SFTR: You Can't Plan for Serendipity
"Doesn’t that seem to be the way of travel, and life? That, while we do ought to be intentional about the structure of our lives, the best stuff—the magic of life—just happens on its own."
It doesn’t pay to assume, especially when you’re dealing with train schedules in foreign countries. Here’s how I learned this lesson (for not the first or probably last time):
The best stuff can’t be planned
A best friend from college had come to explore some of Spain with me, and it was getting to be time to end our Spanish adventure. We had the morning to burn in Seville before our scheduled visit to its famous Catedral de Sevilla. With no specific agenda, we accidentally created one of my favorite memories of the trip.
Doesn’t that seem to be the way of travel, and life? That, while we do ought to be intentional about the structure of our lives, the best stuff—the magic of life—just happens on its own.
We wandered our way down to the Guadalquivir River where we watched the water from the bridge for a while. Then we wandered our way to the indoor fresh market, where we wandered our way into perfectly prepared pineapple and olives and pickles stuffed with exotic things.
We wandered with our spontaneous picnic to the river where we sampled with mostly delight the various stuffed olives and pickles, and watched passing boats of all kinds. Then we wandered our way past a bakery making pasteis de nata (the national custard pastry of Portugal) and ate them as we made our way to our date with the cathedral.
A couple hours in that remarkable edifice—where, interestingly, Christopher Columbus is as of this year definitively known to be interred—was hardly sufficient. But it was all the time we had before making our way toward a late lunch and our train to Madrid. Pickles and pineapple and pastries will only hold a girl over for so long, and we considered nearby restaurants for a late lunch/early dinner. Ultimately, we decided to play it safe by getting to the train station and just grabbing a bite to eat there.
Seville McDonald’s for the win
You know you’re with a good friend when you can mutually admit that, yes, actually, you could also go for McDonald’s right about now. It feels like a lame traveler move, but I vividly remember every one of my foreign McDonald’s experiences. It’s like a collision of lives—you’re at a place with familiar marketing, smells and tastes, but in a totally unfamiliar place and they have unfamiliar offerings on the menu. Case in point: Eggs Benedict sandwiches. And how about that Grand McExtreme Double Intense Cheddar?
Also, interesting things can happen in even the most ordinary of places.
Something like a dozen armed police came through the restaurant while we were waiting for our food and spent a couple minutes obviously searching for someone. For the briefest of seconds, I had the thought that it’d certainly be a good story if we were just briefly arrested. Doesn’t that feel like a happening which would really launch a writer’s career?
“It’s go time, like, now”
We finally got our food and started eating when I checked the time. “Oh gosh! We gotta get going, like now,” I said to Heather. We’d sailed in feeling like we had all the time in the world, and now we very much didn’t. They didn’t serve my drink with a lid, so I walked quickly up to the counter to request one.
“Simple request,” you say? You’d be wrong. I talked with two different people—I use the word “talk” loosely. More like I did charades to indicate the cup I should’ve brought up with me, and to indicate I needed a cover. It’s amazing how many words you cannot come up with when the one word you know doesn’t work. They finally summoned over the guy who spoke the most English and we got it sorted out.
Trotting through the station with the remainder of our meals and my thankfully-covered soda in hand, we were relieved to see a long queue of people waiting for our train. We took our place in said queue, verifying the boarding time on the monitors. “Yep,” we said to each other. “This must just be where they have everyone line up to board, and then we go down the ramp to actually get on the train.”
Verify the queue…
After a minute though, just to be safe, I went to check with the authorities. I pulled the move I’d perfected over many weeks of solo travel as I approached the nice, in-charge people. You have the tickets in hand or pulled up on your phone, approach with a smile and a please-help-me look, then say the words almost universally understood: “Excuse me?” Or, if your brain doesn’t freeze and you can remember how to say that phrase in this particular language, you do that.
I had no idea what words they said, but their response made it crystal clear that we were not in the right line, that our train had already boarded, and we needed to hurry. This time we ran, still with the remainder of our meals and my covered beverage, down the ramp and up to security. You’ve not ever seen two women with McDonald’s move so expeditiously as we unloaded our various bags and coats and suitcases onto the conveyor belt, eyeing our train nervously as if it was going to pull away at any minute.
Thankfully it didn’t, and we were still even able to find luggage space before the train left just a couple minutes after boarding. Grateful to be on the train instead of still waiting in the wrong line, we finished our now-cooled food and MY COVERED BEVERAGE as the train rolled through beautiful countryside.
Said train ride included much fascination on my part about a well-dressed man a few rows ahead, and his notebook of carefully hand-written, highlighted notes.

I wanted to know everything about those notes—I like McDonalds, but I absolutely adore words and pen and paper and handwriting—and the writer of them. Was he a professor? A professional speaker? A student? A politician? What subject fascinated him so much that he put this much effort into documenting and now reading or memorizing it?
Sadly for all of us, we’ll never know. But feel free to join me in still being intrigued and inspired.
Takeaways
If you, like me, are into sometimes taking lessons away from the stories of everyday life, here are a couple ideas:
When in foreign countries, take the object you need modified up to the counter. It’ll save you time, acting, and make the workers less frustrated with inept tourists.
Be intentional about the structure of your life and character development. Then be dazzled by and grateful for every moment of serendipity. Some of life’s really good days just happen on their own.
Figure out if you’re waiting in the right line. You might be waiting in the wrong line for answers to your life — waiting for the wrong person to validate you, the promotion on a ladder you don’t even really want to be on, waiting for your expensive life to make you happy. What you might need is a flying leap into the unknown, to validate yourself, or to make an exhilarating run toward something you think might be worthwhile.
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I write weekly essays and articles about what really matters in life, increasing your personal and financial autonomy at work (why it matters and how to do it), the slower, simpler, and more adventurous life. Paid subscribers get full access to everything I’ve written, including these below most-viewed posts: