I come by this travel thing naturally. I don't think it was so much that the travel bug bit me so much as it was congenital. It's also entirely possible that I should blame the Baby-Sitters Club and Sweet Valley High. Every few books they were going on a ski trip or on a cruise or a bunch of parents were sending their 13-year-olds off to New York or California on their own. So even though my family didn't really go anywhere, I had an idea of what was out there. My mom would talk about places she'd always wanted to go, and my dad would tell me stories about a random job he had in some other city that sounded really cool because it was somewhere else. By the time high school rolled around I was massively disappointed when I couldn't spend a year abroad in Australia, or when I couldn't go on the senior trip to Cancun that maybe three rich girls got to go on. At one point I was doing little road trips over the Midwest to visit friends, or I had a group in high school where we'd get in the car and get on the highway and see what was there whenever we felt like stopping. (Which by the way was amazing and I need to tell y'all about that.) Plus when I was eight I got it in my head that I was going to move to California and live on the beach. After I graduated, I did just that.
In my head, I was going to live in LA for a while, then spend a year in New York, then London, then Sydney, and then settle back in LA for good. I was dumb and did not know how things worked! I didn't know, for instance, how expensive New York really is or that Australia really does not want you moving there. Not that it mattered, since things didn't quite work out that way. I could go back and forth between Chicago and LA, and maybe drive down to San Diego or to Vegas, but that was all I was doing. I was limited by money and opportunity, since I thought I could only go on trips with people and I didn't have anyone for that, and while I wanted to be doing all these amazing things, it wasn't happening.
My brother's a huge reason that changed. He did crazy road trips with his friends. They once drove from Chicago to Mt. Rushmore the long way, meaning they stopped in LA for lunch one day and then drove through ghost towns and got all these amazing stories. They went to Pennsylvania with a stopover in New York, where they walked the length of Manhattan and then got back in the car. I have no idea how it happened, but one year we decided that we'd both meet in DC and spend a few days there and have sibling time. From there we decided to go to Philadelphia. And we almost stopped in New Jersey just because but we missed the exit. So the next year we hit New Jersey on a five-day road trip through New England, and we started talking about the next road trip we'd do through a section of the country. And as I began to see that it wasn't as expensive as I feared, I began actually taking the opportunities I could. I appreciate the smaller, closer trips more now, too. Just because I'm going someplace close doesn't mean that it's not fun or that it doesn't have its own charm. I can get a story out of every city or town I stay in, and that's what's important.
And oh, I'm a pusher. I look for trips I can go on with people. I try to find cheaper ways to do things so they can go. My four bags of brochures from the Adventure and Travel Show are at my mom's right now, ostensibly because I need a place to stash them before I move, but I want her to look through them. She's said a couple times that she'll never get a chance to go here or there, and while realistically none of us are going to get to go everywhere we want, I don't want her to feel stuck at all. Nick and I take her on our trips sometimes, and teach her our ways. And really, I don't want anyone to feel stuck. I hated feeling like I was trapped somewhere, and I don't like knowing that other people feel that way. So I encourage people to get out a little, even if it's a day trip a couple hours away or whatever. It's a big world out there, and everyone should see as much of it as they can.
See, pusher.
YW. :D
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