Aligned & Awake: Travel Broadens the Mind and Confirms Several Concerning Things About People

A completely serious scientific study of what happens when perfectly reasonable adults are let loose in Europe with luggage.

Aligned & Awake
My reflections on life through travel, human design, energy, astrology, and emotional clarity. Not as a guru. Just one person figuring it out in real time.

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There is a very specific psychological event that occurs the second a person enters an airport with a wheelie suitcase.

They lose all home training.

Perfectly reasonable adults (people who presumably hold jobs, raise children, and know how to queue at a pharmacy) begin behaving like contestants in a low-budget survival game where the prize is an aisle seat and a sense of moral superiority.

Spatial awareness evaporates. The ability to walk in a straight line becomes a luxury item nobody can afford.

Airports are where humanity goes to act the maggot.

Boarding has not been called, and already there is a cluster of passengers pressed against the gate rope with the urgency of people fleeing something much worse than a budget flight to Lyon.

“Sir. We are all going to France. This is not the last helicopter out of Saigon. The seat is assigned. It will be there when you board. Sit down and eat your €14 airport sandwich in peace.”

Photo by Emil Palrén on Unsplash

Then comes the overhead bin situation, which is less a boarding process and more a live public demonstration of delusion.

Every single flight contains one person attempting to hoist a carry-on the size of a studio apartment into a compartment built for a cardigan and blind optimism. They shove. They grunt. They rotate the bag ninety degrees as if they have personally discovered geometry and are very excited about it.

It still does not fit.

This astonishes them every time, as though the laws of physics have specifically targeted their luggage. A queue forms behind them, bent sideways in the aisle like a sad conga line of resentment, while someone’s backpack repeatedly connects with my face, and a man three rows back sighs like he’s being asked to personally rebuild Notre-Dame by hand.

By the time everyone is seated, we have all accumulated enough low-level hostility to qualify for group counselling.

And the clapping when the plane lands. The actual applause.

This is the pilot’s job. We do not give Karen at the bank a standing ovation for successfully printing a statement. Yet every few flights, some enthusiastic soul starts a round of applause because the aircraft has managed the deeply ambitious task of not falling from the sky. Congratulations, I suppose, to Boeing and gravity. Truly a team effort.

Air travel also reveals that assigned seating remains, for many people, a baffling abstract concept. Your boarding pass says 14C. Why are you standing in 22F looking genuinely confused, as though numbers have only just been introduced to your life? There is always one husband peering at tickets upside down while his wife hisses directions through clenched teeth, and one child spinning in the aisle like an unmedicated lighthouse. Behind them, twelve of us stand trapped, clutching our bags and our remaining goodwill.

Nothing says holiday like sweating in a metal tube while being hit in the kidneys by someone’s neck pillow.

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Survive the airport, and you graduate to Europe’s train stations, where all information is delivered with the clarity of an ancient prophecy.

Departure boards flicker. Platforms change without warning or apology. Announcements crackle overhead in three languages, none of which your brain chooses to process in the moment. And then, suddenly, two hundred adults begin speed-walking in one direction because one man with confidence started moving, and everyone assumed he knew something.

He does not know something.

I was once in Paris when an announcement came over the loudspeaker in rapid French. Every tourist on the platform froze, then slowly turned to one another with the haunted expressions of people who had just heard a prophecy and understood none of it. Did anyone catch that? No? Grand. Panic.

There is always one man loudly declaring “I THINK SHE SAID PLATFORM NINE” with the confidence of someone who completed six minutes of Duolingo in 2021 and considers himself conversational. He is never right. He has never once been right. He will board the entirely wrong train with complete confidence and post about it later as a charming adventure.

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Nobody mentions the cobblestones.

The travel content shows the linen trousers. The café crème. The golden hour and the effortless arrival. What it does not show is dragging forty pounds of poor life choices over medieval stone at six-thirty in the morning.

CLACKA CLACKA CLACKA CLACKA.

Every single cobble. Announced. To the entire neighbourhood.

You are not a mysterious woman arriving in Europe. You are a municipal disturbance with a carry-on. Entire streets hear you coming. Cats relocate. A French pensioner parts her curtains, looks down, and mutters something that requires no translation.

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Cafés, however, remain one of my greatest loves, chiefly because they offer front-row seating to the ongoing theatre of strangers.

There is always a couple in the middle of what can only be described as a pre-breakup summit. You can identify them immediately. She orders tea in the voice of a woman with receipts going back eighteen months. He asks for an espresso like a man who has let down multiple generations. Neither touches the pastry, which tells you everything you need to know. Nobody ignores a pain au chocolat unless property division is imminent.

I once spent forty-five fully committed minutes pretending to read while listening to a woman in Bordeaux explain, with frightening calm, why it’s not about the dishes, Thierry, it’s that you are not helping me. Thierry looked like he wanted the floorboards to dissolve him entirely. I ordered another matcha. This was now a matinee. Forget Netflix. This was live theatre with better pastries and no subscription fee.

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Breakfast buffets are where men become deeply concerning.

There is a species of middle-aged male business traveller who approaches a complimentary hotel buffet as though sanctions are about to be imposed, and this is his last legal opportunity to stockpile carbohydrates. One plate: six croissants, three yogurts, melon, cold cuts, scrambled eggs, two mysterious sausages, and enough cheese to sustain a minor duchy through winter. “Sir. Where are you going with this? You have a conference call at nine.”

Then he returns for toast. It is always toast. The toast is non-negotiable.

I watch this every time with the detached curiosity of someone narrating a nature documentary in their own head.

Hotels themselves are committed to low-grade psychological experimentation. There is always one light switch that controls nothing anyone can identify, one lamp requiring a postgraduate degree to operate, one decorative cushion that serves no human purpose, and one shower engineered to flood the bathroom regardless of the moral choices you make going in.

European hotel showers appear to have been designed by a committee that fundamentally mistrusts the concept of containment. Half a glass panel. That is your allocation. The rest is faith and towels and consequences. You can angle the nozzle toward the wall, whisper encouragingly, and perform basic calculations. By the time you finish, the bathroom resembles a shallow wetland, and you are somehow wetter than when you started.

Then the plugs. There are never enough outlets for a modern traveller, who now requires the charging infrastructure of a small emergency room. Phone critical. Laptop at nine percent. Watch deceased. AirPods in a spiritual crisis. You end up on hands and knees behind the bedside table, shoulder at an angle that will require explanation later, hunting for the one socket hidden behind the bolted wardrobe like a Victorian orphan looking for coal.

Every night becomes an electrical Sophie’s Choice. Someone goes into tomorrow weak. It is always the laptop.

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And through all of it, the airports, the train stations, the emotionally unstable buffets, the cobblestones, the showers, the Thierrys, travel remains my favourite thing.

I truly love it.

Because nowhere else do you get to witness humanity this stripped back. People in transit are tired and hungry, mildly lost, and aggressively attached to Zone 2 boarding for reasons nobody has ever successfully explained. They queue where no queue exists. They fight with ticket machines, as if the machine owes them money. They FaceTime in public at a volume usually reserved for maritime emergencies.

I sit there watching the whole magnificent disaster unfold, like David Attenborough if David Attenborough had considerably less patience and significantly better luggage.

Here we observe the North American tourist approaching Platform 6. Note the visible confusion. He has purchased an overpriced muffin he does not need. His wife stopped speaking to him somewhere around Lyon and has not resumed. He will board the entirely wrong train with complete confidence and post about it later as a charming adventure.

Travel broadens the mind, they say.

It also confirms that a genuinely alarming number of adults should not be allowed outside unsupervised.

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Tell me…

Which travel behaviour sends you over the edge? The clappers? The overhead bin optimists? Tell me everything in the comments.

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