“Once a year, go someplace you’ve never been before.”
— Dalai Lama
LISBON—Seven weeks ago, I stood in snow 200 miles above the Arctic Circle in Tromso, Norway watching the sky turn green. Tomorrow I will stand on a cliff in the Algarve 200 miles above Africa, looking at the last stretch of the Atlantic before it runs east to Gibraltar.
In between was Tuscany, three groups, an Easter off, and a suitcase packed for three seasons in two months.
That is what travel does to a man my age. You stop counting the days and just count the trips.
I had been waiting 25 years to see the Northern Lights in the actual sky over my head. I was nervous about it the whole way north through Stockholm, Copenhagen, Bergen, and Oslo. Every night one of our guests pulled up an aurora forecast app, and we stared at the projection the way people on the Gulf Coast stare at Doppler radar before a beach wedding. I was worried the whole trip was going to turn into one long letdown. Twenty-five years of building a moment up in your head gives that moment almost no way to live up to itself.
We were in the middle of a king crab dinner when it happened. Somebody stepped outside, looked up, and came back in yelling, “It’s the lights.” Twenty-five grown adults left an excellent hot meal on the table and spilled out into the snow like children at a fire drill. Somewhere back inside, a Norwegian chef was watching his beautiful king crab go cold and quietly rethinking his career.
I have stood in some of the great cathedrals of Europe. I have stood on the rim of the Grand Canyon at dusk. I have never felt closer to God than I felt that night in the snow 200 miles above the Arctic Circle.
The trip knocked another item off the list, too. Dog sledding. I love anything where a dog is part of the work. Truffle hunting in Italy, quail hunting back home, now sled dogs in Norway. A dog with a job is my favorite kind of company.
The temperatures stayed in the high 20s and low 30s. My son went to Finland the January before and said it was brutally cold. We had it easy. We were bundled up, together, and chasing green fire across the top of the world.
From there I flew south to Tuscany for three tours, and in 15 years of showing up to that part of Italy, I have never seen a spring that cold or that windy. The first two groups got the raw end of the weather. The third group got Tuscany the way Tuscany is supposed to be.
Easter sat in the middle of those three tours, and I don’t work around Easter in Italy. I don’t want my guests fighting holiday airport traffic, and I don’t want my Italian team members working through the biggest holiday of their year. So, I caught up on some writing, had dinner with friends who happened to be in Florence on Easter night, and watched Italy come back to life the next week. When I had landed, the grapevines were bare sticks in the ground. On the morning I left for Portugal, the vines were green, and the first poppies of the season had arrived.
“A journey is best measured in friends, rather than miles.”
— Tim Cahill
Portugal, I knew almost nothing about. I had dipped a toe in 15 years ago but never properly toured the country, so my team and I went to work building a trip that could stand next to the best ones we’ve ever run. Porto in the north, Lisbon in the middle, the Algarve in the south. Top to bottom in eight days.
The Douro Valley almost did not make the cut. Thank God it did.
The hills that rise out of the Douro River do not photograph. They are like grand cathedrals; you can take a thousand pictures and show every one of them back home and still not make anyone understand it. The whole valley is terraced. Every hill. Every slope. All the way up and all the way down. The first night I put my guests on a boat for a sunset cruise and a buffet dinner on the river. The next morning, we loaded 25 people into Land Rovers, drove to the highest point in the valley, and spread out a picnic breakfast on a ridge where you could see every vineyard and every bend of the river below.
Two of those 25 guests, Jackie and Pam, were on their 10th tour with me. Both of them have seen a lot of the world from my itineraries over the last decade. Both said, standing on that ridge with glass in hand and the Douro laid out below them, that these might be the best views we have ever had on any trip. I can’t disagree.
Tomorrow in the Algarve, I’ll be wearing short sleeves and squinting at the Atlantic. I had left Mississippi in a coat and the Arctic in three, and I’ll finish the trip in one short-sleeved shirt. Three seasons in two months, all out of the same suitcase.
I say it to myself on every tour, and every now and then I say it out loud. You can’t see this in Mississippi. I’ve done enough of these now to know what comes next. The views are the easy part. The views stay in your photos.
What you bring home is something else.
For a quarter of a century, I waited on those lights. They were worth every one of those years. So was Tuscany in the cold. So was every mile in between. A man can live a whole life and never get a spring like this one. I got one. And the only way I know how to say thank you is to sit down on a Tuesday morning and tell you about it.
Onward.
