A fallen tree, lying across the last stretch of path between us and a hot bath.
Hakone, Japan 2024. We’d bought the 2-Day Free Pass – buses, trains, cable cars, and (what looked like) an actual pirate ship – and then it rained for 24h without stopping, so we bought dingy umbrellas at 7/11 and marched into it anyway, soaked to the bone in Birkenstocks, because we had paid for the pass and the pass was going to get used.
Hours of forcing the issue, then a fallen tree forced us to turn around. So close, yet so far…
Two years on, that tree is the clearest image I own from that whole trip.
The next morning was flawless, by the way. Blue sky, cable car, sulfur chimneys, unhindered view of Fuji sitting there like it was under contract. I have the photos. Yet, I can’t picture it.
Which is a long way of saying the perfect itinerary is a con.
We build them out of FOMO, terrified of wasting a single hour, and the better the engineering, the less survives. A trip with no friction has no edges, and memory only keeps the rough edges.
The reason is almost embarrassing. A plan that works asks nothing of me; I follow it.
A plan that breaks makes me improvise. We retreated, tore up the schedule and booked a ryokan we couldn’t normally afford, because the alternative was another night of being wet.
Best decision of the trip, and it was made by a tree.
That’s the joke buried inside the fear. FOMO builds the flawless itinerary so I’ll miss nothing. It succeeds. I miss nothing and I remember nothing.
I wrote about that rain at the time and got it half right. The argument then was scarcity – “the ruined day is what makes the good day count”. Tidy. Probably even true. But the good day is the one that dissolved, and the tree stayed.
There’s a duller explanation, too. Maybe the tree is vivid because I spent a day writing about it, in which case the itinerary is innocent and all I’ve proved is that attention fixes a memory.
I still overplan, though. Buffer hours, contingency, no room for a tree – until there is.
Related: The Antidote to FOMO – the version I’d revise.
