I’m a Travel Writer Who Loves to Plan Everything. So What Happens When Everything Goes Wrong?

A kiss from a calf meant more than I could have imagined.

Halfway through a chaotic two-week road trip through the Balkans, a baby cow licked away all my worries. When its tongue lapped at my hand like a bovine lollipop, it suddenly no longer mattered that two of the four of us were on antibiotics or that my husband booked a hotel for the wrong night.

A monk with a foot-long beard, caught in the charms of the same five-year-old whose ill-timed “pee-mergency” brought us to the 700-year-old monastery in northern Kosovo, demonstrated how to hold out our hands to the calf. The slurps of the small animal presented a crystal-clear treatise on why forking over our passports to NATO soldiers, accepting an invitation for local brandy, and stepping over a recently butchered lamb carcass into a pastoral Narnia made the trip worth every last, “Are we there yet?”

I’m a type-A traveler who combats anxiety with plans (A, B, and sometimes C, for good measure) and schedules everything, even setting aside time for “potential spontaneous fun.” I am happiest when my day follows the path set out on my color-coded Google Map and the surprises come in the form of pretty old buildings, not random restaurant closures.

But by the time we headed north from the minaret-flecked skyline of Prizren, Kosovo, on the seventh day of our trip, I had deftly done battle with such demons as “Rental cars can’t leave Greece” and “GPS wants to send us over a seasonally closed road to a locals-only border.” I found a pediatrician in Thessaloniki, Greece, with a Friday evening appointment for the kid who sprouted an ear infection at 30,000 feet and a North Macedonian clinic that got me treated for strep throat in a matter of minutes.

Plan B Is Plan Pee

After a morning wandering the post-war reconstruction of the Ottoman-era bazaar in the town of Gjakova, Kosovo, we set out for Peja, an hour away. The much-anticipated stop included the only hotel of the trip featuring the holy grail of family travel: an indoor pool. But first, a voice piped up from the back of the car. “I have to peeeeeeee,” Tove whined, extending the last word into 17 syllables to indicate the urgency.

Peja was still half an hour away, but I had a perfect plan B: the famous Dečani Monastery was just five minutes away. We could stop in, pee, see a really old church, and zoom on to the pool.

At the eerily quiet stone gate, a fatigue-clad soldier from KFOR approached the car. The NATO peacekeeping force arrived following the 1999 war and remains in place to support local police, including protecting the medieval Serbian Orthodox monastery. Serbs make up less than 6% of the Kosovar population, but Serbia still considers Kosovo a part of Serbia, though the nation declared independence in 2009, and the vast majority of the world considers it so. The guard took our passports and waved us in.

The two-toned marble exterior of the 700-year-old church shone like new, but a deep groove in the doorstep revealed the wear of centuries of use. Inside, a thousand ancient frescos gleamed with gold. While I tried to quietly shush my children in the solemn space, two monks with long gray beards and longer black robes found their pent-up road trip energy entertaining. The monks genially pulled back the curtain to the room only used by high priests and pointed out the painting of King Stephen, for whom the church was built. As the impromptu tour wrapped up, they invited us to sit for coffee and juice.

At the long tables on the wooden balcony of a nearby building, we looked out over the monastery and the rolling green hills beyond as the men brought tall glasses of cold lemonade and cookies for the kids and hot espresso and raki for us. They made the brandy here, an older monk with a ponytail and beard down to his belly mimed. It was several notches better than any other I tasted on the trip; the pool could wait.

The kids followed the ponytailed monk to see birds in hanging cages and watched, rapt, as he brought out a book of his nature photography. With one hand in a potato chip bag and covered in crumbs, my five-year-old grinned at the colorful flowers. The man seemed utterly charmed.

He pointed excitedly across the complex and asked, “Caprio?” I squinted, wondering if it was a word related to cabra–Spanish for goat–or Capricorn. He led us across the grass, past two napping kittens, and through a locked door. We walked over a threshold and into a different world.

There were, indeed, goats, baby ones, and also tiny lambs, and an entire farm hidden behind a locked wooden door. Skirting us past the gruesome makeshift abattoir in the courtyard, the monk showed us through the cheesemaking facility. He introduced us to a Sharr Mountain dog the size of a small bear. Then he took us to the calves.

I held my fist in front of one sweet brown-and-white flecked face, all big eyes and long lashes. The calf unfurled a bubble-gum pink tongue, gently but firmly taking a loving lick of my knuckles like a tiny toddler going back for more after its first taste of ice cream. My insides melted, clearing space for unprecedented levels of joy that welled up. I stood in stunned silence, my mouth agape in silent awe, bewildered that such a tender gesture exists.

For months leading up to the trip, I had catastrophized about all the things that could go wrong, assuming that whatever surprises sprung would be calamitous. But I had failed to plan for the chance that a visceral reaction to a physical experience might be one of pure, euphoric joy. It shocked my cynical system, short-circuited my anxiety, took the dark and gloomy spirals of my brain, and colored it like a Lisa Frank Trapper Keeper cover. I clutched my hand as if Beyoncé herself kissed it.

Naomi Tomky

Plan C Is Plan See How It Goes

I toured the rest of the farm and orchard in a daze and cleared out the edible section of the gift shop like I was on Supermarket Sweep. Then we hurried to Peja to maximize the pool time with which I had bribed my children all week to stay quiet in museums and behave in restaurants. But the woman checking us in delivered devastating news: the pool was broken.

On another day, this would have crushed me, but I simply smiled, nodded, and negotiated a lower rate for one night and canceled the other. I was cool, calm, unfazed; I had been through baby cow therapy. If little-miss-chaos-and-ear-infection shifting our schedule got us into the heaven where a calf’s angel tongue licked away my stress, it stood to reason that any other mucked-up plans could lead only to further delights. I explained it to my kids while promising French fries for dinner, which meant they took it remarkably well, and sent my husband to book a new hotel for tomorrow (of course, I had a backup; do I look new?).

The next day, we drove to the new hotel on the outskirts of Peja. As the gateway to the Rugova region, Peja serves as a base camp for Kosovo’s burgeoning adventure travel industry, the start of multi-day hikes and cross-border bike trips. The rocky peaks of the Accursed Mountains spike up behind the town’s skyline, mistakable for a Swiss Alpine village save for the minarets and kullas (stone tower houses). When we missed the turn for the hotel, we instead stopped to explore the waterfall cascading behind it.

Upon arrival, we hit another snag: our booking was for the following night, and the hotel had no open rooms. Old me might have cried. But now I had a new plan C: Plan Cow Tongue. I laughed. The front desk person laughed at me laughing. He mentioned a local woman had just booked the last room an hour ago, he could call her back to cancel her reservation, and they would squeeze extra mattresses into the room for the kids.

On the hotel balcony, I spread out the cheese and beer our monk friends made. I opened a package of gas station crackers and looked out at the river snaking its way down the mountain. The waterfall burbled in the background. Through the next half of our trip, no Macedonian pharmacy prescribing only dried cranberries could bust my bliss, no abandoned off-season amusement park, out-of-service train bathrooms, or a child losing their favorite souvenir could bring me down.

Don’t call me an optimist quite yet, but by the time I started planning my next trip, I alternated imagining missed flights and paralyzing Australian snakebites with visions of locking eyes with a wild koala or meeting Nemo and Dory in the Great Barrier Reef, and I began to wonder what a kangaroo’s tongue feels like.