March 30th, 2024
That’s it - only all-inclusive vacations from here on out.
I mutter this half in jest, but the other half...well, you could say I’m half serious. Planning a trip from scratch is such a headache. Sunwing Vacations is doing God’s work in giving us what we need without the prerequisite of an existential crisis in the face of what’s possible. Only a fool would turn away from the travel package overlords with the absurd idea that they could do it better.
I am that fool.
It seems to me that there is a difference between vacation and travel. My interest lies mostly in the latter even though my body has been at me screaming lately that I need the former.
Vacation is leisure-driven and involves stepping back from the daily grind to engage in passive rest. Travel likewise involves leaving the familiarity of one’s home, but is more active in its engagement with the destination (and often leaving one feeling like they need a vacation afterward!). Neither is better than the other, each is just a different flavour with which one steps out into the wider world.
I don’t take travel lightly. It takes up a lot of resources - time, money, environmental impact - and so I try to approach it with utmost care. To me, travel is an exercise in putting oneself aside and opening up to the diversity of the world. Not all of it is comfortable or agreeable, but through the contrast of different ways of being there is a ripe opportunity to learn about both ourselves and the world. This comes home and gets integrated back into daily life, bringing perspective that plays out over a lifetime.
I’ve been on three international trips in my life:
- Southeast Asia for three months in 2011.
- Guatemala for one month in 2017.
- Japan for one month in 2019.
Each of these was a thorough endeavour, saved up for over many years and grown from seeds of interest planted somewhere between childbirth and takeoff. Yet, and I say this knowing I am incredibly privileged with what I have been able to experience in this life, I hesitate to say I’ve travelled a lot.
Prior to 2011, my travel log looked more like a first resumé - where minimal background had to be eloquently stretched to make it look like anything at all:
- As a kid, I explored the suburban edges of a medium-sized prairie town. Books and National Geographic took me beyond the limits of my bicycle.
- As a poor university student, I lived in dorms and houses with a diverse cast of international students. With a puff from a hand-rolled tobacco and weed cigarette passed to me, we went places alongside the dulcet tones of David Attenborough as we watched Planet Earth together.
- Graduating into the mythical workforce that didn’t involve shift work, coworkers found out I was a raw-fish virgin and popped my sushi cherry on my 23rd birthday.
Hire me? Not quite.
These are my simple roots. I’m a curious person and have always wondered about the wider world yet, in many ways, I feel like I’m a late bloomer in terms of actually stepping beyond Canada’s borders.
Apparently, I missed the Europe right-of-passage - evident by the surprise people reflect when they learn that I’ve never been. Now, looking at the plethora of browser tabs open on the laptop in front of me, somewhere between them and my credit card I’m about to remedy that as pieces begin to come together after 4+ years of puzzling.
Planning a trip is a bit like childbirth - painful, arduous, and full of question marks...but it’s all part of a process to make something great. And that’s about as far as my genitalia will allow me to imagine with that analogy.
What I can compare it to is creativity. An itinerary doesn’t appear out of nowhere; it has to be conjured like a word to a blank page, a bold start in a world of so many possibilities. The paradox of choice makes it hard to begin, but without that first step we will never realize where we can end up.
How does one go from a blank page to a finished piece of work? A seed of curiosity is the start. And then with playfulness, you explore thoughts and dreams that arc to an ending. Looking back at what you’ve imagined out of nowhere, you see connections and distractions. With an edit or ten, the work is tightened up into a whole. And then, with the authority of Creator, you define an end - because otherwise ‘finished’ is an illusion in the face of the fact that more could always be done.
It’s not fun - it’s arduous. Never again...you mutter to yourself - but you don’t want to stop and let all the effort you’ve already put in go to waste. You push on, casting sidelong glances at others booking all-inclusive vacations - one decision, one package, one love.
I need to get outside to clear my head after all the browsing on the computer screen. It's snowing - heavily and unexpectedly, and it wakes me up as each icy flake hits my face. Jogging to the park, an Amazon delivery van is stuck on the main drag - hazard lights flashing and seemingly abandoned over the barrier hidden in a snowdrift. I circle back around 30 minutes later to find the Amazon delivery van has been rescued by Amazon Delivery Van #2 - now both driving in each other's shadow as a convoy. It may be post-apocalyptic conditions out here, but the promised doo-dads must reach their homes!
I return to a scribbled-up paper calendar on my desk with fresh eyes. Flights now anchor a start and end, people and places anchor every evening, and planes / trains / automobiles are logistically ironed out for days where the focus must be on getting one from one dot to the next. And between each penciled in idea, spaciousness for that which I don’t know.
Somehow, a continuous line has been drawn across space and time - and now I just have to follow it. After all the arduous effort, it has been birthed into existence (that’s right: I’m going to try again with this analogy) and the pains of the process are forgotten. Yeah...I’ll certainly do this again.
Oh: I’m going to Scotland by the way, by way of London and a return layover in Portugal on a circuitous route home. I have some distant roots in the Caledonian soil that I want to touch in with. That, and the footsteps beneath me.
I’ve been riding the rough edge of burnout in my day-to-day for a while and disconnecting for a bit is needed. Just like technology, sometimes the body needs a reboot when it’s getting a bit wonky.
More soon!
D