Total Pageviews

Saturday, April 16, 2011

Remember me...?

Most of my exciting trips have started at the end. The end of long-term relationship that hurt to stay as much as it hurt to first walk away. Resigning from a job I loved because I worked for a man I hated. The completion of the snow season which sent me in search of sunshine and far, far away from Italian ski instructors and flaming shots of butterscotch schnapps.

You have to close one door before you can fully open another. A cliché yes, but a familiar pattern in my life.

So when I recently decided to go backpacking through South America, with no great trail of destruction and unhappy endings behind me, I wondered whether I had broken the cycle. I was ready to start off on an adventure without packing the emotional baggage. Without the desire to prove I was a strong and independent female. Without looking to replace some long lasting disaster in my life with some short lived joy, or brown-eyed backpacker.

I was in a happy place. So hang on, why did I want to leave my perfect bubble and venture out in to the big bad world again?

Because travel is not the quick fix to life’s little dramas nor is it the somewhat expensive self-help therapy required to put your life back on a more wholesome, spiritual track. Travel is what I do.  And I don’t need an excuse to justify my next big trip. Sure I had some beauties in the past – but were they just a damn good, if not convenient excuse?

Wow…did I really just make that observation? That was heavy.

So anyway, here begins the next phase of the 'blonde with the backpack'. Four years on from my last entry and not much has changed. Yes I am now 28. Yes I have a mortgage. And yes, I have found my best friend in life who I am now engaged to and subsequently, has become my new travel companion too. But it doesn’t mean I have forgotten my old travel buddies either.

Bertha the backpack may be a little dusty and even a tad mouldy on the straps, but she has never once let me down and while I am still fit enough to throw her on my shoulders, I am not trading her in for a Samsonite hard-shell suitcase on swivel wheels. As fashionable as that does sound!

In fact, I hope that as long as I live I will always be plagued with the never ending dilemma of trying to haul my overstuffed pack on to my back as I travel through some of the most amazing moments of my life. That’s what makes travel so rewarding, the struggle, the lessons learned along the way, the mistakes made that hopefully haven’t cost you too much money or dignity.

But this time it’s different. This time, I am kicking it off with a fresh start and the end, I hope, is nowhere in sight. Let the journey begin!