Travel Time
In my last post, I talked about how I don’t think of my adventurer identity as only associated with travel.
That said, I am someone who’s always loved travel, and I do think of my travels as adventures in their own right.
I’ve done a lot of traveling in my life, which is both something I have been financially and societally privileged to do and something I’ve prioritized as a use of the time and money available to me.
I’ve done a lot of different kinds of traveling in that mix. I’ve taken quick trips, and I’ve lived abroad. I’ve picked destinations last-minute based on where there was a good flight deal, and I’ve planned for months to visit bucket-list places I’ve long dreamed of. I’ve made detailed itineraries and booked everything in advance, and I’ve prepared only a general plan with no official reservations ahead of time. I’ve let others set the agenda and followed along, and I’ve been the “trip parent” making the plans. I’ve stayed in hostel rooms with unidentifiable stains on the undersides of mattresses, and luxury hotels. I’ve slept on boats, in caves, in tents, in shipping containers, even on a school bus.
I have traveled with family, friends, strangers, and—a lot—in my own solo company.
Perhaps the most rewarding thing for me about being a child-free single adult is that I’ve been largely free to make my own travel choices and plan trips where the only compromises needed have been with my bank balance and my calendar.
Throughout the last year-plus of reconfiguring how work fits into my life, I’ve been leery of using too much of that bank balance on travel (not to mention the variety of pandemic-related travel anxieties and restrictions). While I certainly do recognize that one advantage of not having a set schedule and a set number of annual leave days is that I could be, hypothetically, spending extended chunks of time in other places, I’m too concerned about the irregular finances of starting up my own independent business to feel comfortable using savings in that way.
My inner ant is keeping my inner grasshopper in check.
But my grasshopper is still in there, too, fiddling away and reminding me to seize the chances life brings, even if they don’t show up how I thought they might.
So, as of Monday, March 7, I am hitting the road in Stella, my trusty Subaru Outback, and seizing the chance to do one of those things I’ve always dreamed of doing: a cross-country road trip.
I’ve got a general route planned, and I’ve got a few friends to stay with as I go, but mostly I don’t have much in the way of concrete reservations made for this adventure. I’ve got a list of promising Airbnbs (in case you don’t know, I am REAL GOOD at finding Airbnb wins, and I share them on Instagram) in locations that are vaguely along my route, and I’ve got a nerdy travel spreadsheet of approximate drive times and destinations for each day. I’ve got my tent and sleeping bag and a car with enough room to camp in the back. I’ve got a list of some places I know I want to see as I go. But that’s it.
I’ve got a lot of feelings mixed up in this one. Even more than my usual pre-travel tangle of emotions.
Above all, I’m really excited. I’ve wanted to do a cross-country road trip for a long time, and this one is taking me through all new places that I’ve never seen. The end-point (before I turn around and drive back, that is, on a route that is as-yet entirely unplanned) is a much-anticipated reunion with my college besties in a luxurious rental house in Joshua Tree, which is our plan for celebrating the collective 40th birthdays we’ve all experienced in varying degrees of isolation during the pandemic. No partners, no kids, just the 6 of us in the desert.
I’m also anxious on a lot of fronts.
This is the first time I’ll be doing this much extended alone time since I gave up the solo life that was feeling more lonely than independent and moved in with my parents to find my way through depression and loss of faith in my career field. I’m going to miss their company and the family in-jokes we’ve developed in the last year. I’m going to miss Lila, the family dog, who I’ve gotten pretty obsessed with.
I’m going to be working as I go, and this is my first chance to test out what an independent life might look like that isn’t based in just one location where my work is. I’ve always loved the feeling of having a cozy nest of a home (I’m also REAL GOOD at feathering those nests for myself), and it still makes me sad to go to the storage unit where most all of my belongings are currently kept until the next nest is found.
I don’t know where that next nest is going to be located or when it’ll come along, and I fully expect that spending the next 3-4 weeks of my life as a nomad will bring up a lot of that uncertainty.
And, real talk: I’m planning a drive across a very large country that is taking me through a lot of places where COVID responses and political attitudes are very different from my own, and—in case you haven’t heard—there’s still a pandemic going on. This trip is mostly not about cities and sightseeing, and I’m not planning to do a whole lot of interacting with large groups of people, but I’m coming into this after 2+ years of my social muscles atrophying and my crowds and contagion worries increasing. For someone who’s still mostly not comfortable eating indoors in restaurants, how am I going to handle this trip?
I come back, again, though, to my own definition of adventure. Adventures are, by definition, not secure and safe. They are not known. They require you to take the brave path into the uncertain. To quote veteran solo lady traveler, Freya Stark in her book, Baghdad Sketches:
To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasant sensations in the world. You are surrounded by adventure. You have no idea what is in store for you, but you will, if you are wise and know the art of travel, let yourself go on the stream of the unknown and accept whatever comes in the spirit in which the gods may offer it.
Kate Wills, in her book, A Trip of One’s Own, about solo traveling as a woman, puts it this way:
The word adventure comes from the Latin meaning ‘about to happen’, which sums up the thing I love best about being away from home. The feeling that something exciting might be just around the next corner. Even if that thing is only an average Airbnb or a bout of food poisoning. The word ‘adventure’ has associations of chance and luck and the best trips feel like this too.
I find travel so rewarding in large part because it always leads me to new discoveries about myself and the world. And I’m curious to see what I’ll learn on this trip.
One thing I do know is that I’ll be doing a bunch of recording and writing as I go. Over the past several years, I’ve leaned hard into the stability and pattern of self-created rituals that can bring me a bit of peace and surety in times where those two things are hard to find. So I’d like to have some rituals for myself as I go on this adventure, and I’d like to share those.
What would you be interested in seeing/hearing as I go? A daily blog post? A photo update? Natural sound recordings from places across the country? Let me know in the comments, and I’ll see what I can do to share this trip.
Creative Prompt Coda inspired by my thoughts on travel: Think of one of the most memorable places you’ve ever been. Draw a map to it from where you are right now.
