Sometimes when we travel, we get more than we'd ever imagined when we first pulled the rabbit of an idea out of our magician's hat.  In addition to dreamy tours, punctuated by tables of gourmet food and ethereal conversations, there are also gritty, unappealing moments filled with dangling exclamations and question marks.  Oops!  Oh dear!  Do we have a Plan B?  No Ma'am, we don't want to fly to Kazakhstan in order to get to Copenhagen!   Like Disney's Haunted Mansion ride, there are uninvited trouble-making hitchhikers that stash burrs in our socks, bugs in our beds, and downright creepy moments that remind us there are no guarantees.  There are no travel rebate offices that can remove an unpleasant experience from our memories.  Ghosts and goblins of travel, Oh My!
    The first rule of every journey is that it requires flexibility and sometimes, courage.  Five hours extra spent in the airport due to mechanical repairs of a second aircraft after the first was pulled out of service.  Last minute changes of terminals, weather that broods and forewarns, or crew delays that can make travelers frantic.  (O, but if there's a problem, it is so much better to be on the ground.)  Those nagging decisions:  Do we turn around and go home.  Do we press forward?
    And so began our sojourn to Copenhagen to board a Baltic cruise.  This trip had been delayed for about eleven years due to the fact that our first flight out of Austin was postponed by hours because the pilot's seat wouldn't scoot back.  This hiccup caused us to miss all connecting flights, and long story made short, we never left the Austin airport.   We headed home with suitcases of freshly folded laundry and the scent of failed anticipation.  A first.  No cruise, just a strangely open calendar.
    So, after more than a decade, we decided to give the Baltic a second try.  Copenhagen, Stockholm, Helsinki, St. Petersburg, Szczecin, Tallinn, Warnemunde—cities that sounded deliciously exotic and educational at the same time.  We were most excited about St. Petersburg—all those gleaming, golden onion domes, The Hermitage, and ornate palaces that only Elizabeth the First (and last), Catherine (The Great)and Peter (The Great—O, all those annoying Greats!) could have imagined.
    You cannot travel in Russia without a visa, and the application looks like an interview with a former K.G.B. head.  "What was the name of your second grade substitute art teacher and what kind of hair gel did she use—Dippity-Do or something else?  How many litters of puppies did your old dog Mups have and what was the name of the smallest runt?  Did your Great Aunt Matilda cook fried green tomatoes every Sunday for lunch, or was it pan-fried chicken?  Egg batter or cornmeal and flour?"  I mean, forty years beyond grammar school—who can honestly remember?  And so, we decided to go under the auspices of the Seabourn group visa, which meant we could only go ashore during a scheduled group tour and never on our own.  Hours before our scheduled Sunday afternoon tour of the Hermitage and a concert at the Palace of Catherine the Great, I climbed on the treadmill and began to watch the ship's television.  Twenty stations with shows in Polish and Danish, and only one in English.  It was a television sermon from an Atlanta-based church. 
     "Death is evil," the minister said.  I silently argued with him,  No, you don't understand.  It can be a great release for the terminally ill.   He gave many illustrations to prove his point, and I did not get his meaning, thinking only that he just didn't get the big picture.
     Afterward, I went outside on the deck and noted a group of youngsters on a pier near our dock.  There were several young men sunning on towels and one newly pregnant, tattooed, bikini-clad woman who was barely more than a teenager.  She was something to behold.  Like a wild, kamikaze butterfly, she would flit in and around her companions and  occasionally break into a dance that was either fueled by the feistiness of youth or Stolichnaya.  Then she would dive into the murky Neva River and swim to a Russian Coast Guard ship, hang onto its life-saver shaped bumpers, return to the pier and then repeat the process.
    We went on to tour St. Petersburg and the following morning visited the home of a typical Russian family.  That afternoon, after our tour was over, we had no choice but to return to the ship.  Much of our group had flown to Moscow that morning, so there were far fewer people than usual.  A good time to do laundry, I thought.  Bad idea.  Really bad idea.  When I was in the laundry room, a commotion ensued about something that was happening outside on the pier.  I turned on the clothes dryer and then slipped outside onto the deck, having no idea what I was about to see.
    The young Russian butterfly from the day before had been swimming from her pier to the Coast Guard ship when the body of a mutilated Russian male bobbed to the surface beside her.  He was pulled to the shoreside and left there, uncovered for hours.  A tourist snapped pictures of him (to go in some bizarre photo album,), and nervous laughter erupted.  As soon as I realized what had happened, I quickly went back inside the ship and did not return for hours—not until I had heard that the body was finally gone. 
     What I then saw was like a living Russian version of Picasso's Guernica, the moments of which are forever suspended in time.  A woman clothed in black, sitting alone on the pier, staring out across the water through our ship as if it were vaporous—a ship filled with the ghosts of memories.  On the left, the glaring gold of a Russian Orthodox church's onion dome and ornate cross shining above her newly graying hair.  To the right, a man's white t-shirt and dozens of white packets floating downward from a decaying apartment window.  In front of her is a burly, barrel-chested, fifty-something Russian fishing from the Neva with a net. 
     What I thought was, Sir, you ought not eat the fish that swim in the Neva River.  You do not know with whom they swim. 
    I felt as if we'd been dropped into the middle of bizarre James Bond spy movie, with one huge exception—this wasn't fun.  This was so not fun. 
    You may wonder whether I would go to Russia, if I'd known ahead of time what would happen in port?  Yes, I would, but I'd have taken that flight to Moscow with the others.  I'd have chanced dealing with Aeroflot delays and the smoke from the Moscow fires that burned that day.  I would not, though, have chosen to see humanity at its worst.  As a species, we are capable of both great acts of love, and sadly, horrible acts too terrible to contemplate.  Excuse me while I adjust my rose-colored glasses. 
    At the end of the cruise, our ship docked in Copenhagen and we spent the night at the Admiral Hotel along the water.  That evening, we spoke to a young lieutenant having dinner by himself at the table next to us.  He was having some R & R from his duty in Afghanistan and intently pouring over the pages of a novel.  He was cheerful,  pleasant and "living in the moment."  He said nothing about his work—he didn't have to, and we didn't want to make him think about it.  Just meeting him, however,  made me realize that while what I'd seen was dreadful, it couldn't compare with the abundant and difficult truths he faced on a daily basis.  I am quite certain that he'd often gotten more than he'd bargained for, and all the while had summoned up the courage to press forward.
    Life is a journey for all of us.  No telling where we might go along the way.