Unlike tourists, travel writers often prefer the ends of their trips (especially good ones) to the beginnings (fraught with stress). We come home, in the best circumstances, with a sense of accomplishment that replaces doubt and overrides regret. While I'm usually quiet on the flight out, I'm often voluble on the flight back.
Yesterday, for instance, on the shuttle bus at Heathrow, I heard a man I recognized from my Warsaw flight talking to a woman in a Carolina accent. I asked what he had been doing in Poland, and he told me that he was a professor of history and had been visiting the country since 1965. He was, he said, the author of a book on Roman Dmowski.
Standing in the security line at Terminal 3, I fell into conversation with two young women from Iowa who were coming back from studying Thai massage in Chang Mai. They added to my delight at the world's richness.
I had just enough time before the flight to Miami to pop into a newsstand and buy The Spectator. Scrunched into seat 59H, I heard from the young woman across the aisle - a Miamian born in Brazil - about her month working in a Delhi orphanage.
A few hours later I opened my magazine and read Colin Thubron on the scintillating life of Patrick Leigh Fermor.
