The Road Less Travelled

I am so old! After a birthday weekend with the perfect friends and family and a ridiculous amount of time away from writing, I finally missed it enough to clear my head for this post. Finally this blog post will be written; the one that has been a blank slate for too long and was originally intended for "publication" the first of this month.... Like seriously, it's just been sitting there haunting me, so without further delay...

On to my banterings.

I'm afraid I've been thinking (a dangerous pastime, I know), after randomly running into one of my fellow PPPlers and close friend Jesse and his family in the middle of Switzerland, about a few things. Yes, you read that correctly, I randomly ran into one of my close friends in the middle of SWITZERLAND. This isn't like we were both going to the mall, we both happened to be in the middle of Zürich, a city we'd never been to before, at the same time and same location so that we could run into each other. Those things don't happen. Call it kismet, call it fate, that phenomenon requires an entire book by itself.

So to avoid being too wordy I'll go another way:  maybe we--I use this term loosely to encapsulate all of the fellow PPPlers/Americans I've had the distinct pleasure of getting to know during this year--are an anamoly. What's so anamolic about the motly crew?

Well, simply put, we travel a lot.

I had a conversation with a friend of mine, in which he insinuated that I had seen more of Europe than he had. Now this may not be inaccurate, but how could that possibly be so? I wanted to shrug it off as a normal phenomenon, I'm sure my German counterparts in the USA have seen more than I have there too but I couldn't shake the thought, trying to answer the why.


After all, this is someone who's spent the majority of his life living in Alemania and then there's me: pushing a whole year and a few months through the twenty-two-plus-one years of my life. This is a land that borders nine different countries, with a handful of others that are only a hop, skip, and a jump away. I am sure there are valid reasons for certain things, for example, I as a North Carolinian have never had the desire to go visit Tennessee. As a matter of fact, Tennessee seems a world away and matter of fact, I'd probably laugh if someone told me they were planning a trip to Tennessee which is perhaps as foreign as some of the lands I've visited here. But here I have the desire to go everywhere, to spread my metaphorical wings and explore.

So then, what exactly flipped in my mind? What exactly does this wanderlust stem from? Did I get to Europe and just realize that everything here is better? The lands are prettier? The people are nicer? Well, not exactly, there are plenty of beautiful things in America I haven't bothered seeing that would probably require the same amount of resources as my travels here have and as for people? As an aggregate sample, America: 1, Germany: 0. Well then, what?

Necessity? Fear?

I'm not exactly a free soul in the sense that I know that for at least the next three years I'll be relatively barred from my second home in Europe. The world has gotten so much smaller, but there's still a big body of water between the continents. I'm definitely not getting younger. The days of being a free bird are counting down. Why not use this time then, to do what I probably won't get to do in the coming years, when other issues pile up so quickly that you lose sight of those original adventures you set out to have. If any of us have seen Up (if you haven't stop reading my blog and watch it. Now.) then we know that some goals never come to pass the way we intended them to, I don't want to have to rely on helium and balloons to get to where I want to go, so why not go?

I am exploiting my youth, my drive to do things without worrying about the far stretching consequences, the opportunity costs, the economics of life. That is going to be left for the 30 year old Clifford to handle. Heck, use your youth while you still have it to do the things that shape who you are as a person for the rest of your life. Or else all the stupid stuff we did as adolescents is worth it.


Since I have an affinity to Mark Twain in this blog, I'll use his words once more, "Travel is fatal to bigotry, prejudice and narrow-mindedness." Would I call myself a bigot? amurikah. Prejudice? Amurikah. Narrow-Minded? AMURIKAH.

...maybe travel is more necessary for me than I thought...

Now I am not going to say that Europeans are less worldy than us Americans (even though we did get to the moon first...), because that'd be silly, but it has been interesting to see how much more excited a group of
Amis will get about a travel plan, as compared with Europeans. We're used to the long treks, heck, I had to drive 6 hours on a regular to get from Atlanta back home to Chapel Hill during college. We're not particularly put off by spontaneity, which makes planning a much easier endeavor, and maybe that little hint of fear; the thought that, "this might be the last time I really get to do this" creeps in.


So with my youth, I want to see everything I can before the enevitable real world hits me in the face.

Granted, for some people travelling is the "real world", those people who've taken that Frostian route and dedicated a huge chunk of their life to exploring all the lands, continents, cultures out there. As they should. Find one of them, ask them if they have any regrets.

I doubt it.

Barring the financial restraints--a necessary evil, or else I'd be eating Top Ramen everyday for the rest of my life and no travel is worth that torture--I haven't felt so free to do what I have wanted to do in a long time, maybe ever before in my life and I'm forever grateful for that.

All I know is I'm happy I can read that fateful poem and say that I too, time and time again, know exactly what it feels like to take that turn.