Writing About Travel
Why I'm doing this and how I learned to love travel
I’m starting this Substack for many reasons: I want to return to travel writing to hone my writing skills, I spend a lot of time preparing for trips I hope to one day do and I want to share that prep, I love helping other people with their trips, and I generally think about travel a lot so it’s a subject I feel compelled to write about. Lately I’ve found myself writing scripts where I’ve lost the ability to write a good descriptive paragraph or two and I want to fix that.
I used to write travel essays and photograph my trips for a small news site based out of Colorado called Summit County Voice. My hope then was to use that experience as a launch pad into my travel career. That was 12 years ago and I never got around to creating a travel career for myself largely because I pursued other things, many other things. My “career” has never been coherent. Still, writing and thinking about travel is something I enjoy when I’m not in the act of traveling. I love what it does to my brain - it expands my world and gives me confidence.
Recently I heard this idea of how to find your “calling:” look back at what you loved when you were young - 4-6 years old - and do that. The idea is at that age you are the purest you. I don’t know if I fully believe this, but it’s an interesting thought exercise, especially since at that age I wanted my parents to take me somewhere and leave me for a bit so I could explore and wander on my own. It adds up - maybe I should be pursuing travel as a career. Unless I should follow my other passion of that age: folding the car seat over me and forcing people to recognize me as a peanut butter sandwich.
I also acknowledge travel is a luxury and can be problematic. I do my best to talk about all the sides of travel.
Fortunately my body can handle cheap travel. I can sleep on a couch or floor for free. I don’t sleep well at first, but the excitement of a new place keeps me alert during the day and eventually the poor sleep catches up to me and forces me to sleep through the night. Unless I really need it, I skip taxis and Ubers. I barely even take buses because I love to walk. Still, most “cheap” travel requires a plane flight to that location and that’s usually expensive. I’ve been lucky to be able to save up a lot of money and then stupid enough to spend it all on travel.
Travel doesn’t have to be abroad. You can find connection, the sublime, and the new anywhere. I’ve found it in meeting my neighbors while walking my dog, the sudden and unexpected majesty in the mountains bordering Los Angeles, or how the seasons affect the flora of the city street I live on.
Travel made me relax my view of the world as a binary - right and wrong, good and bad. I thought everything had a right way of doing it and every other way was wrong. I had Engineer’s Syndrome where I thought every problem would have a simple mathematical answer and I really believed I could logic my way through any issue. Travel showed me people are not math problems and everyone has their own answer to the best way to live.
My first real experience with international travel was a trip to the Balkans in 2006. I had done a little before - a childhood trip where the family joined my dad while he was working abroad in Spain and a college semester abroad in the UK with a trip around Europe tagged onto the end. Both were formative trips: in Barcelona we walked from pastry shop to pastry shop to power us to see the sites and in Crete I went to an empty beach I was told was nude and I forced myself to try the local custom (I discovered the nude beach was another cove over as clothed people started showing up as I was in the water).
The Balkans trip wasn’t my idea. I’ve always been a little too susceptible to other people telling me how to live my life. One of the biggest influencers of how I live is my childhood best friend Anil. Back in the 5th grade Anil and I were the new kids to our Portland, OR elementary school - he moved from Florida and I from California. He set me up with two big pillars in my life: he turned me vegetarian when I was 12, then turned me into a traveller 14 years later.
Anil convinced me to meet him abroad. I worked as an assistant on Wall Street which paid me more than I’ll ever make again and where they wanted to train me up to make even more, I had recently gotten back together with my college girlfriend, and I felt like my life wasn’t going where I wanted it to go. Anil was in the middle of a two year long round-the-world-trip and convinced me to come to a spot he was returning to out of love for the culture. This is where I realized being a traveller could give me the tools to live the life I wanted to live.
I’ll write more on that trip soon. Hopefully these stories and travelogues help others get out there and see the world whether it’s the other side of the globe or your own block.