Excitement
The countdown is entering the final days -- after months of preparation, I leave in a little over a week! Departure date is Tuesday, May 30. That morning I’ll pull out of my condo parkinglot in my yellow Miata and keep going until I reach Tierra Del Fuego. I’m giving myself six months.
The last weeks have been a blur of errands, preparations, and purchases. Although this trip has been actively in the works since February, I still have a yellowpad to-do list that comes to 33 items, ranging from little things like “Buy voltage adaptors for Peru, Chile, and Argentina,” to little things like “Start a YouTube vlog.” (Neither of those is checked off yet.) Every morning I wake up and am out the door in a highly scheduled panic, and when I have a moment at home, I worry that I should be busy ticking more things off somewhere.
I’m not organizing my list correctly, either. Yesterday I spent four hours at the big REI store downtown, stocking up on essentials like a new backpack, air mattress, water filter, camping cookware, etc. The night before, I gave my new tent and sleeping bag a test run, spending the night at local Millersylvania State Park. See the problem?
So am I excited? If you’re tuning into my blog at this point, you’re probably hoping to vicariously share an overflow of Traveller eagerness. After all, that’s why people read travel blogs, right? But the truth is -- and this is probably typical -- I’m so busy that the excitement comes out only in stolen moments. The other day I had breakfast at my favorite local spot in Ballard, The Dish, and alongside the eggs, bacon, coffee and deep breaths I thumbed through my Lonely Planet Guide to Mexico. Copper Canyon...Old Mazatlan...San Miguel de Allende. Got a glimmer. Then it was off to buy a jack and a steering wheel club, reorganize my insurance, buy new bedsheets for my subletters...
Fear
The busy days tumble black into busy dreams, and at 3:00 am I wake from barely replenished exhaustion to stare at the four corners of my ceiling in horror. “Why am I doing this again?” is the echo of my whisper.
It’s a big life change from working the steady job. And then, of course, a trip through Mexico, Central and South America is ripe ground for every kind of fear -- not just my own, either. I had dinner with a well-intentioned friend who’s a veteran world traveller, hoping to pick his brain, but all he did for three hours was try to talk me out of my insane trip. The man actually spread a World Atlas out on his rug and volunteered, unasked, to help me pick a better destination. It was hard to remain polite, harder to keep his words from coming back to my ears at 3:00 am.
The 3:00 am voices never lie. It’s perfectly true that I’m unprepared. Oh, I’ve been trying as hard as I can to tick all the boxes before I leave. But that doesn’t change the fact that I’m setting out in a Miata to vlog a road trip to Tierra Del Fuego and: I don’t speak Spanish / I’m not handy with car repair / I have no experience making YouTube videos. Those are all things I’ll have to learn on the road, bridges I’ll have to cross when I get to them -- if I can. It’s very possible I can’t.
Let's put it this way. It would be easy to simply hop a plane and book a package tour through Patagonia and Buenos Aires for a month or two. It would be safer, cheaper, more normal, probably even more fun. Do other Pan-American “overlanders” face this same dangled alternative, even a week before they go? At this point one hasn’t left YET. As of this moment one can still save, along with a lot of money, one’s sanity.
But the problem is, I have no interest in such a trip.
So why AM I doing this? There are so many reasons that they boil down to one: adventure. Say that word and there is no why. And it wouldn’t be an adventure without fear.
That’s why it’s exciting.
No comments:
Post a Comment