s a quicker route, see if it’s a more beautiful route, see what there is to see over there.
And I would say nine times out of ten it would totally backfire on us, like one of these times we went down at least probably 200 stairs to get down to a fence that we could not get across or around so we had to go all the way back up those stairs and then book it down the streets we knew to get to the train station in time, of course the train was probably running late because they were always running late in Italy. But it’s a good thing you weren’t in Germany. But we just got so used to okay that didn’t work pivot and sometimes that means turning around and completely undoing the steps that you took in this case literally. Sometimes that means trying to find a different route, trying to find a different way, trying to find a new activity or a new path that you’re having to take but it was probably little things like that that made it so when I got lost in Jerusalem because old city Jerusalem is amaze it wasn’t nearly as scary or hard to navigate that because I was so used to getting lost in cities elsewhere that it was like okay well we can go back and retrace our steps or we can turn right instead and see where that takes us and try to start orienting ourselves and by the end of my time in Jerusalem you somehow have a pretty good feel for that city because you’ve gotten lost in it so much because you let yourself be uncomfortable.
Brett: It’s experiential learning which is some of the most effective types of learning right? It sounds too like your experiences were similar to mine you had well maybe not I’ll check my assumption here you had an attitude positive or negative. Depending on the moment how angry you were you did creative problem-solving because every time you’re in a different place and you learn to be comfortable with some of that ambiguity or uncomfortableness is that would you say those are accurate
Alicia: Yeah. Well, and when the expectation if we want to pull that piece in because I feel like expectations are that nice counter to your assumptions and when the expectation is “we’re going with intention to try a different route” or “we’re going with intention to try this place we haven’t seen” then when things do fall apart it’s okay because you were aware. “I’m aware I’m taking the scenic route” or “I’m aware that I’m in a new space that I hadn’t planned on and we’re just gonna make it work. It also helps having really good travel companions – in your case you and your wife were both capable. You’re both comfortable, you’re both it sounds like you are probably working together on it instead of yelling at each other or getting frustrated with each other it’s “let’s solve this together.” In my case it was – again usually – “okay. Well, add this to the list of times we’ve gotten lost and laugh about it and move on.”
Brett: Megan had a great attitude we missed around about twice – we got it the third time – and every time we would miss a turn or miss our roundabout or take the dead end road she would just say, “Well, it’s good thing we came here because I really wanted to see that church.” Or “I really wanted to see that cat.” And it was just “let’s make the best of a funny, unfortunate situation. And the only reason they’re unfortunate is because the reality didn’t match the expectation, which was” I’ll get there with GPS and no wrong turns.” But that’s something you have to check because sometimes you make a wrong turn and that’s okay and you can still get back and if the train was gone there’s probably another one today if not tomorrow. So just being aware of, yeah keeping that positive attitude using the flexibility and expectation to say I’m setting a new expectation now my expectation will now be that we are taking the next train or that we’re not going down this road again we’ll learn for next time not to do this again.
Alicia: That’s fortunate for you. When I took this the wrong roundabout three times I got pulled over by the cops. They were very confused why we… I was with mom and dad, in Italy and we took it three times because we kept thinking “oh we need this exit” and that was wrong so we turn around and get back on it “oh we need this exit” and it was wrong so we’d come back and get on it again. And there was an Italian police officer who pulls us over and we had just noticed that there’s like an underground exit thing that dropped in to get out of the loop. And so we’re like we got it we know now and he was just laughing at us because he could just see me with the GPS in my hands and he’s like, “il Tom Tom? Yeah it’s not working for you, is it?” I like the this idea this isn’t something we’ve hit on as much so this is fun seeing some of the learnings that have come from this last year even though travel has been so limited that this idea of not just developing your expectations but continually refining them, continually updating them as you’re going through your trip and things change and you have to pivot and you have to add new things and drop other things. But that you’re constantly going through and very intentionally deciding new expectation a later ferry.
Brett: And… I… travel is such a good metaphor for life because this could be extrapolated to many different things. I recently heard someone say that from one day to the next some things changed in the news and they were saying, “no, I…why I thought that this was truth and it was yesterday.” And their husband pointed out, “we have… Everything is changing so quickly, we’re doing the best with the information we have now.” And that can be applied to this travel situation. It’s raining now, so despite the expectation you had of sitting on a sunny beach, it’s raining. This is new information. This is new input. How are you going to do that? Because if you go sit on a beach while it’s raining it might not be what you expected. So even though you’re doing the activity you planned you’re still not going to get the expectation. So maybe a rainy day is a good day to go to a museum, do something indoor, or something. So, constantly take new input and refine those expectations.
Alicia: Unless you shift your expectations to be “I will sit on a rainy beach”. Which is fine too, that’s the beauty of expectations is you’re allowed to hold on to whatever expectations you want, as long as you’re aware of the realities of those expectations. If you want to sit on a beach because that’s what you have decided you can do that, but it now has to include rain or a cover or whatever. Or you have to now bring in that FOMO versus JOMO piece that we’ve discussed in the past. You won’t get to do all the things exactly as you planned them and that’s okay. That can still be okay as long as you can adjust your expectations accordingly.
Brett: Absolutely.
Alicia: So what do we want to do with this next season? We’ve been gone for a year. We took a hiatus to try and give ourselves some space to process some other things to continue kind of pondering on these principles that we had discussed last time. What is our new goal?
Brett: We talked about the framework in season one and I think it’s beneficial if we use multiple stories, multiple instances, and guest speakers to share their experience and we can reiterate the framework through those various stories. So now that we have that all laid out you can say, “here are ways that we can look at it”. So that, I know I need the practice, I need the reminder “hey if you have travel coming up if you have discovering a wilderness coming up, remember to constantly be updating your expectations.” And that is going to only come through repetition in hearing and applying. So that when it’s a brand new experience which is whatever trips you go on whatever trips we go on we’ll be able to think about them through the lens of the framework as well.
Alicia: And I know we’ve talked quite a bit about failure and what it means to fail like when you go to a remote island with no path back or no plan back did you fail or can we redefine failure? Because failure is so much of that expectations and whether or not they align with reality piece. And so I think that’s something that I would like to explore, I think you want to explore it too.
Brett: Absolutely.
Alicia: That we can talk through that and redefine failure or maybe find a new word because I think when we talk through this where we land it is you’re never really failing if you are actively defining your expectations and actively refining your expectations throughout the process.
Brett: Yeah, that’s what I’ve learned even in just this episode. Because it … having those positive positive attitude positive outlook is that “oh that didn’t happen. Well we’ll shift.”
Alicia: So stay tuned for more adventures with Alicia and Brett as we explore the experiences of our friends and people that we know have their own kinds of wildernesses and their own kinds of approaches to the wilderness and how to make failure a productive thing. How to make failure a tool for a travel.
Brett: And if you have stories you want to share comments or if you want to like this like subscribe share reach out contact@discover-your-wilderness.com, and we’d love to share them on this podcast.
Alicia: Till then, have a great week.
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Want to discover more wilderness, or podcasts, listen to episode 11.