To travel or not to travel?

As my travel weary body and my over stimulated mind head back to the comfortable cocoon of my home I feel compelled to agree with Lin Yutang who wisely said “No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.”

After a few days of switching hotels every few nights, learning the unique plumbing characteristics of each new place, unpacking and then packing up again as soon as I start to get comfortable; I begin to ponder if travel is romantic only in hindsight? I barely learn to order hot sauce in the local language and it’s time to move on. I yearn to drink tea, prepared just so, in my favorite mug. I miss my pillow. I miss the routine of my hum-drum, daily life.

The hawk-like search for decent airline fares, risking the non-arrival of your bags in a strange, unfamiliar city (God forbid it happens to be one that doesn’t have the homogenized American storefronts!), all the extra work you need to squeeze into the days before and after a trip to make up for the time on vacation, the vaccinations, the shopping, the pre-treatment of clothes with permethrin (courtesy Zika!)….There is an endless to-do list before you travel which you can safely multiply by 1000 if you are travelling with children. Is all the flurry of activity before, during and after travel worth it? It’s a global world after all and I can find excellent gelato right here in Houston if I want. And I don’t even have to order it in my pitiful attempt at Italian. I can watch the travel channel or go to one of those nifty websites that promise me a 360 degree tour of any place in the world while I am parked in my cushy chair. Why put myself through the physical drudgery and discomfort of exploring new lands?

Cesare Pavese wrote “Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off-balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things — air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky — all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.” I couldn’t agree more.

And that right there is the reason I travel, I think. To go see new places, smell unfamiliar smells, see if they are as real as they are in my dreams. To satisfy this wanderlust I feel. To feel challenged, alive and exciting. To capture moments, like gems, that will reflect back to me my vibrant self when I am old and wrinkled. Perhaps one of them will be the time when the newly wed me walked the streets of the eternal city of Rome, holding my husband’s hand, watching overgrown men make out with their girlfriends in street corners. Maybe I will remember feeling like Alice in Wonderland as I walked the narrow streets of Fez, Morocco. Somewhere a bite of well-cooked octopus will remind me of the balmy evening in Barcelona and the tang of the Spanish sea. When I read Anne Frank, perhaps I will remember the awe on the faces of my children as they walked through her house.

What I definitely won’t remember is how sore my feet felt because I walked all day or how frustrated I felt that my bag arrived late or that I couldn’t stand to eat a hotel breakfast for one more day. The lens of time will soften these jagged edges. What will stand out in vivid detail will be the sights, the smells and the experiences.

And that is the thrill that will course through my veins as I start making plans to make myself uncomfortable all over again. Traveling, after all, is about breathing borrowed air of a place far away from home; and pretending, for however short a period of time, that you are a “local”. Foreign is not a dreadful word — it is the siren call to be somewhere else and be someone else even if for a short while. So here’s wishing everyone exciting travels — the kind that leaves you speechless and then turns you into a storyteller (a la Ibn Battuta).

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