I recently got a new eyeglass prescription. Two things had happened to my eyeballs. All of a sudden, I needed reading glasses, first for ingredient labels and the small print on prescription bottles, and then for reading regular text. The second thing was that I could see farther better without my previous near-sighted correction than with it. Thinking this trend might be leading to x-ray vision, I put off a visit to the optometrist for awhile. When I finally made the appointment, the doctor casually told me that it was normal for vision to flip from near-sighted to far-sighted, “especially as we age.” My dream of x-ray vision in time for the summer beach season was dashed upon an horizon I could now see more clearly, even without glasses.

Reporting back from an enjoyable holiday, and I can happily state that Carol did not buy me a Lexus for Christmas. I did not buy her one either. In fact, we are trying to sell the one she owns.

What you crave in reading a travel narrative is the unexpected, a taste of fear, the sudden emergence by the roadside of a wicked policeman, threatening harm.

Ever since she’s been able to walk, talk and spurn, my youngest granddaughter has regarded me with a mix of antipathy, chagrin and disdain.

Carol and I boarded Amtrak’s #59, still known as The City of New Orleans, on a Monday, but not in the morning. There were eleven cars. There would be three sets of only two conductors each for the trip to New Orleans. There were 218 passengers. The train no longer carried mail. In short there wasn’t much still in common with Arlo Guthrie’s ballad, except this: Guthrie released his version of the song in 1971, and the cars we were riding in dated back to the 1970s.

Carol and I have been living in our little 55+ community for more than a year, and I’m happy to say we haven’t met anybody there yet. On the other hand, we’ve spent about seventeen weeks of that year traveling and meeting scores of friendly, outgoing people that we’re never going to see again. For that reason, those are the very people I like to call my friends.

When traveling, I don’t like committing to much in advance. I don’t make hotel accommodations until I know what train I’m arriving on, and I don’t know what train I’m arriving on until I know what city we’re going to next. And I don’t know what city I’m going to until…well, you get the idea: when contemplating tomorrow on the road, I prefer waiting until today has more or less become yesterday.

Keeping up with this idea of unknown unknowns to the point of belaboring it (as we say in New Orleans, if it’s worth doing, it’s worth overdoing), Carol and I arrived in Oxford with no thought of signing up for any sort of walking tour of the city. After all, I had spent six weeks here in 1971 matriculating in a summer program at Oxford University’s Exeter College. So the visit to the city began very much as a known known. I simply wanted to show Carol that I was once an Oxford scholar.

There are known knowns when Carol and I travel, and there are known unknowns. There are also, I suppose, unknown knowns, although I’m not precisely sure what such things might be. But my favorite attractions in traveling are the unknown unknowns. Unknown unknowns are what former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld identified when explaining why his and Cheney’s Iraq War was not the cakewalk they’d promised it would be. For me, unknown unknowns are the unique and worthwhile experiences a given destination might offer had I taken the time to consult a travel guide before arriving. Sometimes unknown unknowns turn out to be significant, such as arriving at Big Ben in London to find it fully ensconced in scaffolding, or discovering the Winston Churchill’s War Room and Downton Abbey’s real life Highclere Castle sell out well in advance of the day you had planned to attend. Then there are the unknown unknowns that turn out to be completely unexpected, but wholly enjoyable surprises. It’s for these, that I maintain a steadfast reluctance to plan ahead or try to learn anything much about where I’m going until I get there.

   I’d like to tell you that my reason for choosing York as our next destination after Scotland was because I knew it was the geographical setting for Downton Abbey. After all, I was going through the series a second time with Carol (her first), and we had seen the movie together at the start of this trip. But it was only after traipsing around York for a couple of days, and then watching Downton episodes courtesy of a Smart TV with an Amazon Prime app in our York accommodations that I said to Carol, “Hey, Mrs. Patmore is talking about going to Thirsk. We saw that road sign on the bus today!”