Eat, Play, Love. Do it, Buy it, Go There.

  

We don’t travel as much anymore since it has gotten so crowded and costly, contrived and complicated.  Luckily, we traveled a great deal when we were younger, when it was new and easy, cheap and simple.  We would take sabbaticals from good jobs every year, during the slow season, with empty promises to come back if they facetiously swore to rehire us.  The consultants thought they were unloading some dead weight during the winter or the State thought they could save on our salaries during the slow season.  By sprinkling in some sick and vacation time we were able to stay on our insurance and in their system, while accruing longevity for raises and retirement.  We were gaming the system.  We quickly learned that if you were good at what you do, you got to creatively call your own shots in an ostensibly inflexible system.  We were sticking it to The Man, before we became The Man.

With lots of time, but not much money or planning, we would take the first cheap Freddy Laker charter flight to who-knows-where and wing it from there.  We went to Russia when they said we couldn’t, Türkiye when they said we shouldn’t and Warsaw when they said we wouldn’t.  I met a guy in Rhodes who needed help sailing his 93-foot Ketch back to France.  No problem, I can sail.  I chased a new friend around Ireland on an old bike because I got tired of riding alone.  I spent the winter skiing with a Swiss Miss who asked me to stay and a month in France with a Brit who couldn’t wait for me to leave. Backcountry and front country, lifts and lodges, lunch spots and après bars, we skied I all.  

Off piste, we would travel by bikes and barges, freighters and freight trains, sleep in cheap hotels and hostiles, tents and parking lots, train stations and boat decks.  I fell asleep on the deck of a boat leaving peaceful Dutch Canals one night only to be waken the next morning on the ragging Norh Season by I guy with a fire hose.  I have made new friends in split-second choices between bunks or bathrooms and lost partners who mutinied for a warmer tent, a cleaner car or a pretty face.   I rode a bike to a friend’s wedding and then decided to investigate the rest of the continent and the British Isles.  Life was simple then, he world was our canvas, our courage was the paint, and our naiveté was the brush. 

 

Food and drink were secondary back then, a nuisance necessity that got in the way or paved the road to good times.  A nickel baguette with some Brie and a dollar bottle of wine would suffice for a normal day when we weren’t drinking gallons of beer at the Oktoberfest or plucking Mediterranean Mussels of the rocks on south Crete with the Swedish half-bikini team.  Museums were also places to appreciate fine paintings and the fine-ass art aficionados.  Discos were meant for pounding, repetitive, German-industrial-monster rock, or Boz Skaggs and Boy George.  Other travelers would shed their home town reputations and cut loose, especially Aussies and Kiwis who take a mandatory year baccalaureate abroad to roam, ramble, root and rumble.  

Now we have lots of moments and money, vigor and verve, passion and patience, wonder and wander lust.  Now there are luxury cruises and First Class Flights, Presidential hotel suites and five-star restaurants, Mecedes limos and turbo rental cars, bus coaches and cruise yachts, with our sleeping gray heads resting against the windows and our mouths open in exclamation or exhaustion.  We have gone from $30 a day to $3000 a day, and found our sweet spot at $300 a day, but no matter the cost, it takes curiosity, companionship, and patience.  We go to explore, experience, eat, earn, and to give us things to do.  We go to hang out with old friends that we don’t usually hang out with because of distance or discrepancies. We travel with our spouse to celebrate or remember, fraternize or forget.  We travel alone for some space, freedom and solitude. 

 

We Uber around like our legs are broken and sit in airport lounges like our asses are an anchor.  People call us Sir and Ma’am, while we look over our shoulders for our parents, and fill our coffee and wine, from he right, without asking.   We eat six-course, Prix-Fix meals without knowing the price or the fix.  We glamp in the wild next to a guard holding a double-shot 410 and in the third world with a man with a machine guy posted in the driveway.  We total rental cars in British roundabouts when we do not ‘stay left’ or ‘have a look’. 

Who cares, American Express will take care of it, electronically intangibly, imperceptibly. It’s not even money anymore, it is electronic digits that we never see.  We never change money anymore or know the rate. The sky is the limit and there is no downside.  Risk-free, no hassle adventure is an oxymoron, but it is a thing.  Being unprepared does not make it an adventure, it makes you a fool, but being totally dialed in does not make it an expedition, it makes it a walk-in-the-park.   

So, I encourage everyone to travel while you can, before jobs and taxes, houses and spouses, kids and dogs.  Go before you can afford it or have the time, or it becomes expensive, exhausting or ennuyé.  We all have less time than we think we do so do not put it off to an uncertain future.  You only regret the things you don’t do.  Life is more about what you do than what you have.   You remember the charging Rino longer than the purring Porsche. You are what you do and the sum-total of your experiences, so make something of yourself, sooner than later, today and tomorrow and yesterday.