I have a confession to make
Despite my excitement, my travel plans may lead to regrets...
I don't really love traveling. I wouldn't say I hate it exactly, but I also don't often look forward to it.
I like my life, I like my space, with my creature comforts, and I like knowing what to expect day-to-day. Honestly, if left to my own devices, I'd be quite content to never leave my house.
And, since we're being honest already, I'll also admit that I've always been a bit ashamed that I don't love traveling. I come from a family of travelers, people who travel well and, at least it's my impression, enjoy it. This goes back generations on my mother's side. I have writing from my grandfather and his brother talking about their aunt, who I was named after, instilling a love of traveling in them. And beyond love, an appreciation of it and a pride in being a traveller.
Maybe some of that is projection, me sketching in the shape of pride where there is none, where there is only pure enjoyment and, possibly, the assumption that what they enjoy, others likely enjoy too. But frankly, I don't.
There's something about living out of a suitcase that makes me feel, maybe contradictorily, claustrophobic. When I’m traveling, I often feel trapped. I feel far more free in the places I know well.
Covid, especially early covid, with the lockdowns and isolation, made it very easy for me to do what's natural to me. To avoid the things that were hard, that made me uncomfortable, but to say it was because I was being covid-conscious, not because I was leaning into the part of me that wishes I was born a few centuries earlier so I could have been an anchorite.
The other thing I'm keenly aware of is that I've very rarely taken a trip solo to a new place. In fact, almost all of my trips fall into one of three buckets:
1. Trip to visit a place I used to live.
2. Trip to visit or follow along with family.
3. Work trip where I mostly don't do anything outside of work and meals.
The one exception to this would be the other time I took a trip that I was bursting with nerdy excitement about and most people looked at me like I was a bit unstable: when I took Amtrak from Boston to Seattle to Oakland, and back home.
It was great. Amazing. Truly, my dream vacation. I stayed in my little cubby most of the time, I didn't have wifi, and I got to do something I'd long dreamed about doing. But by the ninth day on the train I was all done, so I got off the last leg in Chicago, spent the night at my sister's house, and caught a plane home the next morning.
Similarly, this trip is a little, let's say, unique. It's definitely not everyone's cup of tea and it may be asking a lot of me from a particular kind of endurance. It's possible that by the last day I will be thinking "ah hell, not another football match." Thankfully the last match is between two of my favorite teams to watch, so hopefully that won't actually happen. But it could happen. I love trains, and I got tired of them last time!
The one exception to my feelings around travel is something I have yet to do, but long fantasized about: long trips to one place. For example, spending a month, or a few months, in a new city. The idea of getting to know a new neighborhood, getting to know it deeply, finding the market, finding my favorite restaurant, finding a new park to sit and read, that appeals to me more than spending a week or two on a whirlwind journey through unknown places. I often say, a half joke, that when my beloved dog dies, I will cope by renting an apartment in Madrid and spending several months living like a local.
You know what doesn't appeal to me, generally speaking? 10 days, in 4 different hotels, carrying all my stuff along from place to place and maybe having to find a storage locker for my suitcase at times, while trying to navigate big crowds and tight time-tables.
Which is exactly what I'm about to do.
And to make matters all the more dire, I won't even have a dog to come home to every night, just an empty hotel bed. Ten days, with no dog!! The horror. At least I did splurge on a window in all my hotels. Because apparently that's not a guarantee in London.
So why am I even doing this?
I think this is where it becomes clear that maybe I do like to travel, or at least, I like the same thing that my great-great aunt and namesake liked about travel: the new experiences. It's probably why, even though I like being in my own home, I like my home to be in a city, where there are always new experiences to be had, always a hundred people I don't know around me. For all I don't care for the mechanics of traveling, I do love the chance to experience the new thing, the new place, the new cafe, the new park.
And maybe, sometimes, I also like doing the things that I don't like.