I Will Travel Again!

I Will Travel Again!
The World

When I was about sixteen years old, I got a job for a wholesale jewelry company that a friend of my father’s had ‘hooked’ up. It wasn’t hard to learn the work, and I picked it up pretty quickly. I was one of five others who prepared rough, just out of the mold, gold rings. It was basically a sanding process, and when we were done polishing the rings, they were ready for the settings of their diamonds, then out to sale by the hundreds to retailers. It was too dull and monotonous a job for a sixteen-year-old New Yorker to stay with, so my restless self quit after about six months. The biggest thing that I came away with from the short stint was that I found out just how much cheaper these rings were sold to retailers for, just a fraction of the retail prices! Needless to say, buying retail jewelry to this day is a hard thing for me to do.

For the past twelve years I have worked in the travel industry. Through the years I’ve passed through five different companies and worked from a manager for a wholesale company to an inside sales agent, to a ‘regular’ travel consultant in retail. It was stressful work, but fun times, and a perfect industry for a person like me. I was one of those people that had chosen to ‘live for the moment’, to ‘live for today’. While some of my slowly aging friends were beginning to save their money and plan for their future, I did whatever I wanted, even if it meant living paycheck to paycheck.

Throughout the early nineties, I was able to travel to a new place about once every two to three months. The trips were free for me, as they were ‘working holidays’. Others also got to travel free or very inexpensively, but of all my co-workers, I noticed that I would always take the trip where others would sometimes decline. The truth was, I loved it! More for me, I thought. I took every trip I could. San Juan, tomorrow morning flight? – I’m there! Four-day trip to Costa Rica? – I’ll do it! Cancun next week? – Count me in!

And so I traveled, with only my drinking-souvenir-buying funds to worry about. I took the most direct flights, stayed at the best hotels in the area, and took the best tours. Vendors of all kinds always ‘hooked’ me up so that I may ‘push’ their products or services to everyone when I got back home. Life was good! My friends were always jealous of me, my girlfriends always hated that I couldn’t take them along, and even though the trips were paid for, I was spending all my extra cash as pocket money. But I didn’t care because I was living the life!

Then the Internet really began taking off, travelocity, expedia etc. Then the airlines began cutting back commissions and not offering any more free flights. Things were changing. I stuck it out. So, I was now only going on my own two week vacations a year, setting them up in advance with the best wholesale discounted prices I could. It wasn’t like before, but I was still able to travel more than the average guy, and always had another trip in the works to look forward too. Life was still OK.

Then came 9/11, and that was that. Since then, the last three companies I worked for have gone out of business. I have been unemployed a total of almost two years of the last five. I was broke. My girlfriend left me, and I stopped going to the grocery store, let alone a vacation. Life sucked.

I wanted out of the travel industry, and wanted out of sales! I felt like the guy in “Office Space” who realized that he just wanted a simple life, a simple, non-stressful life and job. Problem was, realistically, these types of jobs didn’t pay much, and any jobs were hard enough to find right now!

Day after day I hung around in my pyjamas, well past noon, mindlessly surfing the net, or staring at a movie on cable, or just sleeping the days away. My bills were pilling up and my friends were wondering why I wasn’t ever calling them back anymore.

The economy seems like it’s dropping like a boulder off a cliff and hopes of finding a decent job are minimal at best. And what am I thinking about?? – Damn I wish I could travel again!

Am I nuts? Am I a thirty-something year old who is still living in his early twenties fantasies? My friends are all getting married and having kids, buying houses, planning for their retirements, and I just wish I could ride a horse through the fields of a Costa Rican valley. What’s wrong with me?

Those vacations of the past were so far away, there were so many things I would have to do before I could get there, it was too much to bear. How would I ever get myself to pay the regular high retail prices for the travel now anyways, now that I had experienced years of cheap travel?

And so, the days continued to go by and my bills and laundry kept piling up. I was no longer living, just alive.

Then while blindly surfing the net one afternoon, I came across this travel site. It was called BootsnAll.com. Backpacking? Vagabonding? Cheap travel? Adults? Hmmm…

I remembered seeing those young backpackers in France, Italy and Greece when I had gone there. I would see them when leaving my four star hotel, jumping in the cab – receipt please! – on my way to the best sightseeing tours in the region. They were always walking everywhere, carrying all their belonging on their backs, hanging out on the park benches, and eating at the local restaurants. I realized that I had always mixed them in with the local scenery, and had never paid much attention to them during my three to five day stints in these countries.

Were they actually having a good time traveling that way? How did they have all that time? Didn’t they miss out on the good living? So I began reading up on the travel logs at BootsnAll, and quickly realized that I had been doing it all wrong. What had I really learned, felt, and experienced these different places that I had traveled? How could I have hoped to know about the area in three to five days? The more I read, the more I came to see that these people were really living the life!

Life was not meant to be easy or always good. Life was tough. Life was hard. But it was the journey that I was missing out on. It was the voyage of life, the learning, and the experiencing that I was no longer being a part of. I wasn’t wrong. It was ok to ‘live for the moment’, because that was me. That’s what I did.

And so, I am now doing my laundry, looking for a job, any job, and working on getting the bills paid and a little money saved. Why? Because I have something to look forward too! My life! My journey! No, it’s not my mortgage payments, or my child’s future education that I am living for…and that’s OK. No, it’s not always fun or good, and that’s OK too. I am living for me again, living for the moment, for today. And it’s OK. It’s not a bad thing. It’s what I did best.

So, thank-you BootsnAll and thanks to the world travelers, backpackers and wondering vagabonds!

I will live again. I will travel again!

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