The Two Ways To Think About Luck When Travelling

While she may not be able to view our Close Friends stories, Lady Luck follows us while we’re travelling. Unfortunately, she often has a big hand in whether or not we enjoy our life on the road.

We love her when she scores us a free table at a busy restaurant, introduces us to great people or gets that sun shining during a perfect day at the beach. On the flipped side of the ever tossing coin, we loathe her and her dopey shamrock shaped eyes every time she cancels our flights, double books our tables and, with some help from Qantas, she loses our precious luggage!

Yet I’ve come to realise it’s more than good luck or bad luck that influences our journeys, it’s how we react to the falling of the coin, before it has even landed.

I learned this lesson with my partner Katie in the south Belgian town of Liège. While traveling from Leuven to Cologne, our connecting train in Liège was cancelled and another would not be available for almost three hours. Said train was guaranteed to be the hot and overcrowded type that convinced my forbears to leave Europe.

As it was lunchtime, I suggested that we go and get some lunch nearby. Using Google reviews and the knowledge that there is rarely anything good to eat immediately by a train station, Katie and I ended up at brasserie called Tripick that brew several of their own blonde biers. With three hours to kill, it was an easy choice to make.

Blonde bier brewed in the classic Belgian style, a little orange rind balanced with bitterness and extra alcohol.

After some salads that we hoped would cancel out a week of debauchery in Leuven, and some chips that definitely wouldn’t, I remarked that we were lucky to find such a nice venue for lunch during this unexpected diversion.

Looking at me like I had just announced my retirement from rep footy, Katie explained she saw the situation very differently.

“If we were lucky our train wouldn’t have been cancelled and we’d be on our way to Cologne right now.”

I couldn’t help but think Katie had a point, even if it was a pessimistic one. Yes, if the train was running as planned (and as paid for, ICE) we wouldn’t be having this spontaneous ‘Farewell Belgium’ lunch at Tripick right now.

Yes, I’m a glutton. Yes, we eat salad. Yes, we exist.

While I had found good luck in the detour, Katie saw the whole situation as bad luck, regardless of how generous the brasserie was with the prawns in my salad.

In this situation, Katie’s line of thinking demonstrates Binary Luck, a way of viewing travel that means passenger vehicles should run on time, business opening hours should be correct and reserved seats should not have someone else sitting in them.

Binary Luck is kind of a macro way of looking at things, judging situations, hours, days, weeks and even chapters of our lives as being defined by only good or bad luck. In that moment, it didn’t matter to Katie that we were having a top shelf round of unexpected Wallonian cuisine, the fact we were there an not on our train, when we should have been, was bad luck.

Meanwhile, after some sweet and spikey final sips of Belgian blonde bier (and years of therapy) I had realised I was viewing our situation through the guise of something I’m going to call Inevitable Luck, a way of thinking that constantly expects the worst. Flights will have crying children, restaurants will sit you next to a bucks party and connecting trains will be cancelled without reason, notice or apology.

In a sense, Inevitable Luck is constantly being prepared for the seemingly imminent stream of inconveniences one can encounter while travelling. It treats these allegedly character building experiences as the norm and recognises/sincerely hopes that good luck will inevitably follow in equal amounts. You will find a great place to eat on a cute street, you will get treated nicely by a Parisian waiter and by Jove you will get a new profile picture good enough to frame that you didn’t even have to pose for.

Huh? How the hell did this get here?

The easiest way to differentiate the two are by the words I (perhaps incessantly) italised above. Those travelling with Binary Luck in mind believe events should go as planned or that’s bad luck. Meanwhile, those travelling with Inevitable Luck in mind believe they will encounter both good and bad luck in roughly equal amounts.

Binary Luck thinkers flip a coin, watch it land and say “Heads? I wanted Tails!” whereas Inevitable Luck thinkers might say “Ah. Thought that might happen.” This is where I personally (and hopefully not sanctimoniously) believe that Inevitable Luck is the superior to Binary Luck as it places a certain amount of control back in the hands of the traveller.

When the coin doesn’t land the way you want, pick it up and flip it again.

By encouraging us to go out and enjoy a boozy lunch at an unexpected 0km per hour, I was giving the coin another flip and not resting on the objectively bad luck that we had. This time it paid off. We found a great place to hang out, bid Belgium farewell and make it back at a leisurely pace to get onto the predictably overcrowded and sweltering hot train.

If you are someone who finds yourself constantly frustrated by the undesirable elements of travel you may be thinking of circumstance and luck as a very binary thing. As I once did and continue to do, challenge yourself to think of luck as a force that gifts and denies in equal quantities but does so at times appointed by you.

I’m pleased to say Katie no longer sees luck in such a binary sense. In Berlin a few weeks later we showed up to an underground tour only to realise we’d accidentally booked tickets to the German tour (no refunds even though the lady at the desk said it’s a common problem). Instead of heading home in a huff, we decided to slowly take the hour walk home, do a bit of op shopping, check out the parks, eat a currywurst and enjoy a whole new side of Berlin we hadn’t seen yet. When we arrived home we couldn’t help but think what we did seemed more fun than what we had planned.

Bad luck can be a gift to a traveller as it provides us with an opportunity to do something unexpected and off our chosen path. Sometimes, I think these are the types of moments we look back on fondly, even if that thing is just as simple as a beer and a prawn salad.