Great reads from Lonely Planet: "A ticket to Vienna" by Ann Patchett

23.10.2024 - 14:11 / lonelyplanet.com

Oct 22, 2024 • 8 min read

This piece from Ann Patchett, which was originally published in the Lonely Planet Travel Anthology in 2016, tells the story of when she misses a plane to Vienna, she puts the ticket to much better use a year later.

When I was 29 and living in Montana with my boyfriend, I took a year-long fellowship at Radcliffe College and moved by myself to Cambridge, Massachusetts. At the time I had thought it was too great an opportunity to pass up, but only weeks later I could see what the decision was going to cost me. When I called our apartment in Missoula late at night, no one answered the phone, and when I did manage to reach my boyfriend, he was distracted, evasive.

Broken-heartedness was not upon me yet, but I could see it clearly up ahead – the bright lights of a car coming towards me in the night. I considered going back to Montana to stake my claim, but if the damage to our relationship was already done – as I suspected it was – then leaving Radcliffe just meant I would be out of both a boyfriend and a fellowship.

In Cambridge the days grew shorter and colder. I trudged back to my tiny apartment from the library, past the Brattle Theater, past Sage’s grocery, past the American Express Travel Agency. Something about the travel agency stopped me. I looked at the posters hanging in the window: the Eiffel Tower, the white sand beaches of Tahiti. Maybe my assessment of the situation had been too limited. Maybe I didn’t need to be in Montana or Cambridge. I put my hand on the door and went inside.

I’m sorry travel agencies don’t exist anymore, at least not as the plentiful dream shops they used to be, those wide windows advertising the beauty of the world, the men and women behind the counter always there to help you go.

That summer I bought a Eurail pass and knocked around Europe with a girlfriend until the money ran out.

When I was 20 I’d won a writing competition, and the prize came with the explicit instruction that the cash award was to be spent on the winner’s development as a writer. That summer I bought a Eurail pass and knocked around Europe with a girlfriend until the money ran out. It was Vienna that stuck with me, the cafes that lined the Ringstrausse, the catacombs beneath Stephansdom, the glorious Hofburg Palace.

I had always believed that someday I’d go back. And so I left the travel agency that night with a plane ticket in my coat pocket and a week’s confirmed stay in a pension. I would go in December for my thirtieth birthday. The travel agent was impressed by my spontaneity, as was I. I didn’t have a lot of money in those days but there was enough for a single impetuous decision. Walking back to my apartment I found I had a different view of myself entirely: I was