Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, Part 2

When I invited my sister to join me and my husband on a trip to Italy and France in the fall of 2019, I knew we were going to have a great time. Amy is fun, smart, vibrant, and enthusiastic, and she’d never been to Italy or France. She was as excited to see those places as I was to show them to her.

I knew we’d likely be in for a misadventure or two. Or possibly more. That’s the thing about travel—there’s always a misadventure. And along with all her extremely positive qualities, Amy is impulsive, disorganized, and hyperactive.¹ We were guaranteed to have some issues. I just didn’t expect them to start before we boarded the Rome-bound plane in Toronto.

Amy, who lives in Milwaukee, had flown from Chicago to meet us at Pearson Airport in Toronto. Dave and I flew in from Edmonton, where we live. Amy’s flight was supposed to arrive three hours before ours. The plan was that we’d hang out together in the fancy Air Canada Lounge. But Amy, who inherited the family gene that predisposes us to overextending ourselves at the most inconvenient times,² had arranged for a friend to take her on a tour of Toronto. An hour before boarding time she hadn’t even made it to Security. She appeared in the lounge 15 minutes before we had to get on the plane.

I blamed myself: she hadn’t traveled overseas since the Carter administration. It hadn’t occurred to me to explain to her that the overseas flights board early. As soon as she showed up, with a massively overstuffed suitcase she’d bought especially for the trip, and a ukulele (because who doesn’t travel with a ukulele?),³ we hustled her off to the departure gate, ignoring her protests that she’d just discovered that her hand-knit shawl was still in Security.

Those Su Nuraxi employees in Barumini, Sardinia, didn’t know what hit them when Amy Waldman led all the visitors in a chorus of “You Are My Sunshine.” I’ll bet Tiny Tim never played at a nuraghe.

“I have to go get it,” she said. “I knit that shawl just for this trip.”

“You can’t,” I said firmly. I knew this because months earlier my daughter had left her raincoat at Security and we weren’t allowed to go back. Also, there was no time to go back. The last thing I needed was to lose my sister at the massive Pearson Airport.⁴

Dave had been upgraded to business class. We kissed goodbye (me, grudgingly, jealously) in the jetway, whereupon he followed his super-elite cronies to the land of fold-out beds and meals served on actual dinnerware while Amy and I trudged along with our fellow peons to steerage, where we would dine on unidentifiable casseroles served in disposable foil containers before pretending to sleep sitting up.

It took the two of us to heft Amy’s suitcase into the overhead compartment. That was after she removed the special section that was supposed to hang nicely over the seat in front of her, so she wouldn’t have to unpack all the goodies she’d need for the trip. But the special section didn’t fit nicely. It didn’t fit at all, so she unpacked about 72 items—knitting, reading material, Airpods, an ancient MP3 player she’d rescued from a friend’s junk pile, a sleep mask, a toothbrush, her passport, moisturizer. I can’t remember the rest, but you get the idea.

Meanwhile, the flight attendant we’d enlisted to call Security in search of the missing shawl came up empty-handed. I promised Amy we’d buy yarn in Italy so she could knit a new one. Nearly nine hours later, in the airport in Rome, I was also promising I’d take her to buy a new MP3 player. In her haste to shovel all 72 items back into the useless special suitcase section, she’d left the player in the seat pocket pouch, something she realized as she was exiting the plane, when she was taking a mental inventory of her belongings.

We’d made it about 20 feet out of the jetway when she plopped onto the floor in the terminal. I thought maybe she’d fainted, but by the time I realized she was wide awake and conscious, she’d begun rearranging her belongings into the special suitcase section, something she hadn’t been able to do to her satisfaction on the plane.

Picture the Parting of the Red Sea, only instead of Israelites plowing through the parted waters, there was Amy, her suitcase at her side and her belongings spread around her as if she were in the privacy of her bedroom. And streaming past her, like the waters of the sea, were the remaining 300+ passengers who had gotten off the plane after us.

It did not occur to me at the time that Amy was unpacking that I should take a picture. So you’ll have to use your imagination. I hope this will help.

This was my fault. When the flight attendant had announced, shortly before landing, that we would be on the ground in less than a half hour, Amy had asked if we could get off the plane after everyone else did.

“I need to repack,” she explained.

I was shocked. Who stays on the plane to let everyone else off ahead of them, especially if you’re two rows behind Premium Economy on a jumbo jet?

“You have to do it now,” I said. “It’ll take forever to get off if we wait. And I have no way of telling Dave, so he won’t know where we are. And we still have to go through Customs and Immigration and catch another plane. We don’t have enough time.”

She was petulant. She was irritated. That made two of us. The charitable part of me would like to blame our mutual petulant irritation on the natural consequences of pretending to sleep sitting up for more than seven hours after eating an unidentifiable casserole from a disposable foil-covered container when you know your husband/brother-in-law is 30 feet ahead of you resting comfortably and supine after eating beef tenderloin off porcelain. (I knew what he ate; I asked him when he smuggled a Lindt chocolate bar back to us before he unfolded his bed.)

Also, petulant irritation is the natural reaction to the realization that you should have sent your sister a long list of do’s and don’ts before taking her on her first transatlantic flight since Three Mile Island melted down. But that ship had sailed. Or, more accurately, that plane had flown. As I tried to ignore the passengers streaming past us, I pointed out that the middle of the deplaning path was not an ideal place to repack. Dave pretended not to know us, though he had the decency to wait so we’d all be in the back of the line together.

Amy stuffed her belongings back into the suitcase and we made it safely to Sardinia. We stayed at a resort where the food was plentiful and delicious and the beach was nearby. Amy could pack and unpack to her heart’s content, and the only thing she lost all week was her Fitbit, which we were able to replace in nearby Cagliari, in the Italian version of Best Buy.

Fiat under fig trees: Amy rented this car for us AND she drove, which was a highlight of the trip for me. Normally when we travel, I get stuck driving. And I kind of hate it. Amy loved it, and it freed me up to enjoy the scenery.

As for the yarn, Google led us to a shop in a remote burg in southern Sardinia, but it was closed when we showed up there in the middle of the afternoon in the middle of the week. In fact, pretty much the entire dinky little town was closed. But the excursion provided me with an opportunity to have yet another adventure I wouldn’t have, were it not for my sister by my side.

NEXT WEEK: We get robbed and Amy gets lost.

1. So am I.

2. So did I.

3. Everyone except for the late Tiny Tim and Israel Kamakawiwo’ole. And Amy Waldman.

4. Spoiler alert: this is foreshadowing. The disappearing-in-a-travel-venue theme will appear in next week’s Substack.