Hello again! This is the second installment of my new experiment. Read the previous chapter here.
A few months back, my family and I went on a day-trip to a cool history museum / amusement park in the Netherlands called Archeon. It’s cool because you can walk around various historical periods in Dutch history, with archeological reconstructions and historical reenactments. Anyway, kids love it.
We couldn’t all fit in one car, so the 2 oldest kids went with their grandparents by car, while my wife, the baby, and me took a train. It was a long ride, so we used the official app to plan the trip, which included 2 connections, one of them in Amsterdam.
We set off and everything was going perfectly. We were enjoying our time without kids (babies are easy to travel with), talking about different things, having fun. The first connection was executed perfectly by everyone involved. Then, we arrived to the second connection, at Amsterdam Centraal.
Amsterdam Centraal, despite being the main station of the main Dutch city, is not a main hub in the country, at least compared to more centric cities like Utrecht. The station is rather small and has no cafés or places to sit and chill. It’s made for efficient rides, in and out. If you want to go to the bathroom, you have to check out of the station.
We got off our train, checked the schedule on our apps, and lucky us! Our next train was leaving from the same track! We didn’t need to walk. Reassuringly, the screens confirmed that yes, the next train on this track was going where we were going.
It wasn’t until the train left, and the screens changed, that we realized, at the same time, that the train we were supposed to take was the SAME train that had brought us here… Yes, we lost the train we had been going on…
We had to wait for an hour to catch the next train. Since there are no cafés or even bathrooms, we just walked around the station (not very big). I had the cheapest ticket available, so checking out into the world was not allowed.
I have felt stupid many times in my life, but this trip is definitely in the top 5.
Which reminds me of one of the stupidest mistakes I’ve seen other people make. We once saw some random people saying goodbye to friends taking the Thalys (high-speed train from Amsterdam to Paris, with just 2 stops in between) and forgetting to get off before the train left! The look on their faces, while hopelessly knocking on the train’s windows, is one of my most treasured memories.
I think making stupid mistakes is one of the best things that can happen to anyone. Most of the time we learn invaluable lessons and most of the time without much consequence. They make good stories that we will most likely share, they keep us humble, and they hopefully remind us of the not-so-stupid mistakes we’ve made or could make.
The best part of making stupid mistakes is they are a tipping point, they change the lens through which we look at the world. That’s very important if you want to get luckier.