Herd

As I am writing this, I am still in Canada, on the final leg of a 10-day road-trip with my mother, who gifted me this package tour for my birthday this year. I have to admit that I have a bit of a condescending attitude towards group holidays and did not greet this very generous gift with due respect and enthusiasm. With the exception of day tours in Australia and Japan I did not have a group-holiday experience since I was in Jordan with my Mum and this vacation had a rather traumatising element that both of us vividly remember to this day. I got violently sick the first night in Amman, shaking with a high fever that developed while Mum was out for a digestive walk and getting dehydrated so quickly that I passed out in the bathroom when getting up in the middle of the night to...well, you know...my Mum waking up from the thump of me hitting the bathroom floor.  Not that this killer virus or whatever it was put me off group tours. Apart from the fact, that I love planning trips a lot (sometimes I think I should be a tour-operator in my next life...)it also has a lot to do with the fact that I am a very impatient person and group tours tend to come with a lot of waiting for others, typically, and also that I get easily embarrassed on behalf of others (in German, we have a very apt description for this, fremdschämen). In all fairness, both are not to bad with the present tour in Canada and I realised that it is actually quite nice for a change to outsource THINKING and just do what you are told to do. It's like being a sheep in a herd, gladly flocking after the rest of the gang whenever you are told to look somewhere, go for a pee, or hunt for food. Not the worst experience...and yet I have to say that could not imagine just travelling with groups of random strangers rather than with a handpicked set of select friends.