It will be nearly a year now that this pandemic has been around. It wasn’t officially a pandemic for our household until we were finally moved in to our first house in late March 2020. Yes, we sold a condo AND bought a house during a pandemic! Crazy? Very. But in the hot Seattle real estate market, this was probably our best (and only?) chance (ever). Otherwise we’d still be looking to this very day or drowning in way more debt than we anticipated.
It also took me nearly a year to realize that I enjoy traveling. There I admitted it. There was something essential, earth-shakingly essential now missing in my life. Maybe the reality that I could catch a lethal virus and die alone in a hospital bed helped elucidate things. Or maybe it was because no amount of travel book reading, youtube videos, or listening to Rick Steves’ podcasts could fill that void.
Still not willing to go as far as saying I am “passionate about traveling” though, “love” is probably the farthest I am willing and even then gingerly. Passionate, to me, is having half a dozen trip itineraries in their back pocket ready to go when international travel restrictions are lifted. Love is daydreaming about your first meal when you land or what the mornings sound like in a faraway place.
To be honest, I’ve struggled since coming out of the travel closet nearly a decade ago. There is still a slight pang of shame when a coworker asks what I will be doing for those three weeks of vacation. Trying to downplay that we will be traveling up to Tuscany from Rome and then along the French Riviera to Paris so as not to sound too bougie is challenging at times. Or to embarrassingly explain that I like to know, at the very least, how to say “hello” and “thank you” in whatever country we will be visiting (to be an ambassador of sorts for our country) when I get caught red-handed in the lunchroom with my color-coded foreign phrase index cards.
But we aren’t anything special really. Just your average interracial mid-forties gay couple living in a “suburb” of Seattle (Kent). No extravagant budgets or champagne dreams here (we aren’t those kind of gays, even if we tried). In fact, we try to do everything on the cheap with what little time we have.
So why only start journeyling now? Well maybe because the pandemic was that strong shove that I needed to be flung fully out of the travel closet.
