Oslo Airport - Epilogue
Listen to: “You’re Not An Airplane” - Guided By Voices
The final map of the trip can be found here
it contains a few annotations from various places mentioned in this blog and is overall worth checking out if only to understand that the US is a very large place and this was a very long trip
After two and a half weeks, New York started to settle. When you’re traveling, it’s never the rapid-fire, place-to-place travel that gives you whiplash, it’s going from in motion to out of motion. It’s a rapid deceleration, a sudden stop. By two weeks in, I was ready to move again, and by the time I was leaving for Norway, boarding a plane felt like coming back home.
It’s hard to say that my reflections on the trip are complete. I still feel close to it, hopping from place to place is part of my mindset. And the version of America I saw on back-roads and byways certainly feels more real to me than that of a place bypassed by huge interstates, static, full of chain restaurants and gas stations. There was a kindness to all of it, a kindness made more stark since arriving in the often bitter, always uncomfortably-direct, self-proclaimed greatest city in the US.
In the end, sitting in the Oslo airport, clear of America for at least seven months, I keep thinking about the man in Pampa who told me everyone wants to run away. This is true, but not just of small towns in the prairie or rust belt cities that the rest of the country forgot. It’s true of New York, and my friends there who want to move to Seattle. It’s true of me, leaving Oakland and San Francisco to travel the world. No place is perfect. We find shades of perfect in our interactions with others, pieces of a larger ideal for where we want to end up, unearthed through constant effort, finding the right friends, the right places, the right feeling for our lives.
I know I could be happy in Tulsa, or Columbia, Chicago, New York or Pittsburgh. I’ve been happy in those places before. But if happiness is a product of effort, bringing forth that effort can often be a product of a place. If it’s interesting, or exciting, if it feels like it somehow fits, then it’s easier to carve out a spot for yourself. To go out, find your people, make a life. And that’s how a place you pass through turns into a place you live.
Eventually, you’ll be in some far flung airport half a world away, getting ready to board a plane back to that place you just happen to rent an apartment, where your friends just happen to rent apartments nearby, where you’ll meet those friends at your favorite bar to tell them about the trip, and someone will ask where you’re going and you’ll say “home”.
This month and a half of travel still only feels like a small part of a larger whole. Having a sense of the vastness of America, of being a tiny blue dot on a massive green landscape is certainly one sense of perspective, but me and my little red travel backpack are continuing that journey even further, sans Vespa. I’ll keep this email list around for my less-frequent travel updates, but I’ll be renaming it. Haven’t thought of anything clever yet, but it’s hard to imagine anything will live up to Vesparado. If you’re just in it for my daily missives on scootering across America, there are no hard feelings if you unsubscribe. But if you’d like musings and stories from Norway, Israel, Turkey, Bulgaria, Greece, and all over Europe, maybe stay tuned and I’ll have some words for y’all.
Thanks for sticking it out. It’s been over 20,000 words, a novella of a blog, and I want to thank each and every one of you for reading.
Until next time
-Esten
