To Istanbul, With Style -- And Dog Food

I don't know why it is, but when I travel, I picture myself as a fashionable person. If you remember those old movies from the forties and fifties where the traveling ladies are always wearing high heels, dressed smartly in suits, and carrying new-looking matching luggage, you'll know what I mean.

I honestly can't account for this. Even when I teach, I don't get much fancier than decent skirts and quasi-ironed cotton blouses with low-heeled pumps. I don't do matching shoes and handbags, and I avoid pantyhose like the plague. A few years back, my husband and I bit the bullet and bought a couple of decent suitcases, but for most of our married life, we've traveled with nasty old hand-me-down baggage, backpacks from our China, Sudan and Guatemala trekking days, and bulging canvas sports bags with tears, patches, and broken straps. So where does this passion to look like Audrey Hepburn come from? Why in the world do I think that what I never manage to accomplish in my daily life -- sleek, effortless style -- I will somehow magically attain when I travel?

When our Eldest was just eight months old, we traveled to Japan. A few weeks before we left, we bought one of those MotherCare travel cots. The photograph on the package shows a gorgeous young mother with a cute baby balanced on one hip. Her hair is a smooth, shining pageboy; she is wearing a business suit and low heels and looks like a million bucks. The baby's clothes and face are clean and it appears to be laughing. In short, you couldn't find a mother and baby combo much more different from my firstborn and me, but when I bought that travel cot, I guarantee you, I saw myself as that mother, our Eldest as that baby. The MotherCare mother carried that travel cot like it weighed five pounds. She balanced her fully cooperative baby on her hip with effortless skill; somewhere on her person was hidden a diaper bag containing all the essentials: drinks, snacks, diapers, ointment, changing mat, wet wipes, spare pacifier, spare outfit -- the works. My baby and I were going to look the same when we traveled: I just knew it. That was one of the reasons I went for the cot in the first place.

The reality, of course, was completely different. I was a sweaty, miserable wreck all the way from Wales to Tokyo; Eldest fussed, spat up milk, and only fell asleep during the last fifteen minutes of our flight. The travel cot weighed a ton. Wrestling it through the streets of Yokohama, Eldest strapped crying and struggling to my chest, I almost dislocated my shoulder.

In fact, the reality is always different, but that still doesn't mean I learn. Instead of the efficient, seasoned, woman-of-the-world globetrotter I hope to resemble, I'm the frantic, fly-haired madwoman fumbling for her passport, dropping her boarding pass on the escalator, shrilling at her kids in the waiting room.

But on this last trip back to the Near East, I came close as I ever have to living up to my image. I had come fresh from seeing two teenagers off to university. I was frazzled and hassled, true, and as I packed, the small black backpack I intended to use as my carry-on bag became so full of over-spill -- handkerchiefs, small souvenirs, packages of tissue, books, Japanese-English dictionary -- that I ended up begging my friend Dina for a larger bag to put it all in. Still, I looked good, I felt, wearing my newest jeans, my trendiest top. I had on decent kid-approved shoes -- no mud in sight -- and carried my daughter's cast-off suitcase -- far better and roomier than my own.

I hugged and kissed my dear friend Dina as she saw Youngest Daughter and me off at the airport. My bags weighed a ton -- the carry-on seemed even heavier than when I'd first put it in the car -- but what else was new?

We didn't find the dog food until five minutes before boarding. Youngest Daughter's mobile phone (so much more trustworthy than mine in that she answers it) rang and I heard the following one-sided conversation:

"Dog food? No, of course not! Oh, wait a minute -- her bag is right here, hang on--" (Youngest Daughter opens my vast over-spill carry-on bag and rummages through it.) "--Is it in a kind of yellow bag? Oh wow, you're right, we do!" (Giggling and pinching her nose shut) "I wonder how that got there because I didn't... No. Sorrrry! So, what should we do? Ha ha, no, you can't, can you? Will they be hungry? Oh, poor things!"

Somehow, 3 kilograms of rather smelly dog food -- enough to feed Dina's two spaniels for a couple of days -- had found its way into my carry-on bag, right next to the souvenir cookies and chocolate I was taking to my colleagues. (Dina will tell you that it wasn't as much as 3 kilograms, but it sure as hell felt like it and besides, this is my blog.) How it got through baggage check when my lipstick and hand lotion didn't, I'll never know, but there you are.

On the plane, I prodded Youngest Daughter. "Can you smell it?"

She wrinkled her nose. "No. Well -- maybe."

"I can smell it." I sure could. In fact, I worried about what it might be doing to my souvenir oatmeal and ginger cookies.

The stewardesses swished back and forth, all stylish efficiency and stay-in-place hair. Stewardesses travel stylishly too -- just go to any airport and you will see. They wear neat little hats and pressed suits and panty hose and high heels. Their suitcases don't have marks and dents all over them, and the handle-thingies on theirs always pull out all the way.

"Just leave it on the plane, mom."

But how could I? If I left the bag on the plane, I knew exactly what would happen. Those trim, practical, overworked stewardesses would come along, wrinkle their pretty noses, and throw it out immediately, cans and dry chow. They wouldn't take it home to their dogs, they're stylish travelers and would never choose to heave smelly dog food around in their neat little carry-on bags. And I may travel like a slob, but I'm not wasteful -- that's the bottom line. I might not carry that dog food right down to the gates of hell, but I'm betting I'd get pretty close.

I carried my 3 kilograms of dog food straight through Atatürk International Airport and onto our next plane and off, right through customs. I breathed a sigh of relief that no trained police dogs were on duty, sniffing people's baggage for drugs: how in the world would I have explained their reaction to my carry-on bag? I took the dog food to my university and gave it to a dog-loving friend. Her dogs, I am told, very much enjoyed their first taste of British dog food.

So I still haven't attained my stylish traveler ideal, but then you can't have everything in this world. Besides, there's always the trip back next year.