Swings and Roundabouts

Every trip has its up and down moments. One day you could be hiking mountains that seem to hold up the sky, drinking mulled wine with cheery locals into the night and the next you might find yourself on mind numbingly boring, sterile, public transport for 10 hours trying to get to the next city.

 

When you are working whilst travelling it is no different.

People tell me I have the best job in the world (no, not the waitressing job I’m doing over the Australian summer, my one with Topdeck in Europe), and they are right. But whilst it is a job that takes me to cool places every other day and sets me up with fun people to do it with, it is also very easy to just portray a glamorous jet setting life on Facebook and Instagram (and this blog!) and leave out the days that are a struggle.

Let me tell you about two very different days I had this year.

The first one was a classic. The sort of day you do the job for. We were in Greece having just finished 3 days sailing our own boats around some Grecian islands. We woke in the port of a sleepy little seaside village and as the chef I provided breakfast for everyone, pastries from the local bakery! We had the whole day to ourselves and our Driver, Ioannis was Greek and knew just where to take us. The island of Lefkada had a beach that he said we just had to see. Rather than preparing all the passengers a packed lunch from the meager supplies at local corner stores, I gave them all €10 each to spend on lunch at our beach stop. A win/win situation as I didn’t have to make lunch and they were able to buy food for much less than €10 and got to keep the rest!

 

 

When we got to the beach it was a gorgeous as Ioannis had said. The water was the kind of baby blue colour that is normally not seen in nature and the sun was shining like it always seems to do in Greece. We had several hours at this idyllic site to eat ice-cream, sunbake and play in the waves.

 

This particular day at ‘work’ ended with a ferry back to Italy. It was running a bit late so the passengers ate dinner from restaurants at the ferry terminal and when the ferry came in at about 10pm I went straight to bed, lulled to sleep by the thrumming of the engine.

 

 

That day felt like I wasn’t even working, no cooking? Getting to partake in all the activities the passengers do? I might have been on holidays myself!

In opposition, I had a day on my first trip which was by no means my worst day, it was merely what I would call ‘work’. We were driving to Vienna in solid rain and there was a lot of flooding happening in the area. The flooding slowed us down and we arrived into a very sparse campsite later than we had hoped to. The rain was still sprinkling as the passengers set up their tents and my trip leader turned to me to ask if we had enough money in our food budget to take them out to dinner. Luckily we did and we went to a local theme park and had delicious schnitzels and strudel for dinner. It was early in the season and the park was only partially open but we still went on the rides we could and I loved getting a bird’s eye view of Vienna from the top of the tallest ride.

 

Back at the campsite the passengers went to bed to the sound of rain still pattering on their tents whilst the other crew stayed up to help me prepare breakfast and lunch for the next day. It was then that we discovered how many gypsys there were in this campsite, they started to buzz around us, checking out what we were doing. I was apprehensive of them and when we finished, I packed as much of my cooking gear back under the coach for safe keeping. This particular campsite had no cabins to offer us crew as accommodation and so we chose to blow up some lie lows and sleep the three of us head to tail down the aisle of the bus, just what you want after a big day.

 

 

 

I woke at 7 the next morning and had only just sat up when I saw a passenger, almost in tears, at the door of the coach (lucky I had gone to sleep prepared e.g. already in uniform). She had woken up in a partially collapsed, wet tent and found that she was locked in. I’m still not sure how she got out because when I got over there I found that someone (or someone’s) had during the night attacked our passenger’s tents, pulling out their pegs and cable tying the zippers shut. My first job of the morning was to take my pocket knife around and cut everyone free and locate their tent pegs. And yes, it was the neighboring but already departed contiki group that had done this.

That day I served a hot breakfast up to disgruntled and wet passengers and tried to make them feel better about this annoying turn of events (EVERYTHING was wet) and then stayed at camp to prepare lunch and tried to clean as much as was possible in the muddy situation whilst they went off to see Vienna. Thankfully the rain stopped for most of this day, and I was able to get into the city for dinner before coming back to my bed on the bus again.

These events are not actually polar opposites in my mind. When you are travelling you have to take the good with the bad and appreciate that it will make a good story one day. Travel doesn’t let you get big headed, because whilst one day you might be buying the rounds for all your friends at the bar and everyone is calling your name and the next night you might be the one they all are laughing at because you don’t know the language and just ordered ‘a tub of monkeys’ not the beer you had hoped for. I always remind myself that it is the journey and not the destination that matters and if today is really that bad, then tomorrow can only be better.

First trip nerves

‘Just so you know, I’m totally terrified’ That’s what I told Brian the day before my first trip started. We were sitting at the dining table in the crew house in Wemeldinge with sun pouring through the windows and paperwork spread around us. My shopping was done and the coach was packed, now I was just going over and over my shopping list for Paris and feverishly studying my trip bible for any helpful information about the campsites that I might have missed before. Brian (a driver) told me about his first trip where he stayed up until the AM every night checking his route notes and looking at every intersection on google street view in the hope that once on the road it would all seem familiar. So basically what he said was, ‘you will be fine, but you will probably stress that you won’t be fine for every single day of the trip’. That’s what I took from it anyway.

The next day we got up at 7 in order to be on the road at 9. Sitting in the jump seat next to Brian I was a ball of nerves and excitement. Speeding through the flat green landscape of Zeeland then Belgium then France we wondered what our Trip Leader would be like, neither of us having met him before Dave would be as familiar a face to us as the new passengers we were about to pick up. Paula and Stacey however were friends who had been on Training Trip with me and I was looking forward to having them with us as ‘walla’ TL’s.

Paula and Stacey were the only reason I could identify my group when they came off the ferry at Calais with the other two trips starting that day. Brian and I greeted Dave like an old friend all the same, sometimes trips are all about the illusion. The illusion that you know this person and are friends, the illusion that you have been to these places before, the illusion that this isn’t my first trip!

I saw our new passengers and thought ‘new friends’. It didn’t help my nerves though, I SO wanted to be the right mix of authority and friendliness, which I found later comes from being myself and knowing what I am doing! The closer we got to the Paris campsite the more my nerves gathered and my head raced with all the things I had to do to make the right first impression and the right first meal.

 

 

That first night was a wonderful example of what a trip could be like. One girl was sick and Stacey took her to hospital and was there until 3am. I set up my cook tent and dinner was just moments away from being served when a car pulled up and told us we were in their parking spot. The driver stayed in his car until we had moved everything including the fully constructed cook tent to a new spot. It started raining and the passengers went off on their driving tour of Paris whilst I stayed back to clean. Lucky I did because two boys from South Africa turned up very late after troubles at the airport and found me in the cook tent. I rustled up a quick dinner for them and found them a free tent in the rain. My cook tent started flooding so I made sure to collect everything off the ground before going to my cabin. I made many trips back and forth from my cabin that night to double check things like whether or not I had left the gas on. It was not a restful night.

The next day did not get any easier.

 I was up early to serve breakfast but I left the passengers eating and caught a taxi to the shopping centre where over the next 3 hours Paula, Stacey and I would spend close to €2000 on food for the next few days and weeks. This was a huge accomplishment for me and I was happy with how it was going until my boss was all of a sudden standing in front of me.

Why? Well because I was new, my credit card wasn’t quite set up yet, so Dave was supposed to be coming to pay for all the food. But something was wrong with our coach so he and Brian were at the mechanics getting it fixed. They had called another of the trips in town to help me out and Welshy (my boss) happened to be with them. Of course he was going to come along to check out how a cook on her first trip was going. I was nervous all over again, reduced to stammering out answers to the questions Welshy was asking me (he had scared me quite a bit on training trip). Eventually Welshy even said ‘For goodness sake Gemma, stop being so nervous!’

We eventually got back to the campsite, quite late at this point, where Dave and Brian had just got in. Jude and Noddy from the other trip made some calls to arrange for their picnic (pre-made at a restaurant) to be picked up by yet another trip and to be taken to the Eiffel Tower. Then we all got down to preparing my picnic in the rain that had been coming down all day. Water was inches deep in some parts of my cook tent.

2 hours was all it took for the feast to be created by the many helping hands but we were still running over time when I closed the doors on the food laden bus and exclaimed that I had forgotten to cook the snails! I looked at Welshy for a clue as to what to do. He said something that I think sums up what we are all about. ‘It’s your passengers first and possibly only time in Paris and they will never have an opportunity to eat snails under the Eiffel tower again, but it’s your choice.’

 

As crew we come in and out of these cities every couple of months. We can become blasé to some of their wonders. We can become tired in cities that never let us sleep, we have the opportunity to skip places in walking tours that we find boring, or to skip a day stop that is difficult to drive to due to flooded roads. I had the opportunity to be lazy and not pull my burners back out to cook the snails in the rain but I remembered who’s holiday it was and out came the pans.

We weren’t even late in the end due to good traffic and miraculously the sun came out for the first time that day, even though it was just for 45 minutes it was all we needed to enjoy our picnic. The praise from my hungry passengers made the stress of the day worthwhile. And hearing their stories of wandering through the first of their great European cities reminded me again of the point of the job.

I finally washed my nerves away with a glass of wine at the Cabaret that night. Crew members from several trips sat in the balcony seats and unloaded their own first day horror stories as topless sequin clad girls sang in French below us and I was able to relax (before going back to the campsite to continue making lunch for the next day). It was only the first day but so far Brian’s prediction was right.