The Perils Of An Addiction To Travel
Why Do Some Folks Keep Moving, and Others Like To Stay Put?
I’ve moved around so much in my life, no dust settles on me.
No, I’m not a diplomat, nor a global corporate employee, nor an international teacher. I’m just a person who caught the bug and then, through necessity, made a career from it.
My travel bug began young
My Dutch mother took my father, sister and I from England to Holland every year to stay with her parents. It was a long drive from the London suburbs to Dover port in the Austin Wolseley, with the suitcases piled up on the roof rack.
We whiled our time away, my sister and I in the back, fighting, playing i-spy, reading school books and chewing on Opal Fruits my mum bought for the journey. The most fun we had was on the 90-minute car ferry crossing to France, where we went out on deck and enjoyed the breeze and ate Mum’s packed sandwiches (the restaurants were and still are a little pricey for what you get).
The best journeys were on the overnight car ferry across a different stretch of the English Channel, on the Olau Line ferry with its cinema, and a swimming pool in the basement. We always ran to the pool the moment we arrived, and were hugely disappointed on the days we found it closed when the sea was too rough.
Disembarking at the other end, we drove through Belgium to get to my grandfather’s house in the middle of the Netherlands (in a forest-rich area known as the ‘Green Heart’). We broke down once near Breda, Belgium. I still have the photo of us all pushing the car back out of a ditch.
In the 1990s came the Channel Tunnel, uniting France and England by a short railway journey under the sea, and ferry companies reduced their services. The journey to the Netherlands got shorter, and that ferry swimming pool, with its contents sploshing around when big waves crashed outside, became no more than a delightful childhood memory.
The joys of travel…
One’s destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things, writer Henry Miller observed.
I could never look at a plane in the sky without wishing I were on it.
My mother told me stories about her days working as an air stewardess. Long stays in Africa while they waited for a plane to take them back, wearing the pillar box hat and heels that were expected of women back in those days, friendships with pilots — I wished I’d asked for more details about that while she was still alive to tell the tale.
Gazing at travel programmes, pouring over travel literature and planning foreign trips were always my passion. I left a secure well-paid job in TV to travel and work in South America in my late 20s, then half a decade later left another secure job to lead a volunteer project in Ecuador and begin carving out a career in travel.
I’ve lived in England, France, Greece, the USA, Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Cuba and now Spain. My daughter aged five has lived in a different place for every year of her life, and I really hope now to settle down. For her sake.
I say settle down, yet one of the attractions of Valencia, Spain for me was how well-connected it is within Spain and with its airport. I’ll never give up wanting to travel but I’d like my young daughter to have a bedroom that grows with her, a home she feels part of, and I’d like her to look at our home’s walls and see it tell our history, for it to contain our memories.
Some people live their lives like this, not yearning for travel.
It amazes me and scares me all at once. I know folks who left their parents to move somewhere with a partner and stayed there forever. Their kids were born and still they didn’t move. Or maybe they did but to the same town, just somewhere bigger.
They see the same people, plan holidays with them, their kids grow up together, and they make their homes comfortable and dig in. Those I know who do this are happy and love their comforts. They are happy to get some sun abroad once or twice a year, but they don’t chase after planes in the sky.
So why do some many humans feel compelled to travel if/when they can?
New Yorker writer Agnes Callard ruminated on the possibility that it’s about avoiding the long expanse of time ahead of us before death.
“Travel splits this expanse of time into the chunk that happens before the trip, and the chunk that happens after it, obscuring from view the certainty of annihilation.”
Of course, travelling is expensive, and it’s not an option for many, especially for a home-owner with bills to pay or children to clothe and feed. I avoided those things so that I could travel, yet I also missed out on a bigger career that many might aspire to.
I sometimes wish I could have wanted all that. Life would have been simpler, maybe, if I’d fallen in love young and that had been enough. To live together, create a home, build a nest, have some kids, and family all nearby. Find a job you enjoy and live your life.
People do that in the Basque Country, where we just lived for two years, my Cuban husband, child and I. For our friends there, weekends were about dinner with the parents, family gatherings and helping out.
Everyone takes care of Grandma, and three or four generations may be sitting down to Sunday lunch every week. Incomes are higher than the Spanish average, and the quality of life is notable. Free education, free healthcare, good public services, wonderful food and wine, and decent housing (if you can find it).
But we left. We didn’t have family there and felt the absence.
Now we live near my sister and family by the Mediterranean, and it’s a cosy feeling, to know they are just half an hour drive across town.
Perhaps finally, in this orange-scented city of music and culture, with its 300 days of sunshine, miles of beaches, and international feel, it’s time to retire my passport for a while.
Thank you so much for reading.
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Gracias!