Summer Plans

A day in Zurich and then an actual Odyssey

Someone’s recommendation in some list of summer recommendations (I won’t try to remember where it was; it doesn’t matter) has stayed with me, at least in sentiment, but only because it validated my own travel plans, which I’d been second-guessing at the time. This person, whoever she is, wrote that one should go sailing—not boating, which might include ferrying and cruising and motoring and rowing—but sailing, really cutting across swelling water, by fickle or friendly wind.

Again, I wouldn’t have cared about this item, and in fact it likely would have annoyed me (Sailing? Must be nice!) would it not have applied to my life and insecurities at that moment, which is the way most recommendations work, if they do. I for one will skim any list of basically anything, but only pause on items of extreme pertinence. There are far too many lists in the world for me to trust that any are ultimate.

Recommending has become, in our modern age of the untrustworthy—that is, covertly all targeted marketing—simply another career, and one that trades on leaving nothing sacred. I’ve overheard, in those types of cafés where college students take their visiting parents, conversations about travel agencies coming back as viable businesses.