No, actually, they’re not. On Thursday evening I’m heading off to Finland (and Estonia! Don’t forget Estonia!) for 10 days for the World Science Fiction Convention, otherwise known as Worldcon. Worldcon is held in a different place every year–last year it was in the midwest, this year, Helsinki. And for the first time in forever, I have not been planning obsessively, I don’t have a complex matrix of schedule and place and so on. And it occurred to me this morning that I’m not really sure why that is. Could be the chaos of my work life at present; could be that I’m still reeling from my daughter’s 3-month trip to Europe this spring (as I write this she’s on her way back to college and I will hear fewer daily reports on the excitement of it all); could be that I never imagined myself going to the Baltics.

For some reason I fix on places with a sort of passion related to (surprise!) reading–England was my first love (if I haven’t told you about my first short story, dictated to my mother when I was 3, in which England played a role… well, now I have). But a lot of my fixations have to do with what I was reading: I went to Greece the first time, not because of the mythology but because of Mary Stewart’s My Brother Michael and Moonspinners. I wandered all over Paris the first time I was there, looking for twelve little girls in two straight lines (Madeline) and hoping for Musketeers, or perhaps Edmond Dantès. I have not yet achieved some of my geographical ambitions–Ireland, Italy, Japan, India, South Africa–all of which have, via books I’ve read, a lock on my psyche.

For some reason the Baltic region has no such lock. I’m not sure I have a reading reference for the place. My images of Scandinavia are colored by Smilla’s Sense of Snow and Wallander, Denmark has Hans Christian Anderson to speak for it*, but Estonia? I got nothing. Add to this lack of fictive reference the fact that everyone keeps telling me “Oh, everyone speaks English!” Which is reassuring on the one hand, but a little disconcerting on the other. Why go someplace Other if it’s just like home? But of course, it won’t be. My traveling companions and I are going on a tour in Estonia of one castle and “highlights of Soviet architecture”; you get neither in the wilds of Northern California.

Here’s the thing I’ve been realizing as I wrote this: I’m going with no preconceived notions. No story to fit my surroundings to. Maybe (just maybe) I’ve been resisting planning too much for exactly that reason, because I don’t want to know too much before I get there. Other than my flight and ferry times and the hotels I’ll be in, because really, I’m too old to sleep at the train station.

Be warned: there are likely to be pictures. And stories. Just because I go somewhere without stories to back me up doesn’t mean that I won’t be coming up with some on my return.

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*it occurs to me that I imagine Sweden as sleek and modern, and Denmark as quaint and rustic. I suspect neither imagining is strictly accurate.