Yeah, I’m not going to Seattle. The infamous “Destination Unknown” trip has been cancelled, due to Adam moving back to Lethbridge and me just not having enough energy to get up to pee, let alone drive for that long. I wasn’t even excited to be going. What is wrong with me? I’m going to NYC in three weeks with Adam and I don’t think I’m excited for that either. I’m sick of these temporary flings with travel and awesome places.

I need to move. Somewhere awesome. I wonder how rent prices are in Narnia. That place seems happening.

For fun, here is a picture:

Everett Park in Kingston.

I’m sitting here writing a paper that looks at the development of abortion rights in Latin America from a religious and colonial perspective. I don’t want to be writing this paper. I hate the fact I have to write this paper. I want to be in Latin America, not writing about it. Sitting on a beach, laying in a hammock, wandering the streets looking for something delicious to devour. Joining a group fighting for reproductive justice. Not writing about it so one guy can read it, grade it, and forget about it. After about every three sentences I write for my paper, I pop open Firefox and immerse myself in a travel blog, search a cheap fares website, or just look at pictures of exotic and beautiful places. I come back from day dreaming and hammer out the rest of a paragraph. I’m backpedaling, misfiring, completely lost in my own life.

If life is a highway, I’ve been stuck at a filthy truck stop for the last 5 years of my life.

Let me put it this way: the most exciting thing that’s happened in the past few days was Sarah telling me, without even giving detail, about a “sexy” dream she had.

A week ago I was let go from my job, which was my only real source of entertainment. I’m still not sure why I was let go. So far, what I have gathered is that I do not steal and I actually got things done and this mucked with their endeavors to go bankrupt. Yes, I actually had a conspiracy theory where I thought the owners of the company I worked for were attempting to go bankrupt. How else do you explain rubber shoes for $40 and introducing expensive and poorly sewn yoga pants into the ghetto-est mall in Calgary?

I’m not going to lie, I was pretty peeved. At least let me know why I’m being fired, instead of saying “the numbers aren’t there” and then telling me it “doesn’t matter” when I ask what that means. Slowly, within a 48 hour period, I realized exactly what had happened. They had told me not to come back to a job I hated and had tried to quit a month and a half ago. No more selling rubber shoes to the one person an hour who enters the store (yes one person an hour was about the average rate, unless it was Monday and then it was no person per hour). Can you really be insulted at someone telling you you aren’t good enough to sell over priced rubber to welfare mummies and homeless men? Really? No, I’ve decided I am okay with that turn of events. This list is about doing things that make me happy, and I think anyone who knows me can vouch for just how much I hated that job.

Making fun of a company doomed to swallow itself whole aside, what does being unemployed mean for me? Well, I did just book a trip to Kelowna that costs about the entirety of my final paycheque. That pretty much sucks, but at least I didn’t book some crazy trip to hike to Machu Picchu like I really had wanted. It also means that, barring my odd fascination with not having anything to do 4 days a week, I can start hunting for a new job! On my list there are a few job related items so I figured why not make lemonade vodka coolers out of lemons and apply for some waitressing or coffee house jobs? I’ve applied for a few waitressing jobs so far and I hope to hear back. I do need money to fund most of the things on my list and since Richard Branson hasn’t stepped up to the plate yet, I need to exchange my free time for legal tender.

Pulpit Rock Photo Montage

image via Dilidou

Heights are not my thing. Thus, Pulpit Rock in Norway scares the crap out of me. Just watching those people sit leisurely on the edge makes me sink to the carpet covered floors of my room in my “safety crouch” (reserved for swinging bridges, gondola lifts, driving on the sides of mountains, the fake Eiffel Tower in Las Vegas, and pictures of Pulpit Rock). You can definitely file a visit to Preikestolen as it as known in its Native language under Thanks But No Thanks

Recently Nomadic Matt wrote a great guest post for Christine Gilbert’s fabulous Almost Fearless that really struck home for me. The piece was about traveling by yourself, without the company of friends or family. As I come to the close of my academic life I’m going to be faced with some pretty big choices, potentially bigger than I imagined they would be.

I always assumed that once I graduated I would be travelling, and beyond that, travelling with my boyfriend. I’m sure you can tell from my list that I want some mix of adventure and backpacking with “normal life” with house and pet rabbit sort of thing. I figure it makes more sense to travel before I invest in a house and decide when and where to settle down and build up my life. Of course, nothing works out how you thought it would, and my boyfriend recently told me that he wants to try and buy a house here in Calgary by the end of the year. Granted, he’s four years older than me and is actually establishing himself in an awesome career that could easily translate to working remotely in a few years. I’ve always had such a blast travelling with him despite our different travel styles, and I was looking forward to experiencing the vast wide world with him by my side. I guess this won’t be the case in the near future.

This leaves me with only a few options.
1. Getting a job I will in all likelihood hate (I have no passion as of yet, other than this list, and sadly it does not pay the bills) to help pay for a house in a city I truly want to leave.
2. Traveling solo
3. Finding that mythical partner-traveler who has as much time and money as you and wants to see roughly the same things

Number two seems to be the most reasonable option, which is where Mr. Matt Kepnes comes in. Traveling alone isn’t something I’m opposed to, it is something I want to try, but the idea of embarking on months, possibly a full year, of gallivanting around the globe solo is pretty terrifying considering I have never done it before. Matt makes it sound like a pretty fantastic and empowering experience, because “[y]ou have to adapt to your surroundings, meet other people, make your own decisions, and plan your life.” Nothing wrong with that. He really encourages the “fuck it” sort of attitude I would love to have and have been trying to cultivate. In reality though, would I be able to touch down in Beijing, Amsterdam, Sydney, or anywhere for that matter by myself and be able to survive all on my own? Could I navigate the Tube in London by myself with my horrendous sense of direction, let alone in a country where everything is in a different language? The biggest lesson I’ve learned in 5 years of academia is that theory and practice are almost always irrelevant to each other. So is Matt’s suggestion of “[j]ust do it”,because in theory it will work, really enough to make it actually work for me in reality?

Photo courtesy of http://freedigitalphotos.com

It scares me a little that I have to make these decisions within the next year. When did all of this happen? I’m suddenly 22 and trying to decide between travelling the world and buying a condo in Calgary, Alberta and I have no idea how it happened.

What do you get when you work 30 hours a week and go to school “full time”? Unhappiness!

I’ve been struggling to find time to live my life, rather than just going through the motions. Being in my fifth year of University, it doesn’t seem like the time to drop out of “regular” life to take on a life of vagabondry or backpacking. I find myself focusing more and more on the future (real or completely imaginary) to compensate for the complete lack of anything exciting in the present. I suppose this is the ascribed destiny for most of the Western world’s population; placid drudgery with a 2 week slice of sweet freedom once a year. I won’t even bring up the people working in free trade zones in the East. Doesn’t everyone dream of escaping it, especially during the idealistic phase we all go through in our 20s? Why is my life going to be any different than that of everyone else?

I wish I was more of the risk-taking type. My personality, my complacency, my unwillingness to attempt anything remotely scary will be my downfall. This list was a first step towards actualizing a thought I had. That I didn’t want to be 80 and have memories of working in a cubicle. I wanted to have awesome memories of drinking with rockstars, climbing mountains, and seeing everything this planet has to offer up. The more I think about it, the more I come to the conclusion I am wasting the best years of my life on the same kind of drudgery I want to avoid later in life. People I know are doing awesome things: volunteering in Peru for a semester, going to Ghana and South Africa for classes, three month long trips to Europe. I sit instead and plan out how to do this stuff later because in all honesty I am scared shitless of going off the beaten path, of going it alone, of being by myself in the vast spaces that fall outside of my comfort zone.

I need to get over that. It’s a requirement. Fear is not something you can take with you. So! My goal for the next semester is to find something travel related (working abroad, volunteering in a third world country, etc.) that scares me and just DO IT. Hopefully I can work something out for this summer or for Fall 09 semester that will jolt me out of my middle class suburban safety.

Have you ever done anything that made you uncomfortable or scared just to say you had done it?

So I leave in 5 days for the land of bright lights, late nights, and never ending deserts. We fly out next Saturday morning bright and insanely early to arrive in Vegas at 8:30 am. We’re staying at a hotel on the strip and have decided to equip ourselves with a rental car so we can haul ass over to the Grand Canyon, Barringer Meteor, and Death Valley. I am incredibly excited for the line up of activities we have planned during our stay, which include a magic show with Penn and Teller, drag show with dinner, and Cirque de Soleil show. I should be able to cross about 12 things off of my list between all of the things we are doing. I’m happy to be leaving, mostly because until I leave I’m working straight 8 hour shifts and when I come back I have to re-enter the world of academia. I am a bit concerned since I have been dealing with some random, yet at times debilitating pain, in a rather sensitive lady-area for the past few days. I’m hitting the doctor up tomorrow morning to see if I can get it taken care of and ease my mind a little. I sure don’t want to have to write a piece about what it’s like to travel with horrible pain that hits when you sit/stand/walk/move/sleep/laugh. I guess I have 5 days for it to be cured or clear itself up.

I crossed one more thing off of my list this summer. I’m excited for when September 8th rolls around and I can officially see how many things I accomplished in the last four months. Yesterday I put a big strike through #43 which was to donate blood. I had planned to do this shortly after my vacation out east, but I was suffering from breathing problems when I got home and did not end up donating. Since I had a day off yesterday, I rescheduled for a morning appointment.

I arrived late thanks to pretty much every road in downtown Calgary being under construction. They weresuper nice regardless at the 737 13 Ave location, the main office for Canadian Blood Services in Calgary. I went through the normal procedures and was taken into the donation room, where I saw the size of the needle and had to avert my eyes from the vein puncturing. I can take needles without blinking and normally watch, but this was a freakin’ huge needle!! Of course, no trip anywhere with me is complete without drama, so I half passed out after they removed the needle. Yeah, everything was fine until I was completely finished and they took the needle out. It got all bright and loopy, and then I was suddenly aware I was wet (cold damp cloths to help you come too) and people were staring at me. Completely embarrassing. Completely. Regardless it is off of my list, and I have another appointment booked in October. I think I can donate two more times before going to Mexico in December/January.

If you live in Canada and aren’t a donor yet, call 1.888.2.DONATE to make an appointment. It’ll take about an hour in total but you could add years to someone’s life.

picture courtesy of jasondunn.com

Adam and I are in the midst of planning a 10-day or shorter trip for the end of this month. You’d think two young people with 10 days off work and enough cash to get them somewhere decent would have a fairly easy time deciding on a locale, right? Well in our case, not at all.

Being we’re in Calgary our flying options are quite limited, as we have to get ourselves to Toronto and back if we want to go to Europe, which is $800CND or more, almost half of our budget. Canadian destinations are limited as well, since we were just on the west coast back in June and I was just in the major destinations Ontario and Quebec have to offer. Saskatchewan and Manitoba…let’s just not even go there.

We’ve been toying with the idea of a road trip to Las Vegas, which I wouldn’t mind since we’d be able to get to Bad Water in Death Valley and see Old Faithful on the way, both of which are on my list. It just seems like 20 hours of driving on either side for a few nights in Las Vegas. We could fly, but 10 days in Las Vegas would probably kill me, and we wouldn’t have access to a car besides.

Mexico or some Southern destination seemed like a worthy choice, laying on the beach, and taking in all the all-inclusive fun we could handle. The only problem with this is we want to go to Mexico in December when it’s cold and we both have some more time off, and why pay to go to Mexico twice within five months?

We are running short on time to decide. I’m at the point where I just want to say “let’s go to Edmonton!” and admit defeat. Who knew planning a 10 days trip could be this hard. At times like this I truly wished I was living in Europe and there were 10 countries on either side you could easily get to for a short get away. For the time being I’m going to try and not focus on the deadline for decisions wearing closer and closer. I might also suggest throwing Tofino into the mix as an option, though I was just on the West Coast. Sitting on the Pacific beaches and sleeping in cabins doesn’t seem quite so bad when it comes down to it, I think I could handle it.

I’ve been holding off from posting for the past little while. The feeling of coming home after a month of hostels, hotels, couches, and luxurious friend’s guest beds has been a rough learning curve. I suppose I sort of crashed mentally of sorts, drained of every mental resource I had being away, but I failed to prepare myself to come home to time sensitive obligations, working, and having to stick to other peoples’ schedules.

After a month away I wanted to come home desperately, I was almost clawing my eyes out on my flight home from Toronto as we sat waiting for 45 minutes to get into the air on the tarmac. I was literally counting the minutes and hours down until I could hug my boyfriend and pet my cat. I honestly thought that after a month I could just fall right back into the groove of my life, especially when I considered how much I missed it. The first few days I was home I felt the beginnings of it, the itching to get back out and live out of my back pack, to bed hop and do what I wanted whenever I felt like it. I missed surprises like French women screaming at cockroaches at 5 in the morning and seeing the most amazing transsexual women on Queen’s street during Pride Week in Toronto.
I’ve been back for almost two weeks, and I’m still quite literally living out of my bag. I’ve been spending as much time as possible at my boyfriend’s house, in some futile attempt to recreate the travel experience (though his sheet-less mattress does kind of scream “crappy hostel”). Eventually I’m going to have to come back to real life, especially when school starts.

Other than that I’ve been busy with work and other things like finding a new doctor and planning my next trip, which explains the large gap in posts. At some point I may finish describing my trip to New York (which I fell in love with) and my scary adventures home with Air Canada. Right now I’m basically lethargic and more excited about my potential Las Vegas/Los Angeles road trip than anything else. I’ll have to keep this crashing feeling in mind for the next long haul vacation, I guess.