Core Value Honesty: I wrote this down when travel was starting to pick up again, and I honestly hope that everyone is doing the right thing and monitoring health alerts Re: the Delta Strain of COVID-19 and avoiding travel if you are able to.

DISCLAIMER:: If you are taking the initiative to jump into traveling after the pandemic, make sure to be respectful and follow all precautions and guidelines that are meant to keep you and the community you are going to safe and healthy.

You open your preferred browser, navigate to the cheapest or preferred airline, select your departure, the dates, and your destination. The motions of all the check marks and acknowledgements and then you enter your payment information. Hit “Confirm” and your flight confirmation now should encompass your happiest thoughts, every move financially and emotionally until you take off and land.

Or at least that is how it is supposed to go. 

My previous international experiences were so welcomed. My first out of the country experience was to Cairo, Egypt around a year or so after their revolution. It remains one of my favorite places I’ve been to. I then traveled to Turkey, Ecuador and the Galapagos. Although traveling internationally then took a back seat to life after college. However, after my first two years of teaching, I booked a trip to London, Paris, and Barcelona. And that was the last out of the country trip I took, until now.

When H and I truly explored the possibility of really being together, the circumstances were a bit odd. He was at graduate school, I was working in a high school, and yet we were in two different places in the US. Him in the northeast, me, in Memphis, TN. Not only was distance a part of our relationship from the beginning in 2019, his future career meant that he was going to move around the world, and I truly had to ask myself that if I was going to be serious with him, then I would need to be serious about his future, and that included leaving life as I had known it behind. I have two pets, a dog and cat with a Garfield/Odie relationship, a home that I had purchased and turned into my own, and latin dancing consumed my free time, and finally feeling settled. I didn’t know at the time that H was the missing piece, but yet, if put into place, then life would be turned upside down and some of the puzzle pieces suddenly becoming less and less fitting. One November night in DC, I told him that I would like to see the seniors at my school graduate, which meant that it would at least be another year before I could join him, because then he was very unsure of when and where he would end up. Then 2020 happened.

I don’t need to put what happened in 2020, as we have lived through it and are continuing to live through it each day for the foreseeable future. Although a year of tremendous loss and uncertainty, he was able to join me in Memphis, and work on school from there. I was able to finish out that year, and then it become clear that when he finished grad school, we would need to really talk about the future. But that future seemed so far away. 

I say all of this because in all the places I have been to, my trips were not ever longer than two weeks. Let alone two years. 

How momentous would the decision be for you to travel to your top destination for an extended amount of time? Does this trip you booked signify or celebrate a goal, a need to get away, or to start over? If it meant leaving behind every comfort you have lived with, every assurance knowing you could be close to loved ones or convenience, would you still love to see the confirmation? 

Being extremely vulnerable here: If you had asked me this previously, I would be silly and say I’d love to eat, pray, and love it in Greece or Italy. However I am not sure I’d have a real reason to leave. While it’s been discussed in my family (jokingly, maybe) about obtaining our Italian citizenship, I had never really given a thought to staying abroad for more than a month at absolute most.

Without going into a ton of really boring details on how I got here, H was the missing piece, and I will say that in my view, our “trip” was booked for somewhere so unknown (Not really really because I represented this country in my last Model UN conference in the Galapagos, but really because there was very little info on it so I kinda did my own thing…I digress…) but I welcomed this in a really unknown way to me. Was I nervous? AS ALL GET OUT. Did I celebrate this next fast approaching phase of my life? Sometimes. Sometimes in my mind for a moment before it flipped to worry and fear if I could really go through with it and him. Those feelings fluctuated on and off for at least five months. There are times that the celebration is a face for loved ones that is honestly exhausting to put on, although I am sure it is and was all a part of the process.

Leaving behind job that I held for four years, leaving a hobby I loved behind, moving from my home, uprooting my pets, saying goodbye to the comforts of being within 8ish hours of family, goodbye to friends, Target, my secret not so secret love for fast food (until Arby’s got rid of jalapeño poppers, WTH SERIOUSLY), is and was daunting, exhausting, and at times really lonely and sad for me. 

This is a process, and yet an enormous privilege.

And yet the entire time, I was sure of one thing: I was going to love it there. I was going to wake up in this place and love every amazing thing and grow to love every less amazing thing as time goes on, and yet it will be over before I know it. Already I know that I will undoubtedly miss this place so much, but I asked myself if that feeling could even be real when I had zero language skills, I hadn’t packed, took off, or landed yet. 

And then I was reminded: when I think of what makes me think of all the places I’ve been and what stands out, for me it’s the summers I spent in Northern Wisconsin. Spending hours in the lake, riding my bike to the an ice cream shop, seeing the stars so clearly, or smelling the air filled with pine. I know I’ll get back to that place, and I’ll go through the motions of booking that trip again. 

For you, maybe it’s off the beaten path you think about, and it reminds you of a simpler time, family, friends. Maybe it’s food or a leaf or shell you found on the ground.

Whatever it is and through it all, I hope you and I continue to book, and find it. 

PS: We all made it. And I wake up every day thankful that I am here to be in this lovely country. I hope you travel with me as I figure this out.

With all my love from,