Desperate Travel 1.0

Long before I became a desperate über traveler, I was an ambitious young, single broadcast journalist. I spent most of my time trying to tear down sexist barriers long entrenched by the old boys club that ran news operations forty years ago.  

I desperately needed a time out from carrying the standard for all that women's lib stuff. Oh, did I forget to mention I was the ‘token’ woman reporter? Among other dubious distinctions, it meant my ‘beat’ was the Act of God stories: that would be your floods, blizzards, forest fires, mosquitoes and any other plague apparently only a woman could  cover.

The revolution could carry on without me for a little while, I decided. I was way too young to be committed to a full time job with car payments. I needed to grab some free spirit time.

After hearing so many wonderful stories from my girlfriends of their life altering experiences involving travel, I desperately wanted that life. I loved my friends' traveler’s tales as they usually involved finding love on a Greek island, making out with a Greek hunk, and drinking too much Greek restina, typically in the reverse order. I wanted in.

My employer gave me a six month leave of absence, filled my job temporarily, and even paid to keep all my furniture in storage until the day I returned to work.

My trip turned out to be an unmitigated disaster, a failure on every possible level. I returned home within a month with my tail between my legs, my self-esteem in the gutter, limping from an infection on my foot, the most banal and unglamorous of afflictions, a plantar wart! I loudly proclaimed to anyone who would listen: I will never travel again.

Well, we know how that worked out.

Travel was not a huge part of my formative family life. Most of my holidays were about duty, not destinations. Family visits always came before exploring the Amazon (as if I would ever do that, but it sounds good).

Initially, I planned my trip to Europe as a solo since everyone I knew had already done the Grand Tour. My plans were made without any input or advice from anyone other than a nice travel agent (who of course, easily convinced me to buy the more expensive air ticket, stay at a ridiculously expensive hotel in London, and well, you get the picture). I was so completely clueless, relying only on the stories of my friends and their hunks that I didn’t even think I needed a traveling companion since naturally I would meet someone on the plane as all my friends apparently had done before they hooked up with the Greeks.

Well, the sixteen-year-old kid who threw up on me all the way across the Atlantic was definitely not my soul mate.  Even before landing in the UK, my entry point, I knew I had miscalculated my timing. I should have traveled when everyone else did. I had waited too long for the unencumbered, un-tethered rite of passage which is one’s first overseas trip.

I more than made up for it!

But I think about this now after reading about the tragic death this week of two young, thirty-something British travel bloggers Peter Root and Mary Thompson. They were living their dream: ‘camping wild’ and blogging about cycling around the world. Their lives sadly ended on a highway in Thailand. Some desperate travel destinations are not for sissies.

Check out the link to Two on Four Wheels and read about lives well-lived. They didn’t wait.