Traveler's Digest

I read online blog posts every day at work. Many of them are about how young people should quit their desk job to go out and see the world. This is a highly appealing yet highly romanticized notion.  

There are many ways to see the world. There are hitckhikers, rubbertramps, occasional travelers, avid travelers. There are those that romp around the jungle and there are those who stay at all inclusive resorts. I’ve never hitchhiked and I have never ridden in the first class section of an airplane, but I think some combination of the aforementioned is appropriate throughout ones’ life.

From a young  age my father taught me fiscal responsibility and my mother instilled in me a love for travel. The problem I have with many of these articles I read online is the problem I have with many people my age and America in general. People spend more than they earn. People do not save.

I highly suggest traveling on a budget as you will experience the world in a way that you will miss pent up in the spa of the Ritz anywhere. I've bussed across more of Europe than I would like to recollect, stayed in hostels with bunks of 20 girls in one room,  and some rooms as low as $8 per night. I've also spent time in some pretty extravagant hotels in different places around the world. They are different experiences and both valuable.

What I also suggest is being a productive member of society at a young age, which also enriches your understanding of the world. I siphoned money off of my parents for a solid 22 years (shout out to Lisa and Gregg on that one), but I am out on my own now, for the most part, and enjoy being able to take the trips I want to take on my own dime.

I am currently reading two books; Jimmy Buffet’s A Pirate Looks at Fifty and Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild. Buffett’s book is the story of the trip he and his family took for his 50^th birthday, while Into the Wild is a biographer’s take on the journey that young Chris McCandless took across the US, a bit into Mexico and back up to the Alaskan wilderness. Both men sought adventure and both found it, but in a different manner and for different reasons.

For one, Jimmy Buffet is worth around $400 million, flew his own planes around and has connections to many people in many countries, note Bob Zimmerman and the Water Pearl. Chris McCandless donated the few thousand dollars he had, ditched his car, burned his small cash a hitchhiked across the country acquiantin himself with others along the way. This is obviously an extrapolation and hyperbole of the point I am trying to make, but Jimmy Buffett came home and is still worth hundreds of millions, and not to be insensitive, but Chris McCandless is dead.

Back to the articles I read online- they do not necessarily inspire me to travel, because I have felt the pull to other places since I first traveled internationally in 1999. These articles cause nothing but resentment for my job. They make me think, “yeah, I should just quit.. get out there and travel and come back one day and figure it out.” This is foolish and I know it. This is why I am going to stop (actually I won’t stop because this is how I fill the gaps in my workday) reading these articles, but I am going to start reading more books.  Maybe they will be books about traveling or maybe they will be books about bondage. Kidding, I already read 50 Shades series and they were lame. The goal is to read offline.

There is also a goal to travel and also a goal to write. Perhaps there should be a goal to also constructively contribute an amalgamation of these goals to the world wide web, but then again I don’t want to become the blogger(s) who made inspired this post in the first place.