Traveling

The other night, after I got home and settled in for the evening, I was reading a book and was struck by the following quote:

“Still, despite all this, traveling is the great true love of my life. I have always felt, ever since I was sixteen years old and first went to Russia with my saved-up babysitting money, that to travel is worth any cost or sacrifice. I am loyal and constant in my love for travel, as I have not always been loyal and constant in my other loves. I feel about travel the way a happy new mother feels about her impossible, colicky, restless newborn baby—I just don’t care what it puts me through. Because I adore it. Because it’s mine. Because it looks exactly like me. It can barf all over me if it wants to—I just don’t care.”

The book is called Eat Pray Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia by Elizabeth Gilbert—awesome read, and I agree with the quote above wholeheartedly. While I was a student at Simpson I had the opportunity to travel to several different countries around the world, and what she says about being barfed on by traveling, in my experience, is completely true…

I remember, for example, getting to our hotel in Florence and trying to check in. The manager told us that they no longer had a room for us, but they had booked us a new one “right down the street” (which was basically across town). Or, flying into Rome late and spending wayyyyy too much on a cab (because the subway was closed) to stay in a creepy bed-bug infested hostel--so gross; riding with a cab driver in Thailand who didn’t know where he was taking us and we couldn’t express where we wanted to go, so he decided to kick us out of his cab in the middle of nowhere; not knowing about the 10 euro port tax to get into Turkey from Greece—our boat had already pulled away from port and they wouldn’t let us through, and no one had any money to speak of--we had to essentially smuggle a member of our group through to get to an ATM to get enough money out for everyone. And of course, there was the time in Venice when we were locked out of our hostel in the cold pouring down rain. Traveling can barf all over you, but the “Omigosh-this-is-so-amazing” moments totally made up for it…

Like the time I saw the Pope and the Sistine Chapel on the same day while staying in Rome; watching dolphins while on a boat tour in Istanbul, Turkey. Or, for you Harry Potter fans, seeing Platform 9 ¾ (yes, it actually exists!) at Kings Cross Station in London. I lit a candle in Notre Dame, prayed at the Blue Mosque; I watched a Shakespeare play in a park and ice skated in front of the British Museum in London; I rode elephants and played with children at an AIDS orphanage in Thailand, swam in the bays and went dancing in Vietnam, and sipped hot cider in the mist on the fairy tale streets of Prague. I hung out at the top of the Eifel Tower, saw the real Moulin Rouge and the only white McDonalds arches in the world while in Paris. And, I cannot leave out good old Dorothy Spence. A seventy-ish year old woman who picked me and my two friends up at a train stop on our way to St. Andrews Scotland—she let us all pile in to her little green Volkswagen Golf and dropped us right at our hotel (she was great, but I don’t usually think riding with strangers is the best idea!).

I've had blisters, bruises, food poisoning, bug bites, sunburns and the like; I've missed planes, trains, and busses; I've hated the food, been freezing cold, lost and miserable--but it doesn't really bother me. In fact, I think it becomes part of the adventure. Traveling, all I have to say to you is: vomit on, I'll love you anyway.