BootsnAll Travel Network



Travel Is A Drug

The traveler’s high. You’ve no doubt felt it, upon disembarking in a realm where all is unfamiliar. Travel is a drug. It reboots reality, tweaks the senses, and becomes addictive.

I crave total autonomy, and shy away from responsibility and attachment. Every morning I arise I still breath a sigh of relief that I don’t have to be anywhere…no meetings, no phone calls…except catching that bus or train or plane. I still hate the phone. And my hand goes to sleep.

Since retirement, I like to be alone…to travel alone…free to serendipitously connect on the deepest levels in the moment. No assumptions made. No mindless chatter. No history of each other to color the here and now. No one trying to grease my purchase of a donut with “how is your day going!”

Being an expat is a luxury. No one expects you to adhere to local customs and expectations. You are released from and are free of the social expectations of the country you came from. This is as free as anyone could ever expect to be and still live in the world.

But expatriate urges aren’t just about yearning to be unencumbered, or a distaste for any particular culture, or even the lure of a particular place’s attractions.

What we expats crave, at heart, is the exhilarating thrill of foreignness. We take delight in molding ourselves as a square peg in a round country. In forever being the outsider with the ability to constantly transcend and recreate the self…indeed to come to know the self.



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