Making a fellow traveller happy is my best travel memory!
Traveling doesn’t have to stop just because you’re back home again. Remembering and talking about trips is also a way of traveling. In your mind and in time. That’s something Arne and his friends do. Below is his story from a trip from Gothenburg to Kiel.
– We love to reminisce about our travels. Even years later, we love to talk about the lovely, interesting, different and funny moments we’ve experienced in foreign climes. Anecdotes are told with abandon during meals with friends, we laugh a lot, smile dreamily and one or the other of us has certainly said at some point, “Do you remember when…?”
– Our trip takes place all over again in our heads. Just slightly altered, with other memories, new memories. Wait a minute, do we experience new trips by telling others about them? I try to capture my memories, make them tangible, preserve them. That’s why I love taking photographs. And if you’re a photographer on board Stena Line and you’re not on deck as the ferry leaves Gothenburg, well, you’re not really a photographer: going past the imposing harbour, craggy fells and picturesque lighthouses towards the sunset – this is the stuff dreams are made of. Where memories are formed.
– The photo that was taken in March of this year on Stena Line in the direction of Kiel as the sun was setting is one such memory – and for two people who didn’t know each other at all. One was a photographer who was in the process of setting up his camera for the sunset. The other was a young Czech woman who was returning from a long trip right across Scandinavia and was now saying farewell to this wonderful area of the globe. For her, this evening was her last one before she finally returned home. It slowly got a bit cooler on deck and she began to hop from one foot to the other to keep warm. With every step, she hopped into the photographer’s way more and more. And him? He wanted to pack away his camera and go elsewhere, but then he suddenly saw what was in front of him: a memory! But for someone else! It came to him in a moment what he had to do: he would take a photo, a photo that the woman in front of him would love for a long time to come. That was her evening. Her trip. Her moment. The camera clicked. The rest is history: the photographer talked to the woman and told her he’d snapped her by chance, the picture was pretty and asked whether she wanted the image. Two days later, she got the picture – by email.
– Via Instagram and Facebook, where we’re now friends, I’ve seen the image again, captioned with the words “I am so happy!”.
– That’s one of my best memories of my trips with Stena Line: having made another person happy. I’ll always think of that moment when I’m standing on deck with my camera again and looking at the sunset, the wind in my face and the smell of the sea in my nostrils. /Arne S.
We thank Arne for this lovely Stena Story! What’s your story? We’d love to hear about them. Just write a comment below. /ylva.