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I have a life-long case of the travel bug. Will I ever be satisfied?
I’m that person who gets caught buying plane tickets for her next trip while waiting to catch a connection home from her last one.
I’m also that person with a limited budget, a job, and a goal to practice contentment. As I considered my desire to travel the globe, I wondered not only how to make it sustainable, but also if focusing on making it work would ever really make me happy.
I wondered if my current strain of wanderlust was blinding me to some of the wonder I was seeking. So, I started looking for another way to consistently treat my travel bug symptoms, another way to travel, another way to practice wanderlust, another way to find what I’ve been looking for.
You see, wanderlust is one of those things that is never satisfied. New places are like new clothes, one more never makes the collection complete. So I haven’t stopped traveling, I’ve just decided to travel more …at home.
I’ve had the adventure of making my home in several “touristy” places like New York City, Miami Beach, and Anchorage, Alaska — places that shout “I’m supposed to be explored!” But I’ve also lived in some quite non-touristy places, like Jundiaí, Brazil and Tallahassee, Florida, and found that those places were inviting me to explore too.
One habit I’ve adapted is taking pictures of my own city. It felt unnatural at first. And worse, I could be mistaken as a tourist — the very thing I paid to be in other situations. But Robert McKee said all characters are contradictions, and there are worse paradoxes than “local tourist.” I hope I get pegged as a traveler more often because I want to be a traveler even more than I want to be a local.
With the pictures come stories. I’ve always loved stories. Documenting my home and gathering stories makes me feel like I’m on a treasure hunt. And by gathering stories I don’t mean interviewing every bartender or interesting-looking commuter, as I used to assume the romance of story-gathering was. It can mean journaling a conversation overheard at a coffee shop, stopping to snap street art, adding my neighbors to my novel, or vowing to never forget the inspiring art lady who gave me a free painting at the farmers market. I don’t need another continent to do this.
Once I get the pictures (and the occasional free painting) from my current home city, I like framing them on the wall next to waterfalls in Iceland or hot air balloons in Myanmar. It’s a way of saying “you’re just as cool, just as formative, just as special. And I’m just as glad I got to experience you.”
Exploring at home doesn’t make my world smaller, but bigger. And that, I realize, is why I’ve loved traveling all along. Exploring requires a kind of mindset, not a kind of destination. Exploration doesn’t even need destinations. Destinations can sometimes limit what you find, which reminds me of an important part of traveling at home — getting lost.
When I lived in New York City and needed “an escape,” my favorite thing to do was let my phone die. Then I was forced to really wander. I found some of my favorite coffee shops that way. Sometimes I charged my phone in the new-found havens, sometimes I didn’t. But letting a phone die takes time, so sometimes I just made it believe I had died. I wouldn’t listen to a podcast if I was taking the tube in London for the first time, so why not take out my earbuds on my daily commute now and then? Earbuds out turned into conversations with other fellow travelers on their way to work, and other modes of story-gathering.
I love asking questions about why people live where I also live. “What brought you to New York?” is a classic with some surprisingly un-cliché answers. And I also liked, “Is it different than you expected?” “How are you and New York getting along?” One time my friend answered, “Living in New York is like being in a relationship — you’re either in an argument or you’re at peace.”
These questions led to stories of disenchantment, reconciliation, falling in and out of love with the place we called home. Breaking up or making it work.
A few years later I was replacing New York with Miami (but don’t worry, we ended things amicably and stayed open to seeing each other again in the future) and found the answers just as interesting, answers like: “It’s the rawest place I’ve ever lived.” “It feels like another country to me.” “People always told me I’d stop getting excited about seeing the ocean but it hasn’t happened.” “It’s breaking my heart.” These were more fulfilling conversations than talking about all the places I hadn’t been…because I resonated with something shared.
I used to have a major problem with jealousy when other people would tell me about their travels. But this is changing as I stop being “stuck at home,” and choose instead to travel at home.
Part of the reason I love traveling is coming back with stories. There’s something so human about telling stories. It’s a way of saying we are alive, we are making a presence on this earth and this is how. And it doesn’t need a time zone change or a visa. I love bringing stories home, and I also love when they bring me closer to home.
My traveling stories from home surprise a lot of people. Stories of why I love the place my friends are tired of. How I still get excited about the ocean. Or why I am looking for a new home.
Stories can come from locals or tourists. As a mostly-pedestrian in New York and South Beach, I found this energizing joy in engaging with tourists (interspersed with the urge to punch some of them). Some of my favorite traveling-at-home stories are from helping tourists find their way. It reminds me of when I didn’t know which train to take either. How I sometimes still get lost.
I imagined I was a link between them and their bucket lists, their high hopes. “Which way is the beach?” reminded me that we’re all just looking for a place that makes us say “wow,” a place to find peace. When I stop to help tourists I might reorient their sense of direction, but they do the same for me.
I’ll never forget a boy who was about eight years old emerging from the 34th street subway station and shouting “Look Dad it’s the Empire State Building! We’re in New YORK!” It was about 30 degrees and I was carrying about 31 pounds of Trader Joe’s, but I stopped being grumpy. Yeah, we were in New York.
I’m here.
I tend to balk at the old saying “home is where the heart is,” and not just because it’s usually displayed in a cross-stitch or Home Goods font that goes against every ounce of aesthetic in me. What if my heart is on the road, in those places I haven’t been yet? What if my heart can feel at home in a hundred places? But as much as I want to push the expectations of a concept like that, I also want to challenge the idea that adventure is “out there.” Home doesn’t have to mean standing still. Home doesn’t have to be an interim between adventures. Home can be the biggest journey you’ll ever take. And one you can always go back to. Adventure is right here.
I love it when free weekends feel like free vacations. For me, traveling at home doesn’t mean less than stamps in my passport, it means more than that. It doesn’t mean wanting less richness of life, it means wanting more.
I’m still almost always planning (or at least dreaming about) the next trip that does indeed require a plane and maybe a passport. But what I’ve realized is that being home doesn’t have to be an interlude between my travels, or a “back to reality” from wonder. Traveling and exploring can be a lifestyle, not a series of events. It can be a way of thinking. My front door itself is an invitation to wander.