“Travel is intense living.” Rick Steves
The above Rick Steves quote is a truism that we embrace. Often when we travel, especially with student groups, people in the group remark, “Well, when we get back to reality…” This statement is usually made in the context of a significant, meaningful, enjoyable, or otherwise intense experience.
Always, we remind folks that travel is real. Actually, some of our most “real” experiences have occurred when traveling.
Routine is Not the Only Reality
In The Joys of Travel, Swick (2018) lists “break from routine,” as one of the joys of travel. He writes that in travel, you are “always learning and constantly caught off guard” (p. 34). He continues that travel makes one “vulnerable, [As you are]…leaving home and wandering sumptuously among imperfect strangers.” (p 31). In our Semester at Sea (SAS) Global Studies course, the professor Ken Cushner observed that connecting across cultures requires being comfortable with ambiguity. Hmm…Perhaps travel reveals new, co-existing “realities.”
We’ve realized that people think travel isn’t real because we mistake “everyday routine” for the essence of reality. That’s just not true. Both are real.
Swick also observes that a break from routine “is a joy that can also be a hurdle.” (p. 32). When we travel, as creatures of habit, we usually establish some routines. And, we have routines that are both particular to travel and similar to home. For instance, when traveling, Larry often awakens early and goes foraging for caffeine and checking out the environs, before Erlene arises. Back home, Larry gets up early, makes coffee, and reads newspapers to see what’s happening in the world. In both these realities, Larry is the early bird who “gets the worm.” And, Erlene is a lucky woman who gets to sleep late and prefers coffee to worms. Habitually, we try to accept and appreciate the full reality of both home and travel.
Delay & Nuisance; Sickness & Health
Swick cites another travel writer, Paul Theroux, as saying half of travel is “delay or nuisance.” In their debriefing reflections about their Japan experiences, students shared about walking for hours trying to find their B&B; ordering food that was not what they thought; and having conflict with travel partners.
In our wedding vows we pledged to travel the world, together. Also, we pledged to support one another in sickness and in health. Real life, i.e., travel includes sickness. For a few days prior to disembarking in Japan, travel got real in that way. Like many places in the world, the ship is experiencing winter illnesses. For several days, Erlene dealt with a cold. She felt really awful for a couple of days. Then, Larry got sick and ended up going to the clinic to see our wonderful Ship Doc Megan Reitz. Larry had a fever and was put in “time out” for 24 hours until the fever subsided. In travel/life, sometimes the body just needs to rest. So, we did. Sleep is universal medicine.
Really—Life is a Journey!
So, travel is not all happy-go-lucky. It includes mundane delay, aggravating nuisance, icky sickness, and more. It also includes once-in-a-lifetime adventures, serendipitous opportunities, and extraordinary experiences. So, we try to include routine reality into our travel and interweave travel reality into our home routine.
For instance, we started routinely enjoying wine years ago in part because it evokes travel for us. When we prepare a meal at home and pair it with wine from France or Spain or another country we’ve visited, we savor drinking the soil of that country. We taste the memories of our travels. When we read in the news about the happenings in New Zealand or Bolivia, we think of the people we met there who reside in our hearts. We collect art from our travels. At home, our daily routine evokes images of Peru, China, and other places we’ve traveled. All of these routinely remind us that life is a journey.
In other words, travel is REAL LIFE, ya’ll. Live it!