Missing Travelling

I love travelling. The exploration, the seeing of things in real life that you’ve only seen in pictures, and the sharing of the experience, even if you do the actual travelling alone. It’s probably the thing I miss most during this whole pandemic. My friends are just a text message or phone call away. I don’t miss them the same way I miss travelling.

It’s not the going outside so much. I can handle the staying inside. I will make it out the other side of this pandemic in roughly the same shape as I went into it. What I miss about travelling is the escape from reality it provides. For a week or a fortnight or a month, you get to be full of wonder and you get to be awestruck. You can get work out of your head. You can not worry about putting the bins out. You can just be.

My travel bucket list is pretty simple. I want to set foot on every continent. I want to see Tuvalu before it disappears under water. And I want to go to places I’ve never been before. So far I have been to 6 of the 7 continents. I only have Antarctica to go. It will happen one day and the planning of that adventure will be just as exciting as the going.

But you don’t have to spend a fortune or go a long way to make travel significant. My son and I love going on road trips. We will sit with a map and plan where we want to go. The destination is just one part of the planning, though. The fun part is looking at what we can see along the way. It sounds terribly cliché, but it’s the journey that makes the destination worthwhile.

I miss those discussions with my son. We still talk about where we want to go but it doesn’t have the same sense of being able to actually go or do. I miss the excitement of discovering a place to see we didn’t know existed before, saying, “I can’t wait to go there” and actually going there.

As much as I miss the planning that goes into travel, though, I also miss the spontaneity of travel. The turning a corner and finding a beautiful garden. The entering a museum and realising there’s a new exhibit. The driving a backroad and seeing a sign to a lookout you didn’t know was there.

When this pandemic is over, and we all go back to our day to day lives, I hope that we can appreciate the ability to do those things we missed doing. Not just appreciate it the first time, though, but appreciate it every time we do it. I want to appreciate the anticipation. I want to appreciate the planning. I want to appreciate the going and the seeing and the doing. I want appreciate the getting there and I want to appreciate the getting home.

And that’s also what I miss about travel. I miss appreciating getting home.