We Had It Nailed From The Start

Over the past forty years I've devoted a lot of time to developing, running systems and teaching others how to the same. I've found as many different ways to design systems as there are people to design them -- each has to figure out what works best for them. I find that no matter how much pre-planning and intentionality to be linear in planning things, in short order things get delightfully, comfortably chaotic. The comfort comes from intuiting a holistic sense of what's happening and always being open to re-thinking or re-working something.

This happened quite a bit in planning our trip. Months ago Jane contacted the Iona Community and scheduled our stay. This was important because this is the centerpiece of the spiritual component of her sabbatical. So everything else would fit around that second full week in July. Since neither of us has traveled extensively in Great Britain and we have no idea how long it takes to get from place to place, we decided to give ourselves a few of days to get from Heathrow Airport to Iona. Since we would be on Iona for a week it didn't seem sensible to hire a car until after that visit -- we would take public transport from London to Glasgow, and on to Iona. Then the printed materials from Iona arrived in the mail. To get to Iona you have to ferry from the Scottish mainland at Oban to Craignure on the Isle of Mull. There is a jitney of some sort to get you from Craignure on the east side of Mull to Fionnphort on the west side, and it is Fionnphort from which you catch the ferry to Iona. In amongst all of these details was a note that the maximum weight your bag [note the singular form] must not exceed 55 lbs. Oh, and by the way, you need to bring your own towels and wash clothes, and you are well advised to bring rain pants and boots for getting around Iona. So we were faced with the perplex of having to add extra things to our "bag" at the same time we needed to pare down its weight. We entered a mental exercise space of absurd trip planning perhaps exceeded only by those backpackers who tear the paper tags from their tea bags to reduce weight.

Then, in the midst of all this wonderful mental chaos it struck me that we were going to lose at least two day's time traveling back to Glasgow to hire a car and then retracing our route north to explore the highlands. So what if we hired the car when we land at Heathrow? We could take the ferry from Oban to Craignure ourselves and tour Mull at our leisure. We could take as much bloody weight in our bags as the airline would permit [um, it's two bags per person, ~65 lbs each bag]. And the cost of leaving a hired car idle for a week is less than the recovered value of two travel days.

Stacy and Doug from church told us to avoid driving into London, as there are significant costs if you do so. This quickly decided us to return the hired car at Heathrow towards the end of our trip, take the Underground to our hotel, and use public transport to explore London and close in sites such as Canterbury Cathedral.

So the chaos returned to relative placidity. Ah, we had it nailed from the start!