It’s been approximately 1 year, 7 months, and 8 days since I last took a gulp of that strange spirit called travel. You may not have noticed the change, but I did. And I think I’ve earned at least my first chip.
To be fair, I have traveled to Dominican Republic multiple times since 2010, but that’s my birthplace … so I don’t count it. And I did go to Costa Rica on a missions trip, but I don’t count that because that trip wasn’t about travel, or the people or exploring culture, but instead about service.
Why the exercise in sobriety, you ask?
My favorite spot in the world is a stretch of tile flooring in an airport in the Caribbean. I’m not sure I know how to explain the why, but I want to try.
When I draw the curtains on our first day, it’s to a few cars waiting on the light in front of our hotel. Beyond is Buckingham Fountain and beyond that sprinting marathon runners. Beyond that Lake Michigan. And beyond that…well, a flat, azure nothingness. It’s the most expansive lake I’ve ever seen. The maps are wrong. The great city of Chicago’s cloud-scrapers rest their mighty shadows on the shores of an ocean.
To personify an emotion is to give it power.
Lately I’ve found myself bowing to one emotion able to discourage me from travel planning, travel dreaming, travel doing… and on that note, from bigger, more enriching things in this life. It’s spelled F-E-A-R.
Travel tugs at two conflicting parts of me. The sensible, responsible individual that fears the growing rate at which her debt grows – a remarkable amount for a 24-year-old girl (woman?) sans student loans or loans of any kind for that matter – and the person that gets that itching, can’t-take-the-monotony of the everyday, 24-year-old with no perceivable strings to hold her down. It’s the latter of course that always feels the urge to give in.
