The Trouble With Traveling
/“Once the travel bug bites there is no known antidote, and I know that I shall be happily infected until the end of my life”
The trouble with traveling? It’s addictive. Once you begin, you can’t seem to stop… and there’s just no end to it. That’s why hobos move on so often. They just can’t stay in the same place for too long. There’s always more to see and do and explore. One of David’s favorite expressions when we were aboard Nine of Cups and were in port for awhile? “We know this place too well now… the shops, the shopkeepers, the roads, the shortcuts … it’s time to move on.” The next port was always beckoning.
We both traveled for business in our careers, sometimes in Europe, but mostly in the USA. Business travel requires one to work while traveling which many times gets in the way of enjoying your destination. Airports, hotels and cities, no matter how grand, are the same everywhere if you’re tied up in meetings and never get a chance to see and experience where you are.
The trouble with travel? It’s never enough.
Our sailing life and adventures taught us to relish slow travel. Visiting a place for a few days or even a week or two is fine, and while we were working full time, it was the best we could manage. But staying for a month or two and immersing yourself in a city, a culture and a new environment can be challenging, stimulating, educational and, oh so awesome, all at once. Spending the better part of a year in Tasmania, or almost five years in South America or months in the South Pacific or South Africa or Namibia… those are experiences most people can’t even contemplate and we were lucky enough to do all those things.
Though we’re off the boat now and our mode of travel has changed, our slow travel philosophy has not. It took us four months to walk the Via Francigena and at times we felt rushed. Others do it in less than three months. Of course, some folks circumnavigate the world in a year or 18 months and it took us 18 years. So far, we’ve managed to visit 49 of the 195 countries in this vast world of ours… some much less explored than others. That leaves us with 146 still waiting for us to get there.
It seems every time we search for ideas about places to see and things to do, there’s always so much more than we can possibly fit in. The more we travel, the more we see, the more we experience, the more we want. All I can say is … Where to next? That’s a trick question… Portugal’s next.
Countdown from today (March 11, 2020) - 35 days