Travel, the Princess, and the Pea

Posted: May 12, 08 12:54pm

As a child I never liked The Princess and the Pea. In this Hans Christian Anderson story, a young woman who insists she is a princess takes shelter overnight in a castle where a handsome prince resides. The queen decides to test her claim by placing a pea under twenty mattresses, because only a real princess would possess the delicacy to feel a pea under such padding. The next morning, the woman reports having endured a sleepless night. “Heaven knows what was in the bed. I seemed to be lying upon some hard thing, and my whole body is black and blue this morning. It is terrible!' Having thus proved herself a genuine princess, she marries the prince, the story goes, and they live happily ever after.

Not too likely, I remember thinking, as the princess is clearly a complainer, and ungrateful to boot. What was so noble about being hypersensitive, anyway? It seemed to me that Hans Christian Anderson had gotten it exactly backward: a truly gracious person does not carry on about a few lumps in the bed, especially not to her generous hosts. It also seemed to me that an inability to tolerate a bit of physical discomfort could cramp a person's style. You'd never be able to deal with the musty mattresses of summer camp, or the strange beds you might encounter on sleepovers. As I got older, other disadvantages occurred to me. A dependence on pampering would make it quite impossible to travel on a budget, for example. You'd just have to stay home, where you could be sure of a decent night's sleep.

I prided myself on my capacity for roughing it. No square meals in the vicinity? Hand me the jar of peanut butter. No extra bed? I'll unroll my sleeping bag on the floor. (Of course I could, at that point, fall asleep anywhere.) When I was backpacking around Europe after graduation this attitude became a necessity, as I tried to make $1,000 stretch for the better part of a year. I didn't mind the penny-pinching because it seemed that memorable experiences favored those who weren't insulated by bubble-wrapped luxury. The more you paid, the less you got.

That was then. Over the years, my interest in roughing it has declined as my travel budget has increased. I'm still no princess when it comes to demanding creature comforts, but I have developed a few non-negotiables (private bathroom) and was on my way to developing more (no trying to figure out public transportation when arriving at a foreign airport after an overnight flight.) Then the dollar collapsed.

Since I live on the East Coast, I've regularly taken advantage of seasonal discount flights to Europe to stretch my travel budget. I'd eat a lot of picnics and always tried to stay in charming, funky places whose lack of amenities placed them in the one-star category (though my standards there also were creeping up). But otherwise I didn't worry too much. Now most of Western Europe seems so expensive as to be off-limits unless I dial back my standards even more.

In three weeks I'm off to Greece (one of the least expensive countries in Europe) and I'm hoping it will still be fun to pinch pennies. It will, in any case, be necessary, and I'm counting on finding peanut butter in the stores.