#janblog

OBSESSION

For close to 40 years, with the exception of a year or two when my folks needed me, I’ve gone somewhere else and done something else. Solo travel in 2019 is commonplace, it wasn’t at the start. I have ZERO regrets for the cost, the time, that I have spent exploring this planet. Not one. I hope to travel for as long as I can and am so glad that I started young and didn’t wait until I retire to start, because the trips I take and the decision I make now are not the same as they were in my 20s and 30s. I would have hated to have missed them. :)

When I was a kid, I read everything I could find on all of the big explorers who took off in their ships for destinations, rumored, but virtually unknown to the west. I studied every National Geographic, and every Life Magazine that arrived at our door. The world was a big, fascinating and dangerous place, but I wanted to know everything about it.

Growing up in a catholic home, our church sponsored the Maryknoll sisters, they did good works in various remote places around the world. I used to lay on the floor and pour over the photos in the Maryknoll magazines - I was amazed that these nuns got to go and live with these people in places I’d never even heard of. We had a huge atlas and I’d drag it out and look up these place on the maps inside. Magic.

(My mother mistakenly though I wanted to become a nun.)

I never actually dreamed that I’d be able go to any of these places. Never crossed my mind. Not once as a kid did I think of GOING. We lived in suburbia, outside of San Francisco for God’s sake. No one I knew traveled, certainly no one in my family. My Dad had traveled in the Navy but that was before his life with a family, and he never talked about that time in his life.

I didn’t know it was okay to want to go.

When I was in college, my boyfriend came into a lot of money, For Christmas. He told me that I could go anywhere in the world, I wanted to visit. ANYWHERE. The mind boggled. Sadly, I didn’t have a passport. So, instead we packed up his car and spent a month driving on farm roads from Chicago to the Florida Keys and up the eastern Seaboard. The trip was AMAZING, every day was a day of discovery, and it lit a fire in me that has never gone out.

I got my passport as soon as I returned to NYC, never been without one since.

At 23, brave with booze, I decided to go to Europe alone. World Airways, used to let you walk to the gate counter, buy a ticket and get directly on the plane, no reservation required. It was a Tuesday, by nightfall I was in Belgium. Magic.

The first trip was rough, I didn’t have a plan. Didn’t do any prep work. Didn’t pack well. I was FREEZING the entire trip. I traveled around England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales lugging a heavy suitcase. My film was destroyed, I didn’t see the sights people go to see, I bumbled around in suburban neighborhoods, but I fell in love with all of it. The discovery, the challenges, the surprises good and bad, the people I’d meet, surrendering to a new place, to a new experience. Loved it, loved it, loved it.

Afterward, I’d work my ass off for 11 months - days, nights, weekends, then take a month off and go somewhere else. I learned to love the planning, the anticipation, the research leading up to the trip. I travel light, I create a framework and let the rest fill in as opportunity presents itself.

Amazon, 1995, traveling with my life-long friend Jon, the Priest.

We’ve met up with three missionaries from the UK in Manaus, Brazil and the five of us have hired a small boat to travel up the fingerling irapes of the Amazon.

The captain, his wife and child are on their boat with us as we park on the Rio Negro where the water looks like chocolate milk. We board a dugout canoe and float out into the river where we fish successfully for piranha. We're using a rudimentary fishing line of jute twine with a sizable hook knotted at the end, which we’re baiting with chunks of raw beef. The piranha lie in wait just beneath the surface, and hit the beef more often than the hook, as soon as the bait drops below the surface into the murky water. If you jerk up the line, the piranha will more likely than not, flip into the boat and go skittering the length of the canoe, with their teeth snapping. We all instinctively lift our feet and the youngest missionary, Philip, sitting at the back of the canoe carefully grabs the tail and flips the fish back out in to the river. This is not difficult fishing, every drop is a hit, sometimes several fish come up on the bait even though it’s only been seconds.

Once we tire of fishing, we return to the boat and everyone decides to go swimming. This is INSANE. We’ve just fished less than 50 feet away, for piranhas which we know are plentiful, and fast. I question the logic, everyone shrugs and jumps in the water. Jon laughing at my caution, pretends to be an injured animal flailing in the water. His brother has just died at 35 so I caution him, I’m not calling his mom to say that he’s died of stupidity. No one is killed, and everyone is calling for me to join them. With every fiber of my being, I know this is a bad idea, but, the Amazon basin is hot. Really hot and really humid. Hot and humid enough that you feel like your head will explode, and while you're there, you think that maybe it’s okay to be eaten by fish.

I close my eyes, I hold my breath and jump. It’s about a 6 foot drop from the deck to the water and I drop below the surface far deeper than I intend to. I keep my eyes shut as I pull my way to the surface, trying mot to panic. Can fish sense fear? I can feel things moving past me in the water, or I imagine I can. Later we will visit a museum which shows the myriad creepy animals that live in the Amazon that can easily kill you.

For many of my years in NY I worked at the same section of Madison Avenue, and I stopped every morning and ordered my coffee and a bagel from the same deli. After awhile, the deli guys all know you by your order.

Five years after I moved to California, a friend asked me to fill in for him at our old job for a week. The first day I stopped into the deli and the guy took one look at me and yelled - “Coffee light, no sugar; Bagel lightly toasted with butter!”

Spot on.

EVERYTHING!

I have gone back to school for pottery classes, workout classes and am currently learning Spanish online via duolingo, in case I decide to go for a Peace Corp position again in the future. I love learning new things.

It would be fun to become a student again. It might be good to take a formal photographic lighting again, I don’t do a lot of studio work any more but I cold use a refresher course.

I’ve thought about getting a contractor’s license, and marketing home repairs  to women homeowners. We get SCREWED by contractors all of the time, folks who count on us now being able to determine what is involved in various repairs.

I don’t know.

I recently looked at a semester at sea program, when I realized that 'mature’ people can go too, but $30K is too spendy for me. :)