The Travel Bug

I remember the day that I first realized how much I love and need to travel—the day that I caught what is so endearingly called “the travel bug”. I was standing alone at Sacramento International Airport during the fall of my freshman year of college. I had a duffel-bag slung over my shoulder and a boarding pass in my hands; the sky outside the airport looked gray through the raindrops collected on the terminal windows. Suitcase wheels clicked rhythmically across the tile floor and planes buzzed softly from the flightline, and only an occasional boarding call for an anywhere-bound plane would break the stillness. That’s when I came down with the bug, all at once.  

It wasn’t going to be a long journey. I was flying alone to San Diego to see my brother, who had just received the surprise notice that he would be deployed to Afghanistan a month earlier than we thought.

My flight was booked the night I found out, and I was on the plane the next morning.

I saw Brad, and we said goodbye the same way we always do: “see ya soon.” Then I made my way back to my university alone—by car, by bus, and by train.

It seems an unremarkable and oddly sober time to realize how much I love to travel—to catch the “travel bug”. Maybe it was a relief to be in the liminal space of transit, so that I could escape the terrifying reality of life at that moment. 

I signed up to spend a year in France that same week. This meant leaving the country as soon as I finished my first year of college, and—selfishly, I think—immediately after my brother would return from his tour of Afghanistan.

I traveled to France alone. By the time I came home, I had traveled around much of Europe, fallen in love in and with Paris, chopped off my hair into a chic little bob, and figured out exactly how my life should be lead from that point forward. I needed to tell people how much I loved them, live every day like my last, appreciate friends and family, etc., etc., etc. It was going to be easy.

I remember riding to the airport at 5am through the dark and empty streets of Paris, taking a last look at the city. To counter the feeling that a part of me would die when my plane took off in a few hours, I wrote a note on my phone. It says "this is just another day, not the start of a new life nor the end of a new one. It's just another Saturday in Paris; it's just another Sunday in California..."

But it wasn’t that easy.

Like many travelers do after a journey, I went back to all my old routines and habits shortly after returning. I had some really rough months; loved ones passed away, I faced important obligations and decisions about my life and I had to readjust to my university. I think I got scared and frustrated, and I think it in part explains my decision to leave again.

Kyrgyzstan was a massive leap of faith for me. Faith in God, I guess. When the opportunity came up to leave in a couple of months for Central Asia, I knew almost nothing about about Kyrgyzstan—except that it had recently experienced a bloody genocide and several tumultuous political revolutions. But I was recklessly ready to leave again. My family didn’t understand. I didn’t either, so I didn’t have much to tell them.

When I returned from Kyrgyzstan, I was a bit thin and sick, but I thought I had figured out a lot about life. I had made some beautiful friends, who I hated to leave behind, and I came to love that place on the earth. I also was spiritually and emotionally damaged by some of the things that I experienced there.

Anticipating a crash similar to the one that followed my time in Paris, I planned my next escape. My parents seemed a little angry when I told them I would be spending some time that summer volunteering at an orphanage in Mexico, but they didn't try hard to change my mind.

In Mexico, I got my French and Russian mixed up with my Spanish and English. I dug muddy trenches and helped flatten out the land to build more houses at the orphanage. I went to church, though I didn’t feel much, and ate street tacos with my new friends out in the city at night.  

I moved back to my university in Davis and got a job helping other students travel overseas. I sat smiling behind the desk at the Study Abroad office and told them how much travel would change their lives; I didn’t lie, but it was easier to recite the words off of a brochure than explain how travel could really change their lives.

I got the opportunity to go back to Kyrgyzstan again that summer, and I said I’d go.

On my way there, sitting at an airport in Dubai, I realized how much I had changed from the first trip across the state from Sacramento to San Diego. My backpack was worn and faded; my hair had become long again; I still loved airports and planes, but more for the comfort they brought me than for the excitement of it all.

Home from another summer in Kyrgyzstan, after stopping through Turkey and Kazakhstan, I was exhausted—and I had five weeks back in California before I left for Australia.

I had high hopes for Australia.

All this traveling had been too wonderful for words, but I was beginning to realize how damaging and unsustainable this “travel bug” could really be. In Davis, I had broken friendships and unfulfilled obligations. 

Although I was trying to get away again, I wanted this trip to be different. I wasn’t running away, or trying to prove anything, and I perhaps wasn’t being as naive about my expectations for the trip as I had been in the past. I think I just came here to think for a bit...

***

Right now, I’m sitting in a window seat in a little budget plane, looking out over the countryside of New South Wales. In a few hours I’ll be landing in Alice Springs in the Northern Territory of Australia. As I write all this, it is not a particularly significant moment, except that it has allowed me to reflect on the last few years—on how and why I've changed so much through travels and trials. 

I’ve still got the bug—I still close my eyes and listen to suitcases clicking as they roll along the tile, to the final boarding calls for missing passengers, to the hum of the flightline. But sometimes I wonder if I'm doing a good thing for myself, my family, or the world.