Six Months/Forever
It’s so near. It’s so far away it might as well be forever.
In six months from now, we’ll both say good bye to work for awhile, do the last bit of preparation, and hit the road in our 15 year old car for an adventure to top anything we’ve ever done. At least, I hope it’s an adventure. That good ol’ doubt has certainly been surfacing its head. It’s the result of of caring too much, of putting to much thought into a project, of waiting and building it up in your head. For the last couple years, this trip has been ever present in my mind and I really need it to go well – for me.
And it will go well – the jitters are to be expected. A part of the experience, it might be said.
A year ago (or was even farther back than that – as I say, this has been on my mind for a long time), I started really thinking about what kind of trip this would be. I got deep into travel Vlogs on Youtube – people who were driving through Mexico and Central America, living out of their trucks/campers on the cheap and doing the kind of slow travel that I’d always dreamed of. I immediately set down the basics: I would buy a van and pull out the insides so that we could sleep in it. Down to Panama and back seemed the perfect level of ambition, bold yet achievable. If this is what other people were doing, had done with repeated success, then I would follow the model.
It took me awhile to realize that the most popular template didn’t fit for us. We could still do slow, overland travel (the alternative is to fly into a location which doesn’t work well when traveling with a dog and also feels less adventurous), but we would do it our way. This meant our old blue car would get her last journey. I would see us in hotels over boondocking. Comfier in some ways, back to basics in others. It is the spirit of the thing, far more than the means. This led to a evaluation of the scale of things too. We decided to focus on Mexico, a country big and varied enough to be the transformative experience I envisioned. The rest of Central America was calling, but so too was the rest of the world. These places would have to wait.
In the end, it’s only what we think will work for us. I say think, because we’ll have to see it properly road tested. Our only opportunities to try things out are our short, 10 day trips around the Province that we manage over the summer. Last year was us getting back into camping. The only previous camping we had done together was with hodge podge gear, loading up the car for one weekend, throwing a camp site together, doing our thing, and then heading home in need of a good sleep. Now we had new gear, new destinations, contention with inland heat, a fully loaded car… and it went well. This summer we’ll do some further fine tuning. That’s it. The rest we’ll have to figure out along the way.
The problem for someone like me is the limits of what can be planned in advance. I have taken care to loosely map out where we might want to be each night and for how long, but it’s foolish to actually book any stays beyond a couple key dates. And while I have gear lists and images in my head of how they should all fit together in the car, we’re a long way out from actually packing.
The trip is both near and far and it’s very difficult to live in the present. Any other journey and we would be there and back again by now – you plan and then execute. Instead, ideas are allowed to roll around in my head for months, taking up space, making me question the stops, the health of the car, budget, and overall feasibility of the thing. There’s a long way to go, but the most exciting thing on my mind is the day, roughly 6 months from now, when we pile in the car and get out of this place. It’s not the best way to live, I know.
The unexpected upside is that the time becomes an extension of the trip (I’m reaching, but hear me out). A person could do this trip with a month lead time, they really could. If they weren’t too fussed about planning all their stops, they could just go. My mind doesn’t work that way. I’m a planner (perhaps a controller as well, but let’s put that aside for now). But through planning, I’ve read about just about every place in Mexico and seen a lot of cool videos, supporting the work of creators. For a couple years now I’ve also been working on my Spanish. That makes it sound like I should be fluent. Again, we’ll have to see how it holds up out there in the real world. The important thing is that my skills are greater than zero – I am enriched.
And thank god I thought about this trip for a good (possibly unhealthy) amount of time. I feel more confident about what we’re about to tackle and why and this feels like an important thing. And there are still things in flux, still varied, exciting possibilities to consider (should we go to Belize after all? What can we expect when we cross back into Texas?) that I’m still flipping through guide books, recalibrating, dreaming.
ExploreAgain is about putting time aside in your life for adventure. Part of that process is allowing yourself to dream big and stay curious. This comes with advantages (openness, optimism, wonder, life long learning) and of course downsides as well (overly analytical, future-thinking, dissatisfaction, disassociation). In many ways, we’ve entered the hardest stretch of the whole thing. I’m dreading how much harder it will be with every day that nears.
It reminds me of my younger self in the annual run up to Christmas, sitting round the tree and just visualizing the festivities to come. I wasn’t a greedy boy – in love with objects – it was the event that I craved, the family coming together, this wondrous thing that came only once a year. You knew what would happen, but not entirely. The holiday held a magic over me, every single year. But it was a lot of build up for something so short lived, that by its design would be wrapped up in a couple hours.
For a good while after, you would bask in the moment – sun rising, Christmas lights twinkling, the smell of breakfast sizzling. Someone would put on a CD they got as a gift and we’d break into a chocolate orange, pass it around. We’d flip through the spoils once more just amazed that you were alive and you got to do such awesome things. The afterglow is almost as good as the thing, you think to yourself. I was exhausted after a sleepless night and early morning.
Soon it’s time to clean up. Time zips by. The future is past and before you lies the interminable dullness known as January and February. You don’t think you can make it. After a week in front of that tree praying to the gods of Christmas suddenly it’s coming down and the decorations are being packed up. Blink and you miss it. Did you seize the moment appropriately? Get every ounce out of it that you were meant to? You are untethered. Adrift. Until you gradually find your way back to the present. There’s life there too.
I can’t make an existence out of merely planning for the next big thing. A whole life living for the future, separating yourself from the realities of the present. Although the planning and the dreaming is a vital part of who I am, of my enjoyment, I have to be cognizant of getting lost out there. Because the present is the only thing that’s real. Because afterwards, when we’re basking in the fading glow of the best days of our lives, I’ll have things to do, life will continue, and I’ll have to pick up my toys and stare down rainy, dark days with not much going on. It’s these days, after all, that make a person.
[Photo attribution: plenty.r.]
