Home, Home Again...

It has been a week since I left the life I knew on the road. The life lived out of a backpack shoved in the corner on the floor. The life whose time was kept by a train schedule. The life slept in airport terminals and hotels, eating whatever picture on the menu looked edible. One week has passed... and it seems like I never left at all.

Coming home was an act that I willed into existence because of all the things I missed about normalcy. Walking my dog. Watching movies with my wife. Cooking dinner for friends. But now that I'm home, I've yet to do any of those things. Because we gave up our apartment while we were traveling, I'm still living out of a backpack in the corner of the room on the floor. My schedule is based on meetings to see apartments instead of train schedules. My sleeping is due to the kindness of the very best of friends. Everyone is very happy we're back and we've received a homecoming unlike anything I've ever experienced before. There have also been those few who want to know every nuance of every sense explored while we were out traveling. Those people make me smile the most. They make me relive every moment and re-see every event with the kind of clarity that comes with the intoxicating aroma of nostalgia.

I thought I would have some grand epiphany here, writing this, what could be considered my "final blog entry". I imagined some new-found wisdom that I could process and assimilate into my being and then pass onto you, Dear Reader, like a grasshopper snatched deftly from an open palm. But, alas, no. Wisdom seems to escape me. All I know is that I'm not done with the world yet. And that my query posited at the very start of this blog has, in fact, been answered.

Before I left, I had such anxiety over the current state of America and its prevailing ideologies. I felt that this experience was purely limited due to the fact that the only sphere of understanding I had was from the perspective of someone in America looking at it from within. I wondered if the rest of the world was like this; that it shared my hostility and anxiousness and trepidation and mistrust. I felt that if I could just get over there, my perspective could realign itself with the Truth. I've come to find the solution of travel to be the cure I was seeking. I know now a wider perspective than I've ever knew prior to my travels. A sense of ease that comes with knowing better... or, at the very least, knowing more. I have seen wonders of the world that have humbled me. I have only had a taste of what every place has to offer.

I used to worry about traveling in simple terms: What about the language barrier? Where would I stay? How expensive it must be to go someplace. Can I eat the food? What should I bring? What can't I live without? I realize now that travel holds with it a lot of stigmas if you've never done it before. And there is a tendency to want to bring everything with you that you think you might need, cramming your suitcase full with all the modern conveniences you can't live without. Heck, it would just be easier not to leave at all, right?

Wrong. You can get everything you need while you're out there. Toiletries, clothes, shoes, food, warmth, shelter, vices, etc. Hell, if I had known then what I knew now, I would've taken a really small backpack for the computer and a change of shoes and gone with the clothes on my back and swapped them out when I had gotten tired of wearing the same things or when the climate altered drastically from one place to the other (like I ended up doing in Athens). There are pharmacies everywhere. There are shops everywhere. All it takes is money.

Now many of you are thinking: "Well, yeah! Money! No duh! Travel is expensive!" This is true. No bones about it. But think about how much you spend a month. Go ahead and get a calculator if you need to. I'll wait. Now, imagine that instead of paying for certain things every month, you paid for the cost of living overseas instead. Money spent the same way for the same thing, just over there. Getting there can be expensive too. But imagine saving $50 from every bi-monthly paycheck for a year. Half of that will get you a round trip plane ticket to London from Portland right now (less than that for a one-way). The other half will feed you and house you for the duration of your stay if you plan it right. Imagine you're really frugal that year and save $200 a month. Now your talking train tickets to anywhere in Europe for the duration of your stay. Now you're talking the really nice hotel rather than the box in the building. Go on the off-season and you can see the all the touristy sites for a bargain with that kind of money. Rent a car and get a Heritage Pass for 20 pounds and drown yourself in all the castles and churches and ancient sites in the UK for a month. There are tons of couch surfing websites and house swapping websites and travel-made-cheap websites to accommodate you. There are Bed & Breakfasts for as low as 20-50 pounds a night in the smaller cities. Or, save a few extra pennies and call a travel agent to plan it all out for you (Hi, Charles!). A good travel agent will only charge a small fee (if at all) since they make commission off the booking rather than off the customer. That way, you can get the very best deals and stay in the very best in affordability. The trick is to plan to travel, NOT vacation. And yes, there is a difference. If you want to vacation, your standards will tend to much higher and thus more susceptible to disappointment. If you plan to travel, you're a lot more prepared to roll with the punches and, hey! Who knows? Maybe even have an adventure whose memories will last forever and make you the envy and target of resentment from all of your peers. Hooray!

If, after 4 months of traveling, I have gained any real insight on the nature of travel, it is this:

The hardest part of travel is deciding to do it.

That's it. That's the secret. It's the same secret as the one for success or the one about doing anything well, really. Once you decide that travel is what you want to do... that's all it takes. Everything else is just logistics and math. I know many of you have kids or mortgages or jobs you feel you can't get away from and I get that, I really do. But while I was traveling, I saw families with babies (plural) out there. I saw parents with small kids, backpacks all geared up, wandering the streets of Venice at one in the morning. I saw people from all ages and all classes and all lifestyles out there seeing stuff that was knocking their socks off. It's easy to feel like you'll never have the time or the money or the break from life you feel you need to truly enjoy such an undertaking. But these thoughts are simply untrue. When someone tells me that they don't think they'll ever get to go anywhere, all I think is, "You're simply not trying hard enough". I understand that it's hard to believe that getting out is a possibility for everyone, especially for You, Dear Reader. I had it that feeling too. Then I got on that first plane to Australia and, lo and behold! I was traveling.

There is no such thing as "the right time". Money is just something you spend on other things rather than doing what you want to. There is no "big break"... just living. It goes on and on until you die, so make the very fucking most of it while you can before you are physically incapable of doing anything you want to.

Go travel.

If you want to amazed, if you want to experience life beyond what you know, and you aren't afraid to get some on you... close the tab on your computer that you have pulled up to read this blog and open a new tab and start looking at travel websites and destinations and how much money it'll cost to get there. Put the date in mind on your calendar. Count your pennies. Leave your trepidations at the door. And go.

That's it.

This has been a real fun thing, this blog. I've gotten so many responses from people who said they really liked it and I am truly glad. It's a weird feeling to be typing in a room somewhere away from everyone and everything you know and not knowing if anybody is even out there in cyber-land reading it. It's good to know that some of it got through :) Thanks so much for letting me ramble on and on at you for these last four months. My wife tells me I should keep doing this but it seems a little misleading to blog about travel when I'm sitting right next door to you. So, until I figure out what I'm doing next, I'll simply say "ciao!, ta!, cheers!, adios!, adio!, adieu!, au revoir! arrivederci! sawatdi! buh-bye now!"

See you out there.


-d@n
20 April 2010