Getting the Sparkle Back (It's Almost Travel Time)
It’s all happening, people.
My flights are purchased. My apartment has been sublet. My job has been thoroughly notified. I am T minus 27 days from stuffing my REI Co-op Vagabond Tour backpack to its bursting point, kissing my cat right on her fluffy head, plucking the resulting clump of fur from my lip gloss, and heading triumphantly out the door into the unknown.
I am so friggin’ excited.
The look of maniacal excitement against a toothpaste-splattered bathroom mirror.
My first stop will be Chicago where I’ll spend some quality time with a Forever Friend. You know those people who you are always pee-your-pants-level excited to see, no matter how long it's been? Yeah, those people are pretty great. I firmly believe that wherever a Forever Friend is, that is that place you should start (and/or end) any grand adventure. Plus, I’ve never been to Chicago and I hear they have a big shiny bean there or something? I’ll investigate and report back on this shiny bean rumor.
After Chicago I’m off to the UK for a spot (commence terrible British accent), to the Hampshire countryside about 50 miles southeast of London. I’ll be staying for two weeks at a spiritual commu-, well...a community of seekers, uhh...a place to retreat from the world...It’s not a cult, you guys, I swear!
How do I explain this? I’ll be staying at a place called L’Abri (French for “the shelter”), which is sort of a Christian communal living place where people are encouraged to unplug (no cell phones of internet access) and have conversations around life’s big questions and eternal mysteries. Hell, maybe it is a cult, but whatever it is, it sounds interesting. I promise I’ll leave the moment anyone asks me to shave my head or donate all my worldly wealth to the Glorious Leader. (Jokes on them anyway, for I have no worldly wealth.)
Once I’ve figured out that whole Ultimate Meaning of Life stuff (two weeks should be a sufficient amount of time), I’m off to…(drum roll)...
Bulgaria! That’s right, the beautiful, underappreciated (it shares a border with Turkey and Greece, you guys, I feel like more people should know it exists) country that was the site of my previous grand adventure - the place where I served as a Peace Corps volunteer from April 2008 to January 2010. My goal is to stay for a month, buckle down, and finish writing a memoir I’ve been working on about the aforementioned Peace Corps experience. I’m hoping to visit the village I lived in as a volunteer, catch up with old friends and coworkers, and fill in my story with all the little details and descriptions that have escaped my brain over the past seven years.
This plan gets me through about mid November and after that things get blurry. I don’t know what I’ll do next. Volunteer in Greece? Ride a hot air balloon in Cappadocia? Stay in an ice hotel in Sweden? We’ll see where my whims and budget take me when the time comes (although budget probably rules out that ice hotel).
The freedom of having an open-ended itinerary is one of the things I’m most excited about on this trip. After three years of spending the majority of my days commuting to the same office, sitting in the same rolling chair, and looking at my life spread out before me in a pre-planned grid of color-coded blocks on an Outlook calendar, I am extremely excited by the prospect of having absolutely no idea what I’ll be doing in a few months.
So it’s funny to me when, after informing people of my plans, the most common question I get is, “Then what?” Everyone wants to know what I’ll do post-travel - if I’ll come back to Portland, if I’ll go back to the same company to work, basically if I’ll be returning to the “real” world after this temporary detour on the roadmap of life. I try to take the question as a compliment and assume that people will miss me so much they can’t bear the thought of me continuing my travels indefinitely, but secretly I think, “You’re asking about the most boring part of this whole thing!” Anyway, my answer to what I’ll do post-travel is, “I don’t know and I like it that way.” (Plug that on an Outlook calendar!)
Of course, people being people, the second most common question I’ve been getting is, “Are you scared?" To that, my answer is a firm and unequivocal, “Shit, yes.”
My fears are legion. They range from the logistical:
What if I’m the world’s worst budgeter and I run out of money in six days instead of six months?!
To the sociological:
I’m already 32 years old! Wasn’t I supposed to get all this freewheeling wanderlust stuff out of my system in my 20’s? Am I just going backwards instead of forwards on the vast moving walkway of life? Shouldn’t I be “settling down” at this point? Like, focusing on one of those career thingies everyone is always talking about, buying a house, planting a garden, finding a partner (Ha! As if I haven’t been trying), having babies (or in my case just getting larger and more exotic pets, like alpacas and maybe a beehive or two), getting on the board of something (City Council? Co-op?), or doing any other number of grownup activities that contribute to society?
To the political:
Is this the worst time ever to be leaving America? I mean, things are kind of going to shit in a shit basket right now. Is it incredibly selfish of me to leave? Shouldn’t I stay just to attend marches every weekend and talk to my racist family members and have my senators on speed dial to push back against each fresh new hell the GOP unleashes on us?
To the irrational:
What if I never have a job again? I mean, I’m sure I’ll have some form of employment again, but what if it’s never a halfway decent job ever again? Once you step off the Career Train, does it just chug away without you, never to return? Are employers like, “Nah, you got off. There are 20 people scrambling to take your spot and 18 of them have computer programming skills.”
To the extremely irrational:
Does the Marriage Train work the same way?!! Like, if I go off gallivanting around the world, will the only two (if that) remaining eligible men in Portland be scooped up by women who had the patience and tenacity to stay in one place, vigilantly searching for a life partner under every rock (i.e. staying on Tinder for more than two days at a time before deleting the app altogether and throwing their phones into the nearest vat of molten iron)?
Am I going to come back from this crazy, harebrained trip in six months and have to spend the next forty years cold-calling seniors to sell overpriced life insurance and swiping left on middle-aged dudes with ponytails who call every woman “honey?” (That is if there even is an America to come back to once Trump completely destroys all of our democratic institutions with his breathtaking incompetence!!!!)
And honestly, those are just the fears that I could frame in a somewhat humorous way. This is in no way a comprehensive list. So, yes, I am scared. I don’t know what will happen out there or where I will end up. It will most likely be hard, but...it could also be incredible (provided I find a way to budget in that ice hotel).
And therein lies the answer to the other question I’ve been asked several times, “What made you want to go?”
It’s a fair question considering my long list of fears. Not to mention the fact that my life here the past several years has been about as good on paper as any life could be: steady, well-paying job, great apartment in a cool neighborhood, wonderful friends, all the gourmet burgers I could ever eat. But somewhere along that sheltered path, my little sparkle of “maybe something incredible will happen,” slowly burnt out, smothered by the sheer repetition and predictability of modern life. As good (or maybe just easy?) as things may be, if you can’t imagine anything beautiful or unexpected happening in your life, it might be time for a change.
I’m leaving because the longer I stayed in my secure, predictable little world, the more the hope drained out of me. It’s hard to fit any magic or spontaneity into a life where you’re staring dead-eyed at a computer screen eight hours a day then trudging home to berate yourself for not having the mental energy to produce creative work while sucking down your third glass of wine for the evening. I will face down a mountain of existential fears and insecurity to escape that mundane fate.
So, I’m going.
I don’t know all the "where’s" and "how long’s" yet. All I know is that little sparkle is back and it’s whispering, “Maybe something incredible will happen” with crazy eyes and a big derpy smile on its face. I’ll take that over a life that fits into an Outlook calendar any day.