The other day Zoe was designing and building her own word search on Disney princesses in a brief period of her not being super-glued to her new iPad. At least I think it was princess themed as she asked for help with the spelling of Rapunzel and a few others then she shouted to me that she wanted me to spell ‘prick’.
As I was in the kitchen and she was in her playroom (told you we are proper pretend middle class) it almost sounded like she called me a prick – second thoughts maybe she did. But you try spelling that to a 9-year-old without at least chuckling to yourself, especially if like me you have a super sense of humour.
After the self-imposed doom and gloom around the school situation I launched into pressing ahead, everything will be alright mode. I acquired some maps of South America, then Central America, then Europe and then the World.
I have numerous lists of exciting issues – like will a 10hr ferry between Bari and Dubrovnik mean I will lose my body weight in sea induced sickness, which could be a good or bad thing, or if you can camp out in the caves in Sassi (alas not it appears). Sue on the other hand has started lists of the boring, but important, issues which will need resolving – new passports, what jabs we need, what meeting with the educational boards to have etc.
Told you we were poles apart (is that a traveller’s joke?) in approaches.
Whilst planning and looking at maps, folding maps away and then unfolding them repeatedly it struck me that whilst a plan is a vaguely good thing its difficult to anticipate the unknown, especially when it involves continents which I haven’t been to and Sue hasn’t even heard of.
Whilst I am the more prominent character cajoling the entire idea, I am conscious that to many it is absurd to be doing what we are. It hasn’t taken over my thought process entirely – just when I am awake – but I seem to have a range of feelings between planning the trip to the n’th degree and enjoying the beauty of the journey of not knowing what, where or when we will end up.
Depending on which map I have battled to unfold on the lounge floor, my imagination fluctuates between a multi-coloured set of scenarios from us being on deserted palm tree shaded beaches, to cramped buses with locals, climbing volcanoes, getting caught in monsoons or standing on ancient ruins as the sunsets.
It’s strange how the world has contracted in size, whilst remaining the exact same size for the past couple of million years (estimated figures, I can’t be arsed to google the facts)
All the evolution, world wars, dinosaur destroying seismic events haven’t altered that the world is just the same size it ever was. It’s just technology which has shrunk it down to unable the masses to trundle round the world in comfort, or just stay at home and view it through an ever-thinning box in the corner.
I am sure for a price you could probably get around the world in a long weekend of flight filled fun, but that’s the opposite of what I want to do.
I want us all to experience the world and alter us as people, not to have the invisible neon sign of one-upmanship tag of being able to say we have been around the world for a year.
The world is a huge immense thing – you should see the maps, they are all bloody huge – I want to get stuck in places, I want to have sandy, dirty, dusty feet, I want to have uncomfortable bus and ferry rides and sleep in random hostels which you wouldn’t look at twice normally.
When planning is completed, and we settle on a route we will have a thin sharpie line across the world drawn – but just how much will get left unexplored or how much we can expand that line to a much broader brush will always remain to be seen.
Ultimately, I don’t think you can really fail at travel. There is no official success or failure of going travelling when you stop to think about it – no one apart from us will be able to look back and deem it worthwhile or not.
We are free to make our own path across whichever chunks of the world we choose and therefore we have no right or wrong. Every experience should be judged on the merits at the time, whilst not considering the affect we are altering as a result.
Until we are in it, experiencing it I struggle to get my thoughts into a coherent sensible pattern of what the hell to do. It is daunting and as such tiring.
I recently found a quote from esteemed writer William Arthur Ward who I think sum’s this up much more nicely than my limited brain power will ever allow when he said “To love is to risk not being loved in return, to live is to risk dying, to hope is to risk despair, to try is to risk failure. But risks must be taken because the greatest hazard in life is to risk nothing. The person who risks nothing, does nothing, has nothing, is nothing”.
The Jude's Wanderlust 