this is your brain on travel
In honor of my 40th birthday I thought I’d reflect on some of the high lights in my adventures around the world.
I always feel the most alive when embarking on a new adventure. Into the unknown.
When I was younger it all felt more mysterious and dangerous. Trip advisor and instagram changed that. Now, everyone has pictures of everything and the unbeaten path is clearly marked with several reviews.
Then Covid disrupted more than just travel. In some cases, it decimated it. (Along with life and spirit and business. Some figuratively, some, sadly, literally.) While humanity was hurting so collectively, I wasn’t thinking about adventures. It was hard to dream about anything really.
Four years later, though, the world has begun to heal and I have a ticket booked to a faraway land. I am remembering how much I love this feeling. It’s not so much the great unknown, I am going back to a place I have been, or more appropriately, a place that I have been haunted by, New Zealand. I went when I was 25 with very little responsibility (ok no responsibility, zero responsibility, like, none) and a friend with matching responsibility levels. We both had a few thousand dollars to our names and we both agreed that a month long backpacking/road trip around New Zealand would be the perfect way to spend it.
We were right.
I am still wondering how you go about getting time, money, and responsibility in line.
When I had the time I didn’t have the money. Now I have the money, I don’t have the time.
It’s easier to travel on a dime than on no time. I also think you have more fun. For example, in planning a trip to Maui the number one reviewed accommodation was a lowly humble hostel. Everyone who traveled there was pleased with it and said they had a wonderful stay, met lovely people and would definitely recommend it, 5 stars all around.
The Ritz Carlton, on the other hand, had the most mixed bag of reviews with a bunch of spoiled travelers accustomed to the best of everything complaining that the ice cubes weren’t the right shape or that the pool towels were not fluffy enough.
My point is, the more money you have the more money you allow yourself to spend on a trip and it no longer becomes about the value of the experience it become the value of how much you spent on the experience. It’s not how you spent your time, it’s how you spent your money. These are two very different perspectives.
I have always preferred to put my emphasis on the first, and I think that’s why I am thinking it might be interesting to take an inventory on how I spent my most precious irreplaceable commodity in my past 40 years: my time. So here goes.
The first international trip I ever took was to Australia.
Go big or go home I guess.
Before I got my passport, the only places I had been were: Disney when I was 4, the Jersey shore, Myrtle beach (when my brother moved there) and the tri state area to visit family.
Then my sister studied abroad half way around the world and my mom and I decided it would be a great idea to visit.
We were right.
My first international trip was on one of the longest flights to a place so far away if we went any further we’d start to come back home again.
I was 16. (I still apologize to my mom about how I acted when I was 16. Naturally, I knew everything.)
Fun fact, I actually stayed in my terrible high school to go on this trip. It was my junior year. I loved my friends but I hated that school. It was somehow over priced and under funded at the same time.
I had the option to attend a good public school and planned to switch. Our Australia adventure had been booked that summer around the same time I had begun the process of enrolling in a new school. I remember leaving the administrator office and thanking them, I may have even been shaking hands with someone when I casually threw out this small detail that I would be missing about two weeks of school in September to go to Australia.
Everyone stopped and looked at me like they were waiting for me to tel them I was joking. I looked at them and they looked at me and they just point blank stated that it’s not possible to miss that much school and pass junior year.
So off to my shitty catholic school I went, because I was going on this trip.
I did eventually graduate from that shitty high school. It would close a number of years later. It really was terrible.
You know what wasn’t terrible, getting the chance to see the other side of the world when you are 16. It set me on a trajectory of not just travel but a mindset that no matter what I did with my life, I would make sure that I had the freedom to go where I wanted to go. Literally and figuratively.
It’s not what made me want to be a writer, I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was six. It is what inspired me to be a travel writer. Then in Italy I met wine and I wanted to be a travel wine writer. That all led me to eventually buy a restaurant and that made it so I could get to where I wanted to go. But owning a restaurant doesn’t necessarily scream freedom, and 12 years later I know that to be painfully true, however, I still made it work.
All because of Australia.
