One of the most life-changing things you can do is travel. Even if you don’t experience anything amazing while traveling, the act of opening yourself up to other worlds, cultures, habits, and customs. I think a lot of people hear “travel” and think that the only thing that counts as true traveling is leaving your country and seeing other places around the globe. But it also counts to travel around your own country, and to explore the pockets of individualism that are alive in our own backyard. There are obviously many differences in national vs international travel, but there are also a lot of similarities. Honestly, in this day in age, so many corporations are international that you really can travel anywhere and still get McDonald’s fries down the street.
Since my husband prefers to drive and I get sleepy after 2 hours at the wheel, I’ve spent countless hours staring out of the window, watching the world pass by. We’ve cruised the Pacific West Coast, driven from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, and taken planes, trains, and automobiles to travel the Great Plains. We know what rest stops to break at, which gas stations have the best coffee, and which towns have quirky, large-scale animals to take pictures with. We’ve run out of gas in the Colorado desert, earned speeding tickets in Georgia, put on snow chains during a blizzard in the Cascades, and gotten stuck under a highway during a hailstorm in North Dakota. We’ve learned how to communicate in a stressful situation, how to prepare for emergencies and how to laugh at all of the bullshit life will throw at you when you are just trying to have a good time. All of these experiences have prepared us for so many life challenges, as well as being excellent training for bigger, more complicated travel in the future
Every summer, we try to drive from Oregon to Indiana to visit family for a few weeks. I have some family that can’t travel, so after five years of living 2,000 miles away, I try to get back at least once a year to reconnect. But the other major motivation is how restorative and relaxing I find the drive— all 32 hours (each way) of it. I get time and space to think about the year I just had, and to plan for the year ahead. The endless miles of desert and flatland through the middle of our country is the perfect setting for contemplation- and for processing the sheer amount of information I’ve gotten from the trip on the way back. I’m an introvert, so I tend to find group functions and non-stop events very exhausting. However, I know that this is a limited time frame to visit people who I very possibly may never see in person again, so I push myself the whole time I am back in my hometown. The drive out to Indiana is my time to prepare emotionally, confirm plans, and get my social filters ready. The drive home is my time to process information, vent frustrations, and shed any lingering armor that I had on for the visit. When I fly, I don’t get that time and find that it takes several days after I get back home to re-adjust to our Oregon way of life.
This year will be the first year in the last five that we are not planning to drive to Indiana. Between buying a house and a car in the last year and our senior kitty needing meds twice a day, it’s just too much to also plan a 3 week absence from our new home. I’m not sure how it will feel not getting that built in reflection time this year- I am a creature of habits and I like knowing I have time set up in my life to think. But hopefully my new hobby- gardening- will provide the same level of contemplation and self-awareness as road trips. I will definitely spend a lot more than 64 hours this summer doing it!