| The last week of August, I took Sheila and my 17-year old daughter, Sarah, on a weeklong trip to Europe. Sheila is godmother to two children, Carina, age 7, who lives in Neider Olm, Germany, and Peter, age 6, who lives outside Brussels. Its always fun to visit Europe and were fortunate that we can stay with friends. I wanted Sarah to come with us this time to practice her French. Sarah is now taking her fifth year of French, and to help her get better plus the fact that she had really never seen Paris before we threw in a four-night stay in Paris, just for fun. The trip was also a continuation of the Alsgaard family tradition of Mystery Trips. That is, Sarah didnt know where she was going until a few hours before we left. My parents had done the same with our family when we were young, and its almost as much fun waiting for the trip as it is going on the journey. Our running joke, prior to departing, was that the trip was actually going to be a tour of the Truck Stops of Utah. (Why Utah? Who knows. Maybe you had to be there.) As anyone who has ever traveled knows, a trip never goes as planned, and no journey is perfect. Flexibility becomes critical. This one was no exception. In fact, it was so ... how shall I put it? full of critical, that Sarah, on her own, wrote a column about the experience. And so I share it here. The Race Against Time By Sarah Alsgaard  Because of my summer job at a charming boutique with the name of K-Mart, I felt my vacation time slipping away. At least I had the faint hope of going on a vacation a Mystery Trip the last week of August. Id even miss the first day of school, and that made it even more exciting.
Its a family tradition to pile the group into some mode of transportation and divulge where the trip is headed only after the trip has begun. I act the complete opposite of most normal teenagers and actually trust my dad when he says were going on one of these Mystery Trips. I have faith that he wouldnt take me somewhere terrible, like, for example the truck stops of Utah. It was blindly trusting another person to not disappoint me; to not take advantage of my trust. Dad didnt fail me. We ended up going to Europe. At least I could spend what was left of my summer in Europe! But the Mystery Trip had other plans. As if this particular trip was cursed from the start, time after time, things went wrong. Heres a partial list: The out-bound plane from Dulles had mechanical problems and we were delayed 18 hours arriving in Frankfort (of course, the return planes were on time, like clockwork). We missed train connections in Germany on the way to Paris, and were four hours late arriving there. We booked ourselves on the commuter (slower) trains from Germany to Paris and back, instead of the TGV or ICE (faster) trains, and spent seven hours traveling each way. We slept in one morning in Paris and didnt have time to complete our itinerary for that day. Whats the pattern here? Time. I realized on this trip just how important time is. I believe every human on earth has an insatiable hunger for time. There will never be enough of it, ever. I realized that people even bought time, as my father did on our trip, taking expensive taxi rides in Paris instead of the Metro to save time. It was remarkable. I wonder if faith is as important to people as time is? I noted on the trip that there were similarities between the two. As I walked through the Louvre admiring the paintings depicting patrons of churches, the Holy Family and various other saints and sinners, I noticed that people have bought faith as much as theyve bought time. People never seemed to have enough faith, and they craved more. Faith. Time. Both have been purchased over and over again throughout history. Will humans ever learn to have enough faith that they were given enough time on earth? Will we ever learn that we have enough time to have enough faith? I hope I have enough time and enough faith to find out. | 
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