At the moment, I am in the dark, quiet cabin of an Airbus 340, in the very front row of the airplane. I have the whole row to myself, and I am taking full advantage. I’ve also been bestowed a blanket, a pillow, a pair of slippers, and a little bag of toiletries. The seat even reclines into a fully flat bed. It’s funny to think that these are some of the most luxurious accommodations I’ve had since embarking on my travels.
I have the royal pleasure of being in this seat today because my “space-available” privileges are working in my favor. Sometimes they leave me high and dry, but this time they’ve granted me a first-class seat to Tokyo.
I feel out of place amongst the other business-class elite, who are tucked in as comfortably as if they were asleep in their own beds. I just feel overheated and energized as I toss and turn. Even a beer and a sleeping pill are no match against my mania. However, the one upside to having anxiety is that sometimes it fuels one’s creativity, and this is the first semi-creative moment I’ve had in my two and a half weeks abroad in the United Kingdom.
If you think it sounds crazy to backpack through Europe in winter, congratulations, you’re more strongly rooted in reality than me and my best friend/travel companion, Isabel. As it turns out, there is a big difference between summer backpacking and winter backpacking. The cold, wet weather can really dampen your spirits when you’re carrying around your life on your back and utilizing public transit on the daily. Let’s rewind to two weeks ago.
We’d been gallivanting around London for about four days, staying in the loft of Isabel’s friends’ flat, when the totally inconceivable happened: cold symptoms. I’ve long chastised Isabel for her weak immune system, so no surprise, it happened to her first—scratchy throat, low energy. Before we knew it, we were both plagued.
Our plan was to hit a number of towns in England before hopping over to Ireland and then eventually parting ways, which we succeeded in doing, but Oxford was lost in an abyss of phlegm, and then, somewhere between Bath and Dublin, our time had vanished. Three weeks in the U.K. seemed like an eternity paper, but somehow I find myself on a plane to Tokyo to get a dose of Japanese culture, while Isabel will soon be on her way to France where she will au pair for a family in the French Alps. Our last day together, in Dublin, was spent in a fog of confusion and traveler’s fatigue as we tried to pinpoint exactly how all of our time had slipped through our fingers.
But looking back, a lot has happened over the past few weeks. We had an American Thanksgiving in a London Airbnb with a gaggle of Italian girls. We stayed in a loft in a posh London flat. We met my distant English relatives and had dinner with them in a restaurant my granny used to go to. We stayed in a real family home in Wales.
But each day, when I returned to my laptop to account our experiences of that day, I wrote pages and pages, only to read back a loathsome book-report-like summarization of events. Then I’d end up groaning and slamming my laptop shut, unable to comb through the dullness of my own writing any longer, putting it off for another day. The strong desire to write, and the refusal of my mind to produce anything worth reading was beginning to drive me insane. I’d hit a wall, and realized I needed to take a step back to reflect.
There is this pressure that exists as a “traveler” regarding how you are meant to feel about your experience. It should be wonderful, incredible, life-changing. I now realize that I’ve subconsciously been trying to convey those things in my writing, and that’s why I’ve been blocked. Isabel has helped me make sense of it, as she does with most things in my life. In her eloquent words, traveling is not about seeing the world, it’s about seeing yourself.
Yes, it’s been a real experience, not a fantasy. We’ve slept in the bubblegum pink sheets of a friend’s sister’s high school bedroom. We’ve worn the same two shirts again and again on rotation. We’ve drunk cup after cup of instant coffee. We’ve starved for hours on the train because we ran out of time to stock up on snacks.
But we’ve also had great times. We’ve spent more time laughing than I have my entire collective college experience. We’ve heard the life stories of friendly strangers from remote corners of the world, and shared home cooked meals with new friends.
The clenching fear that I had before I started this trip has waned. Traveling like semi-vagabonds in the U.K. in the winter is do-able, and now I know it’s do-able, which makes me think anything is. There have been moments in the past couple of weeks that we were lost and tired, and many times in which we were on the brink of tears, but we never cried. We simply confronted our problem, and either solved it or found a way around it. Those were our only options.
It’s not about the castles and cathedrals and every famous market and every museum. We’ve seen those things, too, but to write in detail about those sights doesn’t touch the surface of what we’re really doing.
Isabel and I had to say goodbye today. I won’t see her until the summer, in which time, we joke that we will have become completely different people, but in reality, it is a bittersweet certainty.
This trip is giving me what I need. It’s forcing me to be honest in my writing. It’s forcing me to grow a much-needed thicker skin. And most importantly, it’s showing me my own power and control over the can of worms that is my life. I think I’m going to be okay—I really do. It is a wonderful feeling to finally believe that again.
Staring out the window as we surge east, the orange sun finally cracking over the horizon, banishing the darkness, and it comically occurs to me that I’m truly headed toward the Land of the Rising Sun.