Finding My Fix: Chronicles of a Travel Junkie

To Sarah from Sydney who will be in Europe until August 2006:

I hope we meet!

~Drea

P.S. I love your city!

I have applied to a program called Journalism in London that lasts six weeks this summer. In the program I will be able to take a Travel Writing course. Assuming I’m accepted into it, my Europe itinerary will be something along the lines of this:

May 12 to May 19 Paris
May 19 to June 23 Morocco, Italy, Sicily, Greece, Ireland
June 23 to Aug 6 UK
Aug 7 to Aug 30 Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden

to contact me: comment

My name is Drea, and, whether I like it or not, I’m a nomad in an eternal search for “home,” whatever that means.

And, after a lifetime of searching, I have found home…

I arrived in Hawaii on a Wednesday, and took the shuttle to the Beachside Hostel. I dragged my suitcase inside. By this time, I had dragged both a backpack and giant suitcase through four different airports, up and down too many stairs to count, and had emptied them in the middle of the Wellington airport to throw away half their contents. I knew by then that on my next trip I would return to my minimalist roots.

“Hi, I made a reservation here. At least I hope it’s here.”

“You hope?” The desk attendant looked at me, eyebrow raised. “What’s your name again?”

Turned out my hopes would not be fulfilled today. This was the Beachside Hostel; I had wanted the Seaside Hostel. I didn’t feel like lugging my crap, which at this point is what it was to me, to the next place, so I settled into the room that to my disappointment was of the mildly roach infested genre and had a bunk bed that rocked and squeaked like a ship in a storm. But you try not to think about these things too much. Read the rest of this entry »

This is the last of the South Island stories and photographs in this series (hopefully there will be more someday). I hope you enjoy. Read the rest of this entry »

It has been brought to my attention that my writing in this blog isn’t half bad, or wouldn’t be if only I would use grammar and spell check. It has been recommended that I first write my entries in Word and later copy/paste them to the blog. I agree. Let me explain some of the mistakes. After traveling in locations that speak a dialect of English different from mine, my spelling has suffered. I am no longer always sure whether in American English, “traveling” ought to be spelled with one “l” or two, or whether or not “color” should have a “u.” Quite often while traveling, I am writing on a computer I am unfamiliar with, with a keyboard that makes little sense to me, and whose commands are in a language with an entirely different alphabet. Rarely, while abroad do I ever have the luxury of writing on my own computer. Quite often, I am paying $5 an hour to use the internet and, considering my writing in this blog is entirely for pleasure and not at all for financial gain, I’d rather get my story written, horribly or no, than spend my time editing it. I can always edit later. Finally, now that this has been the case for five months, I have grown lazy with spell check. This blog is more or less a first draft, and personally I feel that most of what is written here is in dire need of improvement, not only in terms of spelling and grammar. But how bout this: I do my best to learn to spell so I don’t have to use spell check in the future? Fair?

NEWS: I am back in New York City. I have bought my tickets to Paris and back from Stockholm, so I’m definitely going to be in Europe from May 11 till August 29! But where? I don’t yet know.

So I left off saying that I had plans for dinner… Two of the divers I had met on the dive boat in Milford Sound, happened to be from Portland, Oregon, and as Americans often are, happened to be welcoming people. The van ride back to Te Anau from Milford Sound included numerous stops in the mountains for purposes both educational and decompressing. Passing too quickly from the extreme pressure 16m below the surface of the ocean through several thousand meters of elevation and back again could be disastrous to the human heart. So we made stops at the river to fill our water bottles and see some ruins of the facilities for the families of the highway workers who built the tunnel allowing passage to the Sound. We stopped at a lookout where Dave informed us of the near extinct Kakapo, a large flightless parrot. Male Kakapo blaze a trail up a mountain, perch themselves at the top, and periodically bellow out a whomp sound that can be heard for miles. Any females in range and in the mood only have to follow their trails up the mountain and… you know the rest. Read the rest of this entry »

The bus from Queenstown to Milford Sound via Te Anau left from the i-site at a brutal hour in the morning. Luckily my sleep schedule had adapted itself to the Intercity bus schedule and so I wasn’t too terribly groggy. While I was being loaded onto the bus, I became aware of a large number of round, ancient looking people wearing khaki with large Olympus cameras dangling against their chests, drawling out “y’alls” and “how you doin’s.” It had been a long time since I had seen so many Americans of this demographic, or should I say any Americans of this demographic.

Read the rest of this entry »

Bus drivers, Museums, Bungy, and a scenic bike-ride

Read the rest of this entry »

James Blunt was playing on the radio two days ago… two different stations… and it made me so happy! James Blunt has finally hit America!

I’ve been back a month and I still occassionally use the New Zealand spellings, the English inflections, and the Aussie vocabulary that I picked up while traveling. I still say, “cheers, mate, sweet as, where are the toilets?, no worries, university, hostel, flat, queue, pub, pissed, etc.”

I still have four more posts left to write, the pictures are already uploaded and linked, I just need to write the dang things. I promise it will happen, but between trying to bring my funds up out of the red zone, while still planning this coming semester in New York, and a summer-long Europe trip, I have little time for writing.

So here’s my general updated itinerary for this coming summer. It’s a lot shorter than originally planned, but you can be guaranteed I will have new adventures to share, new boys to tease, and new languages to speak:

May 13 – Aug 25

Paris (with NYU friends)
London (with NYU friends)
Cardiff
(some of these cities, as I have met at least one person from each: Oxford, Birmingham, Manchester, Doncaster, Northampton, New Castle)
Edinburgh
Glasgow
Belfast
Dublin
Madrid
(other parts of Spain, Portugal, and Morocco)
Italy
Greece and Turkey
Germany, especially in the South (promised I’d visit friends)
Copenhagen and maybe more of Denmark (promised I’d visit friends)
Stockholm and maybe more of Sweden (promised I’d visit friends)

Hopefully next summer I’ll get to see all the places I missed, such as all of Eastern and Central Europe.

It’s been a while since I last updated, and things are getting all out of order, but I’m doing my best to put up the last of the photos and stories (there are about 6 posts worth left to publish). Read the rest of this entry »