A few evenings ago I saw a preview for Kitchen Nightmares, starring that fiery British chef Gordon Ramsey, which is one of my guilty summer pleasures. When the announcer boomed, “Coming in August,” through my television, I leapt off the couch to grab my calendar. Before I had a chance to open it, I realized that I would be somewhere in Turkey by then. August sounds so close, but I’m already going to be three countries into my itinerary by that point.
It’s moments like these that stop me cold in my tracks: I am afraid. Not of traveling around the world, but of leaving to travel around the world. Over the months, I’ve tried to prepare myself for what these last two weeks before the trip would feel like. I imagined that I’d feel exhausted and utterly overwhelmed, racing around trying to do a million things at once. All of this is true, but despite my best efforts to ready myself, the whole experience seems to have left me reeling. I suppose there is a difference in the mental rehearsal versus the actual emotional performance. For months I was able to pacify myself by pushing those thoughts to the dark corners of my mind. “I’ll worry about it when I get there,” I told myself. But now there is here.
I am usually a heavy sleeper, nodding off in minutes and weighed down by delicious rest. Now I spend nearly an hour tossing and turning before finally drifting off, only to wake an hour later when I hear the neighbor’s cat scuttle through the backyard. I am wracked with nightmares, most of which revolve around being woefully unprepared for the trip ahead. Last night I dreamt that I forgot our passports at home; the night before I dreamt that I simply ran out of time. I awake from these dreams heart pounding and beset by panic. The feeling is so intense that it takes me full minutes to shake off the idea that those things haven’t really happened.
The nature of my dreams stem from knowing how I operate in these situations: when I am tired and overwrought I am likely to get mired down in minutiae, forgetting the important details. This leads to second guessing myself: if I’ve forgotten something as fundamental as the passports, then what else have I forgotten? The Absent-Minded Professor act is foreign to me. I am also a planner who is accustomed to finishing tasks well in advance, something that is nearly impossible to do when tackling a goal of this magnitude. In other words, I am out of my comfort zone.
I am reading Anthony Doerr’s Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World. While it’s essentially a memoir of his family’s year of living in Rome, there’s a great deal of his emotional world that I can relate to. He is a man who is always out of his comfort zone, be it navigating language barriers at his local grocery or trying to figure out how to be a father to six-month-old twins in a new city. He says, “We need habit to get through the day, to get to work, to feed our children.” I realize that, as much as I enjoy change, I, like most people, am also a creature of habit. In fact, when I talk to people about this trip, one of the comments I hear most frequently is, “It would be fun to travel for eight months, but I’m not sure what I’d do without my routine.” I’d be lying if I said the thought of not having one for eight months doesn’t freak me out a little.
But here’s the other side of routine that Doerr discusses: while we need structure and order, we can become so complacent in our everyday lives that we forget to see things afresh. This fear I am grappling with comes, I think, from being shaken from my patterns. In this sense, the trip has already started for me: there is nothing normal or routine about my life anymore. But if I can push through this fear, the lack of routine will soon become familiar. Doeer encourages us to,
Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience - buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello - become new all over again.
This is the flip side to my fear and one of the things I enjoy most about travel. It’s a chance for the pedestrian to transform into a novel experience. Getting out of our routines is vital to our growth as humans and reaching our next stage of development. If we’re not a little uncomfortable, then we’re probably not pushing ourselves enough. So if these next two weeks don’t kill me, they’ll make me stronger.
I have a confession to make: yesterday, we spent $77.21 on six pairs of socks. The most expensive pair? $17.05 (on sale). I can safely say this is the most I have ever spent on socks in my entire life. If you think this is absurd, it is. But these are no normal socks: these are merino wool socks. And if you think wearing wool socks in a warm tropical climate sounds perfectly awful, I share the same thought. However, in the upside-down world of RTW travel, nothing is as it seems. Our research tells us that wool is the best fiber for regulating heat; it keeps you cool in the summer and warm in the winter. Wool does an excellent job of wicking away moisture, and keeps nasty odors at bay.
