“DON’T DO IT. DON’T YOU DARE DO IT!,” I said panicked with my head tucked beneath my palm as if to hide in a very crowded restaurant.
“Why? They paid and left! They aren’t using it!,” replies my scheming husband.
“Eric, we can’t be those uncultured pricks who steal wine off an absent table in a foreign country! We have to blend in!,” I say, amused and embarrassed at what I know he is about to do.
“I’m very cultured. And they just walked away from it. I’m doing it. It’s good wine. It’s a whole uncorked bottle and it’s paid for and they just left it!,” Eric protests. “I am doing this for you.”
Eric runs across the aisle, grabbing the very expensive bottle of wine from the vacated table. I can barely manage not to laugh or put my head face first on the oak below me.
Loudly whispering and crouching in an overly crowded restaurant Eric says, “you better drink the red in your glass because if not I’m mixing it with this white and you are getting a blended rosé.”
I chug. And then comes a glass of expensive white to the tippy top of the glass, hinted with the red that came before it.
This, my friends, is my newest dear memory.
My husband snagging a half-drank bottle of wine we couldn’t otherwise afford from an empty table in a Romanian restaurant.
Right now, we are seeing the world from the nose bleed seats.
We are traveling on a tight budget, and paying most of our money in petrol.
We are driving a car that keeps threatening to die in the heat.
We are traveling in countries, beautiful ones, whose exchange rate is extremely beneficial to our income.
We are staying in places with the occasional roach and a lot of graffiti and a various number of homeless refugees right outside the door.
We are buying magnets as souvenirs (when available) and snagging wine from empty tables.
These are the travel nose-bleed seats.
No Hilton. No room service. No A/C. No guarantee that the shower will be clean or the room bug free, or that the elevator and hallways don’t smell like straight urine. (One building we’ve stayed in didn’t have plumbing throughout the whole building, so our neighbor was pooping in a bucket and walking it to the hall drain.)
Make no mistake, I’m cool traveling like this. But no amount of pretty pictures should suggest that we can do this because we are somehow richer than you.
And I don’t fail to remember that I could afford to get into the stadium at all…that’s more than most people.
But we are at the highest point in the arena.
Where the seats ain’t comfy, but the beer tastes good, and the view of the people is crystal clear.
I don’t care though, with him, in these seats, stealing laughs and sips off a half-full bottle of pricy chardonnay…
At the highest point in the stadium…
I am sitting in the seat closest to heaven.
Taylor Patrice
P.s. See you on the other side of travel. We are almost officially out of internet range for the next several days.