Some trips are built around the famous hour — the timed entry, the sunset everyone photographs from the same wall. The ones I remember are built around the hour nobody scheduled.
In San Miguel de Allende it came late. We’d done the things you do: the church the color of a sunset, the rooftop where the margaritas cost what a whole dinner costs an hour away, the market where I bought something I didn’t need because the woman selling it told a good story. A full day. The kind a guidebook would call complete.
And then the town went to bed, and went quiet in the particular way high-desert towns do, and I stayed up on the roof. The cathedral stopped being a landmark and went back to being a building. The cobbles stopped being charming and went back to being old. And the sky — I had forgotten, the way you forget in cities, how many stars there actually are. They don’t perform. They’re just there, in numbers that feel almost rude, over a town that has been watching them for four hundred years.
Nothing happened in that hour. That’s the point. No one was selling me anything, nothing was on the itinerary, and it is the part of the trip I’d go back for first.
I think about that hour a lot when I plan, because you can’t book it. You can’t put “transcendence, 9:40pm” on a schedule. But you can build a trip with room in it. You can decline to pack the evenings. You can leave the last night open on purpose, make space for the unscheduled hour, and then get out of its way.
That’s most of what I do, honestly. I do the work that wears people out, and then I leave you a little room. Because the trips worth taking always have an hour in them that no one planned, and the whole job is making sure you’re somewhere worth being when it arrives.
Richard · Pontiris One of these, once a month.
One story, one destination insight, and nothing else.