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Much of my mental energy has recently been devoted to the planning of my next travel adventure – if that’s really the right word for it. Indeed, the planning part has not gone so well. This really should not surprise me by now.

My friend Eileen and I booked our flight and hostels months ago: Geneva, Milan, Marseille, and Barcelona. We began to research our destinations. We bragged to everyone about our awesome itinerary.  I emailed, texted, and Facebooked a dear friend who lives in Munich and urged him to find a way to meet up with us for a few days. He characteristically resisted making plans, much to my annoyance.

This weekend we sat down to plan the final detail: train transportation between our chosen cities. Being a seasoned France traveler, I know that the best deals are to be found at the web site of the Société Nationale des Chemins de fer Français, or the state-run train system. This is tricky, as it requires a reasonable grasp on the French language (and access to Google Translate just in case), an acceptable credit card (there seems to be no rhyme or reason to which ones get accepted and which ones don’t), and absolute confidence in what you’re doing, because the SNCF employees certainly aren’t going to help you.

I should know by now that SNCF actually stands for Seriously Not Cooperative Frenchwomen. I’ve managed to bore and irritate more than my fair share of SNCF clerks. They are masters of customer disservice. It’s not their fault. They’re French. Our beloved notion of customer service … well, it just doesn’t translate.

So it should not have surprised me one bit to find out that our desired itinerary could, for some reason, only be confirmed with paper tickets, and that these paper tickets could only be delivered to a French address.

I momentarily considered calling up an old flame who lives in Arles and asking him to be the middle man but decided that it would create far more problems than it would solve.

We looked at a few tourist-oriented web sites that were happy to sell me the same tickets on the same trains, conducting the transaction in my native tongue at three times the price. That simply would not do for my budget. It’s not that I can’t afford it. I simply refuse to pay three times what someone else is paying on the grounds that I was apparently born in the wrong country.

So we changed our itinerary. We would take a train from Geneva to Paris, then continue on to Barcelona. For some reason, although our departure location was the same as it always was, this itinerary would permit us to pick up our tickets upon arrival at the train station. Vive la bureaucratie !

We won’t get to eat risotto and tour La Scala in Milan or stroll along the Vieux Port in Marseille, and these facts make me sad. But I do get to go to Paris, and even though it will be my sixth visit, it still makes me glow with excitement. So we canceled our hostels, booked a new one, and started humming Edith Piaf songs.

I wrote on my Munich friend’s Facebook wall that Geneva > Milan > Marseille > Barcelona had become Geneva > Paris > Barcelona in the sincere hope that he will manage to arrange a rendezvous anyway.

I believe that travel holds essential life lessons for those who are paying attention, and one is that planning is overrated. Stalled trains, chance encounters, and labor strikes have made permanent changes to my itineraries and the course of my life. Things often don’t turn out the way I want them to, sometimes to my profound disappointment, and sometimes to teach me that my plans were all wrong to begin with.

The very next morning, I received a phone call from the airline that will be transporting us to Europe next month. They called to inform me that they had rescheduled our connecting flight to Geneva. We were now scheduled to arrive two hours after the departure of our non-refundable train to Paris. Unable to stomach the thought of another go-around with the SNCF web site, I bargained with the airline to take us to Paris instead.

I returned to my Munich friend’s Facebook wall to tell him that Geneva > Milan > Marseille > Barcelona had now become Paris > Barcelona. His response: “And you ask why I don’t plan ahead… :) ”

I will try to negotiate at least a partial refund on the unused train ticket, as it involves not just my money but Eileen’s. In doing so, I will bore and irritate yet another SNCF employee, and I will ultimately fail. On this I know I can plan.