In our European trips together so far, Carol and I have stayed at about two dozen different hotels and apartments. It’s not surprising, then, that a lot of people would probably like to have asked me what’s been our favorite accommodation.

A contingent of Carol’s family recently headed off to Portland, Oregon for the holidays. Since I had made a couple of train trips there, I was asked to recommend places to go and sights to see. As the experienced reader of this blog may have immediately discerned, I had precious little to offer. Outside of the famous Powell’s bookstore, there was the historic landmark of the city’s Union Station, which I was aware of only because that’s where I had disembarked from Amtrak. There was the homeless encampment surrounding the station, the motel with the iconic 1950s era sign, where I stayed quite cheaply, and a sports bar near a strip joint that had been located within walking distance from the train station.

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.

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!”

Haggis: (‘haɡəs’)The national dish of Scotland, a type of pudding composed of the liver, heart, and lungs of a sheep (or other animal), minced and mixed with beef or mutton suet and oatmeal and seasoned with onion, cayenne pepper, and other spices. The mixture is packed into a sheep’s stomach and boiled.

   The above will explain why our first meal in Scotland was Italian, and the closest we ever got to haggis was to quickly dry heave past it whenever it appeared on the menu. Nevertheless, our week or so in Scotland remains one of the fondest of our entire trip to the UK. The word that comes to mind to describe Scotland is: genuine.