Anyone who knows me can safely assume that I am a big proponent of travel. I don’t know of any other activities that can open your mind, change your perspective, inspire you, or build you up like a journey will. Each trip can be an adventure of both quiet and monumental revelations if you let it. If you are willing to see it.
I haven’t gotten the opportunity to travel much recently (I consider visiting home a very different category of traveling), the downside of the steady job. I knew that when I moved to Austin, almost three years ago, I would have to take break from traveling and start a different kind of adventure. An adventure based on growing roots, making friends and creating a world of familiarity. Some days I appreciate this adventure a lot and other days I’m insanely jealous of all the trips I read about on Facebook or hear about at work.
This past month a very last minute trip was thrown together to meet a few of my favorite people in London. At first I was apprehensive, this wasn’t really the best time for me to be making a trip. Alaskan boy was coming home, my dad was tentatively planning a visit and work was starting to pick up. But despite the possibility of my dad’s visit, he told me, Getting together with old friends is always hard. It’s always hard to drop it all and get away. There will never be a better time to wait for. He was right, of course. The time to go is when you’re willing to make the time. It will never just appear.
As a result of taking my dad’s fine advice, I had an incredible reunion with some wonderful ladies I haven’t seen for many years, I got to explore London and take in many of its fine sights, I had the best food of my life in Paris and frolicked all around its magical streets. I even made new friends! There was something in me that needed to be reminded that I knew how to get around a foreign city by myself, that I could navigate a place even though I didn’t speak the language, that the person I became when I first met these wonderful ladies and the person I am now are actually the same.
So don’t wait. Now is the time. Take a journey, explore a new place, reconnect with old friends, reconnect with old interests or passions. You think there will be a better time, that there will be more time later, but what if this is actually it?
Beautiful London
Remnants of love in Paris
Seeking Misadventure 